The Art of "Quotemanship" and "Misquotemanship"

Quoting people accurately is really hard — and you can quote me on that.

Hitting the Trifecta: Trump, Palin, and Gandhi (together at last!)

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This conjunction is hard to imagine–Donald Trump, Sarah Palin and Mohandas Gandhi sharing space in one Facebook-post-turned-Tweet.
Evidently, Mrs. Palin, the erstwhile governor of Alaska, has Facebooked (at 2:33 a.m. on February 25) an artful presentation of a quotation widely attributed to Gandhi over a picture of Trump waving to a host of clicking admirers.
Palin can use Facebook. That’s great. Can she use Google or Bing? Can she stop and think? It’s so easy to check stuff out these days. A couple of keystrokes present the likely origin of the quotation. It is NOT from the mind of Gandhi.
A close variant is found in the 1918 proceedings of the Third Biennial Convention of the Amalgamated Clothing Workers of America. That publication quotes Nicholas Klien:

And, my friends, in this story you have a history of this entire movement. First they ignore you. Then they ridicule you. And then they attack you and want to burn you. And then they build monuments to you. And that, is what is going to happen to the Amalgamated Clothing Workers of America.

Klein, from Cincinnati, spoke before the ACWA on May 15, 1918, in Baltimore, Maryland. The Christian Science Monitor covered this adequately in 2011.
This is a classic mess. The quotation is misunderstood, misattributed, and misappropriated.
I saw this earlier today thanks to one of my sons. He sent me a Tweet posted by Felicity Morse, social media editor with, I think, the BBC. She correctly wrote (in a burst of refreshingly brief and clear sentences, NOT attributed to Gandhi):

Nothing is right here. Gandhi is not Trump. Gandhi did not say that. No one has ever ignored Trump.

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