Quoting out of context

An out of context quotation is a kind of discrediting attack which appears to use a person's own words against him, but is deceptive because the apparent meaning of the quoted words—even though they are accurately quoted—is different from the meaning of longer passage from which the words were taken. To illustrate, Gilson Gardner wrote:

"It is silly to say that the moon is made of green cheese."

One could quote this out of context as:

"...the moon is made of green cheese."—Gilson Gardner

Real examples almost as extreme as this can be found in movie and book advertisements, which find ingeious ways of extracting seemingly positive snippets from overwhelmingly negative reviews. For example, an advertisement for the film Be Cool quoted:

"...Travolta is as smooth as ever..." —Kevin Thomas, Los Angeles Times

The actual review said:

"[John Travolta's character Chili] Palmer is back in 'Be Cool,' and although Travolta is as smooth as ever, the picture is a bust, a grimly unfunny comedy with no connection to reality, and worst of all, running on and on for two dismal hours."

Here is a subtle example.

"Beauty is truth, truth beauty" wrote the Romantic poet John Keats in "Ode on a Grecian Urn." That famous citation, which expresses 19th-century Romanticism's trust in feeling over reason, is pertinent in the case of Anne Carson's newest volume...

What can be possiby be wrong this reviewer's quotation of what is probably the most famous line Keats ever wrote? The missing context here is an additional set of quotation marks. The actual closing lines of the poem are:     When old age shall this generation waste,
      Thou shalt remain, in midst of other woe
    Than ours, a friend to man, to whom thou say'st
  'Beauty is truth, truth beauty,—that is all
      Ye know on earth, and all ye need to know.'
It is not the narrative voice of the poem that says "Beauty is truth, truth beauty." It is the urn that says this to the narrator. The narrator is certainly moved by the urn, but it is by no means clear that the narrator fully agrees.

Sometimes, even a subtle change in wording can radically change what the speaker meant to say. For example, Charles E. Wilson, president of General Motors from 1941 to 1953, is often slightly misquoted as having said

"What's good for General Motors is good for the country."

The context was his confirmation hearing before the Senate for his appointment as Secretary of Defense. He was asked whether, as a government official, he would be capable of making a decision that would adversely affect General Motors. What he said in full was:

"Yes, sir, I could. I cannot conceive of any because for years I thought what was good for the country was good for General Motors, and vice versa."

It's not totally unfair to translate the "vice versa" into "What's good for General Motors is good for the country," but chopping off the "for years I thought" and "what was good for the country was good for General Motors" is; it transforms a forthright statement into a piece of fatuous arrogance.