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A quote frequently attributed to Mark Twain gained greater prominence in 2016 as media publications debated the effect of fake news on the internet: The quote shown here has been attributed to Mark Twain (or Samuel Clemens, if you prefer) by dozens of web sites, books, and memes, and was even available on a T-shirt sold by Amazon. However, none of these sources provided any information about where or when Twain allegedly said this. Was it written or spoken? Did it appear in a book or a newspaper article? A lack of source information for this particular quote is especially noteworthy, because Mark Twain's writing was very well-documented. Several volumes of quotes from the author of Huckleberry Finn have been compiled, yet we were unable to find this quote in any of them. Barbara Schmidt, who operates TwainQuotes.com, told us that she also had no evidence that Twain wrote or uttered this phrase. However, Schmidt directed us to a passage from the Autobiography of Mark Twain, Volume 2, in which he expressed a similar opinion about the power of a lie:: The full quote, which can be viewed via The Mark Twain Project, reads as follows (emphasis ours): It is possible that someone else paraphrased Twain's words, and others conflated both the actual phrase and the paraphrase over time. However, we have been unable to find evidence that Twain spoke or wrote this exact phrase.
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