Why do we get quotes so wrong?
There's some Pareto thing going on where eighty percent of quotes are attributed to about twenty people. This list would include Gandhi, Twain, Churchill, Lincoln/Franklin, Einstein. Maybe it's worse. Maybe it's more like 95% of quotes are attributed to five people.
So many wrong quotes are given to Churchill that his fanclub (just imagine) have compiled a whole list of them.
Whenever I want to quote something - casually, not academically - I'll just say or write 'widely attributed to' so-and-so or 'probably apocryphal' unless I've for definite seen it. Unless I am copy-pasting it out of the source in that very moment.
Michaelangelo chipping away at a block of marble until he found David? Apocryphal.
Just because I feverishly fact-check this stuff doesn't mean I'm going to get churlish about people that don't. At what point, if there are enough of these images with scenic hills and a quote by 'Winston Churchill' emblazoned on it, is it actually a Winston Churchill quote?
What about all the people who came up with an interesting quote only to have its origins lost and inevitably attributed to one of the 5-20 quotable people in the world? These things often aren't the work of one person. They morph, mutate, over time. So sometimes it's possible a person said something similar but it has become warped and unfindable in the canon over time. Or just slap a Name on it and make it saleable. If it's interesting or seen as 'profound' a normal person can't possibly have come up with it.
So why does this happen? I tried to look it up but there doesn't seem to be much stuff on the why. Just natural entropy I guess.