Meme Quotation
A short, image-anchored quote in the modern viral sense — quickly shared, easily altered, and prone to misattribution.
A meme quotation is a short line that circulates online, usually pinned to an image or a particular typographic template, and is passed from person to person by copying and sharing rather than by citation. The word 'meme', coined by Richard Dawkins in The Selfish Gene (1976), described any unit of cultural transmission; in the current internet sense it names the specific genre of image-plus-text that dominates social platforms. Meme quotations differ from earlier forms of viral quotation mainly in speed and mutability: the same line can appear in a dozen visual formats within a week, and small edits accumulate quickly.
The most common failure mode of the meme quotation is misattribution. A pleasant line attributed to Marilyn Monroe, Einstein, Buddha, or Maya Angelou is far more shareable than the same line attributed to no one, and platforms reward shareability. As a result, the same anonymous phrasing is bolted onto famous names again and again, and the false attribution outruns any correction. Quote Investigator and other reference sites now spend a substantial share of their work debunking meme quotations that most readers assume are historical.
The responsible way to quote a meme quotation is: check the attribution against a primary source before repeating it; do not attribute if you cannot verify; and, when a piece of writing depends on the line being real, prefer a quote you can cite from a book, letter, speech, or interview. If a line is worth sharing, it is worth being honest about where it came from — and if it is anonymous, saying so is not a demotion. Anonymous folk wisdom is a legitimate genre in its own right.
“Be yourself; everyone else is already taken.”
Keep reading the glossary
The phenomenon by which a quotation snowballs into being attributed to a more famous figure online.
A quote deliberately invented and attributed to someone for credibility, humour, or harm.
Assigning a quote to the wrong person — the most common error in quotation.
A research tradition (and a well-known website) devoted to tracing the true origin of famous quotations.