“Fan mail”

If you’re still on the fence about buying my book on Fake Buddha Quotes, I Can’t Believe It’s Not Buddha, which you can order here, check out the following comments from fans of this blog!

“You are a bit of a dick.” Regan Calhoun.

“The replies this guy gives prove he’s very far away from enlightenment, and he should give up the appropriated Buddhist moniker and go join the debate team at community college.” Anonymous

“After your death you definitely suffer in the hell. 10,000% sure about that.” Cherith Iran

“Your words are spurred by hatred. I feel …

Read the rest of this article » ““Fan mail””

“I Can’t Believe It’s Not Buddha!” is now available for preorder!!!

Yay! After many weekends and evenings of slaving over a hot MacBook Pro with 2.4 GHz Intel Core i5 processor, 8 GB 1600 MHz DDR3, and 256 GB SSD, my book on Fake Buddha Quotes is now on its way to the printers and available for preorder!

  • “I couldn’t put it down!” — Winston Churchill
  • “I never tire of reading Bodhipaksa.” – Abraham Lincoln
  • “So this is why you’ve been too busy to call? You’ll be sorry when I’m gone, Mr. Fancy-Pants Author!” — Ethel Fischbaum

If there’s a mildly pedantic Buddha Quote Fan in your life (and we both …

Read the rest of this article » ““I Can’t Believe It’s Not Buddha!” is now available for preorder!!!”

Awful pedants of the world, unite!

NPR has an article inspired by Garson O’Toole’s new book, Hemingway Didn’t Say That: The Truth Behind Familiar Quotations, investigating the phenomenon of the torrent of bogus quotations that flow through social media and occasionally make the people quoting them look foolish, as when the Republican National Committee tweeted a picture of the Lincoln Memorial along with the quote, “‘And in the end, it’s not the years in your life that count; it’s the life in your years’ — Abraham Lincoln,” and when the US Postal Service put a misattributed quote on a stamp dedicated to Maya Angelou.…

Read the rest of this article » “Awful pedants of the world, unite!”

Fake Camus quotes

I just stumbled across a paper called “The noble art of misquoting Camus — from its origins to the Internet era,” by philosopher and Société des Études Camusiennes member, Giovanni Gaetani.

Gaetani’s English is not quite broken, but perhaps we could say it’s “dented.” Nevertheless, he makes some good general points about misquotations in the age of the internet, including this:

The real importance of misquotes – and mistranslation as well – is undervalued. Whether they are big or small, hidden or manifest, made in bad or in good faith, they are always compromising because their inevitable destiny is to



Read the rest of this article » “Fake Camus quotes”

Groucho glasses on the Mona Lisa: Three tools for being better informed

Because I’ve been steeped in the study of Buddhism for decades, and have a reasonable degree of familiarity with the original texts (mostly in English, although I studied Pali at university too) there aren’t too many Fake Buddha Quotes that have taken me in. There were three or four that I’d come across repeatedly in books on Buddhism, often by respected authors, that had me completely fooled, but most of the fakes circulating on Twitter and Facebook stood out like novelty Groucho glasses on the Mona Lisa.

Once I started researching the more obviously fake Buddha quotes, however, I realized …

Read the rest of this article » “Groucho glasses on the Mona Lisa: Three tools for being better informed”

I can’t believe it’s not Buddha!

The Fake Buddha Quotes blog got a mention on BoingBoing a few days ago, which brought in an extra 11,000 or so visitors in one day (normally we have 2,000 visitors a day). With some hesitation I dipped into the comments on the article, and I was glad I did, so that I could appreciate some of the witty banter.

One of the gems was this image, which I loved 🙂

There was also this one, which unfortunately I couldn’t find in a larger size:

And that led me to a Google image search, where I found this:

I love …

Read the rest of this article » “I can’t believe it’s not Buddha!”

25 Mostly Fake Buddha Quotes That May or May Not Change Your Life

An undated blog post by Steven Bancarz, the creator of a website called ‘Spirit Science and Metaphysics’ purports to offer “25 Quotes From Buddha That Will Change Your Life.” Unfortunately, many of the 25 are Fake Buddha Quotes. But which ones?

So far Bancarz’s blog post has been liked or shared over half a million times on Facebook. That means it’s been read by roughly half as many people as visited this entire site last year. Oy, oy, oy! As Mark Twain never said, “A lie can travel halfway around the world before the truth can get its …

Read the rest of this article » “25 Mostly Fake Buddha Quotes That May or May Not Change Your Life”

US Postal Service Puts Fake Maya Angelou Quote on a Stamp

Self-described “nerdy lexicographer” Erin McKean (for whom I have an intellectual crush) discusses today in the New York Times how the US Postal Service has included a misattributed quote on a stamp commemorating the poet and author Maya Angelou.

The quote, “A bird doesn’t sing because he has an answer, it sings because he has a song,” has obvious resonances with the title of Angelou’s “I Know Why The Caged Bird Sings,” and it’s a line she herself quoted, but the actual author is the children’s book author Joan Walsh Anglund.

McKean discusses “Churchillian Drift,” which is the phenomenon by …

Read the rest of this article » “US Postal Service Puts Fake Maya Angelou Quote on a Stamp”

Recommended site: Antiviral

A surprising amount of the stuff that’s passed around in social media is fake. Some of it should be obvious, like articles from the satirical publication The Onion that are read as if they were genuine news stories. Some are more difficult to spot, although many of them should by rights have social media users’ bullshit detectors registering 11 on a scale of one to ten.

To help us sift the gold dust from the coal dust is a relatively new feature on Gawker.com called “Antiviral.” That’s “anti–viral images, news stories, etc.” The blog doesn’t just debunk fake …

Read the rest of this article » “Recommended site: Antiviral”