Virtually every quotation you know is either misattributed or inaccurate. Neither particularly matters. They last as quotes because they resonate with truth. Getting them exactly right or precisely attributed doesn’t make them any worse at expressing truths or humor.
For example, my freshman advisor told me:
“If you don’t stop spending so much time at the newspaper and the radio station you will have a mediocre academic career, taking the path of least resistance, just slipping by everything.”
Years later, when I started telling the anecdote, I quoted him as warning me that I was in “the twilight of a mediocre academic career”. It was only recently, when I discovered my freshman journal, that I realized I was misquoting him. I still tell the anecdote that way, because it is better. It appears in my 50th reunion book from MIT.
Misattributed quotes used to stay alive on the fact that that you generally can’t prove the negative. The Internet makes available nearly every word written by a great person, so at the very least you can say, “There is no record of them saying or writing that.”
To be continued
Comments
My response if that had been said to me freshman year would have been, "Cool! It's a plan." And indeed, it was a plan I executed extremely well.