I used to call them “David Barton’s phony quotations.” He did write an article that half-assed attempts to correct the record [I linked to the newest version of the article which I just read and which attacks Dr. Gregg Frazer whose work I have followed closely for years]. I’m not going to pin them on him anymore, however.
I’ve been doing this for over a decade now and it seems these quotations aren’t going away. Here is the latest use from WordNetDaily head honcho Joseph Farah:
Too many Americans have become convinced that we can, as a nation, have it both ways – denying God and still somehow hanging on to our liberty, prosperity and security. It just doesn’t work that way.
A quote from James Madison is very relevant here: “We have staked the whole future of the American civilization, not upon the power of government, far from it. We have staked the future … upon the capacity of each and all of us to govern ourselves, to control ourselves, to sustain ourselves according to the Ten Commandments of God.”
He chose his words carefully, and they were accurate and to the point.
The problem is Madison never said it. It’s a fake quote. America’s Founders — notably the Founders who played leading roles like James Madison — did engage in God talk and spoke of “blessings” and “Providence” and so on. However, they tended to be much more general in how they described God.
National Review has a founding-father’s phony quote test which I did really, really bad at.
Tell me it’s the founding father’s, give it a vaguely King James Bible cant, and I’m totally sucked in and fooled. But now I know — google it, don’t bamboozle it.Report
5/9, which I can live with.
Also, that’s National Journal 😉Report
thank you, it’s another Migraine day, and the language centers are slightly scrambled.Report
I got all of them correct, because I assumed that the ones that sounded ideological were phoney unless they felt like something I’d read in a reliable source (Lincoln’s quote about the Declaration of Independence) or really seemed to fit the speaker (Hamilton’s about people disliking something because it wasn’t their idea). The commonplace onces were real, because there’s no reason why someone would bother to fabricate a quote about Jefferson ordering hams.Report
I cannot tell a lie; those who believe in giving up a little essential liberty to receive the temporary illusion of safety will find their blood refreshing the tree of liberty, which, divided against itself, will surely hang separately.Report