04 April 2017 13:32:30 IST

All your favorite famous quotations are fake!

The Internet doesn't look for verification so niether do people

The quote, "What lies behind us and what lies before us are tiny matters compared to what lies within us" has been attributed to well-known people like Ralph Waldo Emerson, Henry David Thoreau, and Oliver Wendell Holmes. But according to a researcher -- who goes by the nom de plume Garson O'Toole -- of quotes that go viral on the Internet, none of these people said any such thing. Instead, it first appeared in 1940, in a book called Meditations in Wall Street . And initially, the book was anonymous — a person named Albert J Nock wrote it, says O'Toole.

In an interview with VICE , O'Toole talks about whether authorship really makes a difference or not, and more. "You'd think, 'How can thousands of people be wrong?'. But it turns out that they are," he says in this interview . Click to read more.