Most of the quotes you see on social media were never spoken by the person they are pinned to. They are phrases that have been trimmed and polished and dressed up in fonts until they feel true. They float over sunsets, they hang in yoga studios, they are written in chalk on café boards. They feel historic but they are not. They are fanfiction in cursive.
This is my biggest historic pet peeve. Maybe it is my Roman Empire. Watching Franklin transformed into a beer prophet, Gandhi into an Instagram motivational coach, Marie Antoinette into the villain of hunger. They are not real. They are masks. They are costumes we have put on dead men and women until we forget their actual faces.
Take Franklin. Everyone knows the quote. “Beer is proof that God loves us and wants us to be happy.” It is everywhere. Breweries, T-shirts, bar towels, chalkboards outside pubs. But he never said it. In 1779 Franklin wrote about wine. He wrote about rain falling on vineyards, about grapes ripening in the sun, about divine affection revealed in fermentation. He was not baptizing beer pong. He was writing theology. He was praising creation itself. And yet somewhere along the way we cut away the wine and swapped in beer and now he is frozen forever as the patron saint of tailgates.
That is what misattribution does. It erases the person and keeps the slogan. It takes a queen who was a teenager at Versailles and makes her the monster of famine. It takes Voltaire’s wit and replaces it with a line invented by a biographer centuries later. It takes Einstein and hands him every motivational poster in existence. These men and women are turned into ventriloquist dummies. Their mouths are stuffed with words they never spoke because it is easier for us that way.
This is why primary sources matter. The ink is different. A letter written by hand in 1779 does not read like a meme. It is messy, human, full of hesitations and flourishes. A diary scratched out in candlelight is not a neat slogan. It is an intimacy across centuries. When you see the paper itself, when you read the line in its actual place, when you realize Franklin was joking and flirting and sermonizing all at once, you feel history breathing. You feel the sweat of it.
Social media flattens all of that. It takes the jagged and makes it smooth. It turns Gandhi into a self-help caption. It makes Franklin into a keg stand philosopher. It crowns Marie Antoinette with a line Rousseau wrote before she even learned French. It is history stripped and repackaged to fit your feed.
I am not saying we should not share quotes. I am saying we should honor the source. Go back to the letters. Go back to the speeches. Go back to the manuscripts browned with time, to the script written by human hands. Touch them if the museum will let you, or at least look close enough to feel the imperfections. Primary sources are not perfect but they are real, and they remind us that people lived before us with the same mix of wisdom and pettiness and humor and contradiction.
When we trade that for cute fonts we lose the human being. We lose the flirtation in Franklin’s theology of wine. We lose the context in Rousseau’s snide aside about cake. We lose the real voice and replace it with something that was never said. History is already slutty, already chaotic, already beautiful. It does not need a Pinterest filter.
So next time you see a quote floating past you in a perfect font, ask yourself. Did they really say that. Or did someone write it for them centuries later. The archive is always more delicious than the meme.
I first saw the Ben Franklin quote in T-shirt in 2000 in college. I repeated it online ever since.
About 8-9 years later I looked for its original source and couldn’t find it. I stopped. I haven’t seen it much lately, has there been a resurgence?
I agree with you 100%.