What are some quotations that are often cited in an abridged way that completely changes their meaning?

There was a blue jeans commercial that clipped the opening stanza of CCR's "Fortunate Son" in such a way to completely invert the meaning of the song: Some folks are born made to wave the flag, Ooo, they’re red, white and blue. And when the band plays hail to the chief, Ooo, they point the cannon at you, y’all!

A quote by , etched into his granite memorial in , shortens a longer quote from the final sermon before his assassination to fit into a small space and, in doing so, changes the tone and meaning of his words. [1] The quote as it appears on the memorial: I was a drum major for justice, peace and righteousness. The full quote: Yes, if you want to say that I was a drum major, say that I was a drum major for justice. Say that I was a drum major for peace. I was a drum major for righteousness. And all the other shallow things will not matter. Poet said that the abridged quote makes MLK look like an "arrogant twit" [2]. After a public outcry and re-examination by the , the quote will be changed through an as-yet-undecided process. The entire sermon is 20 minutes long, but here's the relevant section from the very end: [1] http://www.washingtonpost.com/local/martin-luther-king-jr-quotation-to-be-replaced-on-memorial/2012/02/10/gIQASLfc4Q_story.html [2] http://www.washingtonpost.com/local/maya-angelou-says-king-memorial-inscription-makes-him-look-arrogant/2011/08/30/gIQAlYChqJ_story.html

From the Christian Bible - Timothy 6:10 [1]: "For the love of money is a root of all kinds of evil.". Always misquoted as "Money is the root of all evil" or "Money is a root of evil", always missing out the 'love of' part. Money existed in Jesus' time, Mohammed's too, and Moses, Krishna and Buddha's. If you're going to quote their teachings, read their teachings. [1] http://bible.cc/1_timothy/6-10.htm

Barack Obama, April 6th 2008, during the Democratic primary campaign: "It's not surprising they get bitter and cling to guns or religion" He was at a fundraiser in hyper-liberal San Francisco and was asked a question about the crucial Pennsylvania Primary which would occur in two weeks. The question that framed Pennsylvanians as uneducated hicks; how could he gain support where people only cared about god and guns? He was rejecting the notion that he couldn't get support in small town white America. Full quote: "So, it depends on where you are, but I think it's fair to say that the places where we are going to have to do the most work are the places where people are most cynical about government. The people are mis-appre...they're misunderstanding why the demographics in our, in this contest have broken out as they are. Because everybody just ascribes it to 'white working-class don't wanna work — don't wanna vote for the black guy.' That's...there were intimations of that in an article in the Sunday New York Times today - kind of implies that it's sort of a race thing. Here's how it is: in a lot of these communities in big industrial states like Ohio and Pennsylvania, people have been beaten down so long. They feel so betrayed by government that when they hear a pitch that is premised on not being cynical about government, then a part of them just doesn't buy it. And when it's delivered by — it's true that when it's delivered by a 46-year-old black man named Barack Obama, then that adds another layer of skepticism. But — so the questions you're most likely to get about me, 'Well, what is this guy going to do for me? What is the concrete thing?' What they wanna hear is — so, we'll give you talking points about what we're proposing — to close tax loopholes, you know, roll back the tax cuts for the top 1 percent. Obama's gonna give tax breaks to middle-class folks and we're gonna provide health care for every American. But the truth is, is that, our challenge is to get people persuaded that we can make progress when there's not evidence of that in their daily lives. You go into some of these small towns in Pennsylvania, and like a lot of small towns in the Midwest, the jobs have been gone now for 25 years and nothing's replaced them. And they fell through the Clinton administration, and the Bush administration, and each successive administration has said that somehow these communities are gonna regenerate and they have not. And it's not surprising then they get bitter, they cling to guns or religion or antipathy to people who aren't like them or anti-immigrant sentiment or anti-trade sentiment as a way to explain their frustrations. Um, now these are in some communities, you know. I think what you'll find is, is that people of every background — there are gonna be a mix of people, you can go in the toughest neighborhoods, you know working-class lunch-pail folks, you'll find Obama enthusiasts. And you can go into places where you think I'd be very strong and people will just be skeptical. The important thing is that you show up and you're doing what you're doing." Washington Post Story: http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/content/story/2008/04/12/ST2008041200232.html Youtube audio:

Karl Marx on religion: Religious distress is at the same time the expression of real distress and the protest against real distress. Religion is the sigh of the oppressed creature, the heart of a heartless world, just as it is the spirit of a spiritless situation. It is the opium of the people. The abolition of religion as the illusory happiness of the people is required for their real happiness. The demand to give up the illusions about its condition is the demand to give up a condition that needs illusions. The criticism of religion is therefore in embryo the criticism of the vale of woe, the halo of which is religion. Criticism has plucked the imaginary flowers from the chain, not so that man will wear the chain without any fantasy or consolation but so that he will shake off the chain and cull the living flower. The shortened, more common version sounds cynical and I think is often taken to be so. The full quote has nearly the opposite tone.

From Nietzsche's Thus Spoke Zarathustra: "Give me, woman, thy little truth!" said [Zarathustra]. And thus spake the old woman: "Thou goest to women? Do not forget thy whip!" Because of this section it is often suggested that Nietzsche was a misogynist when in fact Nietzsche is ironically using the character of the old "wise" woman to mock the widespread misogynist sentiments of his time. Nietzsche was one of the first philosophers to embrace equality in thought and intellectual capacity irrespective of gender. He often surrounded himself with feminist philosophers.

"Information should be free." Stewart Brand, at the first Hackers' Conference in 1984, told Steve Wozniak something quite different: On the one hand information wants to be expensive, because it's so valuable. The right information in the right place just changes your life. On the other hand, information wants to be free, because the cost of getting it out is getting lower and lower all the time. So you have these two fighting against each other." Source: http://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Information_wants_to_be_free

Ah, quote mining. The most popular places this happens must be in the creation/evolution 'debate'. One popular example is Darwin. He really thought his theory was absurd, didn't he? "To suppose that the eye with all its inimitable contrivances for adjusting the focus to different distances, for admitting different amounts of light, and for the correction of spherical and chromatic aberration, could have been formed by natural selection, seems, I freely confess, absurd in the highest degree." Ah, this quote proves it--evolution is proven absurd from Darwin himself. But wait! Here's the rest of the quote: "Yet reason tells me, that if numerous gradations from a perfect and complex eye to one very imperfect and simple, each grade being useful to its possessor, can be shown to exist; if further, the eye does vary ever so slightly, and the variations be inherited, which is certainly the case; and if any variation or modification in the organ be ever useful to an animal under changing conditions of life, then the difficulty of believing that a perfect and complex eye could be formed by natural selection, though insuperable by our imagination, can hardly be considered real." If a reviewer says a show has "energy, razzmatazz, and technical wizardry," you might choose to see it. After all, it was written right on the advert in the local paper. But would you feel the same way if this is where that quote came from: "I couldn’t help feeling that, for all the energy, razzmatazz and technical wizardry, the audience had been shortchanged." Sources for these and more quote mines here: http://en.wikipedia.org/w/index.php?title=Fallacy_of_quoting_out_of_context

"Consistency is the hobgoblin of little minds." What Ralph Waldo Emerson actually wrote was, "A foolish consistency is the hobgoblin of little minds."