Mark Twain on Fake Quotations

Mark Twain, who himself is regularly credited with things he did not say, could do it himself. The excellent Quote Investigator blog reports how he won an argument by inventing a quotation. As he said:

"It is my belief that nearly any invented quotation, played with confidence, stands a good chance to deceive. There are people who think that honesty is always the best policy. This is a superstition; there are times when the appearance of it is worth six of it"

 I haven't done an update on the quotation for a while.  The last time I checked on 20 August 2019, Google reported 44,000 hits. A Google search today (11 May 2021) finds 96,000 hits.  Bing, which apparently doesn’t omit anything from search results, finds 1,860,000 pages, down from 3,500,000 in August 2019. As always, the search phrase is “truth is the greatest enemy of the state.”

At least my blog page and article debunking the quotation show up on the first page of Google results, and also on Bing, so those who are suspicious enough to check may find enough to make them dubious about the quotation. 

Alpha History Gets an “F”

 Alpha History is an Australian site that claims to be curated by credentialed academics.  Shall we say that they do not provide much evidence to put confidence in their “scholars.” Their post on Nazi propaganda quotations includes the quotation we are following, along with other fabricated quotations.  As usual, they fail to provide sources.  

According to the site:

“Alpha History is written, curated and compiled by qualified teachers and historians. Content on Alpha History is written specifically for students at middle school, high school and undergraduate levels.”

The site has since removed the dubious quotations.

The site also included a lot of copyrighted material from my German Propaganda Archive without credit, but has remedied that.