The book's author, Garson O'Toole, is a journalist and creator of the popular website Quote Investigator, which thousands of people around the world turn to for help and help. And the main question is this: do these or those sayings really belong to the outstanding people whose quotes are so widely distributed both in the print media and on the Internet? And the answer is often no. Garson O'Toole examines common quotes attributed to celebrities, from Abraham Lincoln to Anton Chekhov, Aristotle to Woody Allen. He is trying to find their origins and understand why the confusion arose, what are the reasons for the appearance of false quotes and aphorisms. He calls them "error mechanisms" and explains in detail where, when and why the misunderstanding arose.