I have posted this before, but I am dying to know what drives people to misattribute quotations. Not to use a quotation without knowing that it's misattributed, but to actually be the first mover on taking a quote by, like, Morris Prosperity Bootstraps and saying "this is by Confucius actually."
A few of these might be an understandable mistake (like the quote from an amazing One Week One Band series about Stevie Nicks, misattributed to Stevie Nicks herself). A few might be deliberate bad faith (like the neo-Nazi quote misattributed to Voltaire). Several have some kernel of a real quote in there -- the result of translating, paraphrasing, or bowdlerizing a writer's archaic, messy, or otherwise questionable bits to be more Inspirational(tm). (Quote Investigator has excavated hundreds.) But most misattributions seem to be the result of somebody, somewhere, taking a quote by Bountiful Godsglory Robbins and putting an Aristotle on it. Who are these people? What happens inside their head? I just want to understand!