The internet has become a petri dish for this kind of stuff. Before, you actually had to pick up a book and read it, the whole thing. If you found a quote you liked, you excerpted it with proper attribution. Now, people just google key words and search for quotes that they believe foots the bill for a particular subject, and then they pray that the source material is accurate. Far too frequently, it isn’t.
That is why crediting facts to ‘the internet’ is worthless, and crediting them to wikipedia is not much better.
“The internet has become a petri dish for this kind of stuff. Before, you actually had to pick up a book and read it, the whole thing. If you found a quote you liked, you excerpted it with proper attribution.”
The internet has made it worse, but your “before” is a fantasy. Quite too few of the famous Dead White Males became famous because everybody read them. Big names like Montesquieu, von Clausewitz, Hegel, and Freud (with the exception of “Civilization and Its Discontent”) are notoriously for collecting dust on bookshelves. Their fame grew in much the same way internet “memes” (e.g. “It’s a trap!”) grow.
Scholars in particular and writers in general constantly quote eachother. They may be better trained than chatroom participants and political hacks, but academics, journalists, think-tankers, and the like are not of another world.
“Before, you actually had to pick up a book and read it, the whole thing”
In case I wasn’t clear, my point is that a lot of people derive their knowledge of writers big and small not by reading whole books, but by reading excerpts in other (possibly lesser) articles and books. For instance, most people know of Darwin through the Neo-Darwinism of the mid and latter 20th century. Or maybe (just maybe) through recaps of Herbert Spencer’s popularization. Who the heck bothers with “On the Origin of the Species”? Likewise, our Schopenhauer is Nietzsche’s Schopenhauer, our Hegel is Marx’s Hegel, our Sophocles is Freud’s Sophocles, and (most relevant to us) our Edmund Burke is the 20th century American conservative movement’s (and especially Russell Kirk’s) Edmund Burke.
Obviously there was a time when people read more whole books, but there was never a golden age when everyone knew firsthand what everyone else was talking about.
Well, I think WWII was a large part of it. Note how this one is cited as 1941 origin. The Petronius Arbiter one is WWII era. WWII put many bored people together, mixing around, without much opportunity for references. Perhaps it’s coincidence, but it seems like there are several that have been tied to that era. (Of course, it could be some other cause, such as “more documentation is being examined from wartime vs peacetime” or whatever.) But if WWII was the petri dish, the Internet has spread the pathogen.
Most people have not read Alexis de Tocqueville, so they don’t realize that he wouldn’t have agreed with the quote. They just know that the man got to know the country and had keen insight...so it “sounds plausible.” Combine that with confirmation bias, and you have something people believe and want to spread.
And it bothers me that people who correct the errors get slapped and accused of opposing the sentiments of the spurious quotes themselves. See my tagline :-(