A Good Site on Bad Quotations

While reading an article on dubious quotations by Corey Robin in the 20 September 2013 issue of the Chronicle of Higher Education, I learned of a blog devoted to what he calls WAS — Wrongly Attributed Statements.  It’s a blog worth following.

Sighting Report #10

It’s bad enough having hundreds of thousands of web pages spreading the false Goebbels quotation, but people can even proclaim their gullibility by wearing a t-shirt with the phrase.

A t-shirt company offers Sarah Palin against a Nazi backdrop with the quotation “Truth is the greatest enemy of the state.”

And you can also get the quotation on a bumper sticker, courtesy of e-Bay.

Tracking Report #7

A Google search on 11 September 2013 finds 379,000 hits for the phrase “truth is the greatest enemy of the State.”  Bing, which last time returned only 8,500 hits, now claims 17,000,000.  That can’t be right, so I'll check again in a few days.  The Google total is almost exactly the same as it was back in May 2013.