I ran into a new (to me) inaccurate citation this morning: the one about plato claiming that empathy is the highest form of knowledge. No, wrong, incorrect. It caught my ear because I felt confident that it was both not the way Plato thought about knowledge and not the way he’d have said that if indeed he had thought it. In order to pass it along that way — without attribution to a specific source — you would have to have no ear for Plato at all. Someone just liked a pop-psychological slogan, and the attribution to Plato made it seem more profound, more ancient, and more authoritative. It turns out, though, to just make you look like someone who knows neither about Plato nor about web slogans without a cited source.
Unless you can find a cited version of an alleged quotation, your overriding assessment of it must be that it’s false. The Web is just too big and too shallow (alas!) to trust unsourced quotations at all.