Mr. Bogle, where did your quotes come from (letter to editor, Dec. 18. issue)?

A lot of the ones you used have been circulating on the Internet for some time. They actually found their source in one modern book: David Barton’s 1989 “The Myth of Separation,” in which he attacks the separation of church and state using quotes that are either phony, paraphrased (usually badly), or taken out of context.

And by “phony,” I mean that some of the quotes don’t appear anywhere before his book. Over the last 10 or 15 years, David Barton has painfully discovered this as there were many things he was forced to retract.

After a nationwide billboard campaign a couple of years ago that had a fake quote from George Washington: I think “It is impossible to rightly govern the world without God and the Bible,” was what they had plastered across the country.

This quote was invented in the 1860s based on an 1831 John Marshall biography of Washington that said something similar -- and not even from anything Washington wrote, but as a decades-later remembrance from an unidentified source.

George Washington, for example, never wrote the name “Jesus Christ” at all in any of his writings but one, his 1779 address to the Delaware Indian chiefs. (And even that is often misquoted.) If you see him mention the full name anywhere else, it’s fake.

The thing is, Mr. Bogle, it’s easy to pass off a phony quote. Just write something that sounds formal and you can probably get away with calling it a passage from the Founders. Fraudulent Founders’ quotes by conservatives care less about history and more about ideological expediency.

One must be very careful quoting from history. The magnitude and complexity of the phony quote campaign serves as a reminder of those who are so gullible.