05.08.2026
The quote nobody checks
There is an enormous number of sentences going around, attributed to teachers, that nobody has ever verified.
They get said in class. They get put on images. They get used to settle arguments. And they pass from mouth to mouth losing a word along the way, until they end up saying something else.
My rule, and I don’t break it: a quote does not exist until I have the exact source in front of me.
Book, chapter, verse. Or type of document, place and date if it’s a letter, a lecture or a conversation. And the text as it stands, without tidying it up, without removing a word that sounds odd, without modernising it.
If I can’t verify it, I say so. Out loud. It looks worse and I don’t care.
Because the shortcut is tempting: the sentence fits what you’re saying, it sounds like him, he must have said it. And that is exactly how a false body of doctrine gets built, without anybody lying on purpose.
It’s the same thing we were doing at fourteen, studying parapsychology and the occult, interviewing people who swore they had seen things. Everybody believes what they’re telling you. And you still have to go and look.
Try it this week with one sentence you use a lot. Look it up.
I got plenty of surprises. Half a life’s work came out of that.
The biggest was with the book I have used most. I compared the 1972 edition with the one sold today: thousands of words changed, six years after the man who translated it had died. That turned into a book of its own, Stolen Words.