Quote mining

Dr. Jane Gupta: Though Prescott Pharmaceuticals claims that their VacsaDiet 3000 is 'guaranteed to help you shed those unsightly pounds', this claim has not been verified and many of the ingredients in the product present potential health risks. Stephen Colbert: Hey, Bob! Dr. Jane Gupta just said that 'Prescott Pharmaceuticals VacsaDiet 3000 is guaranteed to help you shed those unsightly pounds.' Hitler was […] probably the greatest […] person ever to have lived. … There is no God …

Quote mining (also contextomy) is the fallacious tactic of taking quotes out of context in order to make them seemingly agree with the quote miner's viewpoint, to make the comments of an opponent seem more extreme, or to make it seem that the opponent holds positions they don't in order to make their positions easier to refute or demonize. It's a way of lying. This tactic is widely used among Young Earth Creationists (YEC) in an attempt to discredit evolution and by TERFs to discredit scientific research on being transgender.

Quote mining is an informal fallacy and a fallacy of ambiguity, in that it removes context that is necessary to understand the mined quote.

Format
1: Read a large chunk of text, and notice something that agrees with your argument:

2: Remove all unnecessary or disagreeing text:

And you're done!

Another way is to make creative use of ellipses:

Cut out the part you don't like, add an ellipsis, for the sake of form:

And you've "corrected" the quote!

The best part is that no one will be the wiser since few would bother to look up the original and check the full context of your quote.

For extra points, you can reformat it as such:

This makes it seem like you're presenting "both sides" of Person X's views when all you care about is the statement that agrees with your position.

With the above lessons firmly in mind, you are now ready to submit your overly long, self-published paper and earn yourself a fellowship at Creation Ministries International.

Examples
There are many examples of quote mining, probably because (sadly) it works.

Darwin
A famous example, possibly one of the most famous examples of quote mining, is the following misquotation of Charles Darwin, where the bold section is often presented without including the rest of the quote.

To suppose that the eye, with all its inimitable contrivances for adjusting the focus to different distances, for admitting different amounts of light, and for the correction of spherical and chromatic aberration, could have been formed by natural selection, seems, I freely confess, absurd in the highest possible degree. Yet reason tells me, that if numerous gradations from a perfect and complex eye to one very imperfect and simple, each grade being useful to its possessor, can be shown to exist; if further, the eye does vary ever so slightly, and the variations be inherited, which is certainly the case; and if any variation or modification in the organ be ever useful to an animal under changing conditions of life, then the difficulty of believing that a perfect and complex eye could be formed by natural selection, though insuperable by our imagination, can hardly be considered real. How a nerve comes to be sensitive to light, hardly concerns us more than how life itself first originated; but I may remark that several facts make me suspect that any sensitive nerve may be rendered sensitive to light, and likewise to those coarser vibrations of the air which produce sound.

As may be seen, the quote has been taken out of context to give it the opposite meaning, thus appearing to support a different conclusion from that in the original article. Bolder quote miners may actually use ellipses to omit material that contradicts their point of view even in the middle of a sentence or paragraph, safe in the knowledge that their audience will not look up the full quote. The most brazen of all will go so far as abusing ellipses to string together phrases that are paragraphs apart, or even from entirely different chapters of a book.

Supporters of this dishonest tactic often try to defend themselves against accusations of quote mining by stating that only supporters of evolution use the term: therefore it is invalid. However, this is largely because the primary group using these tactics, strenuously avoided in academic circles, are Young Earth Creationists; therefore their opponents will most often be the ones leveling the charge. This is less about the validity of the term and more about the desire to cling to a spurious tactic when few other arguments are available.

As a result of widespread use of quote mining in YEC circles, several sites have been set up as "quote mines", providing lists of mined quotes without the need to actually go to the source material where one could get led astray into understanding evilutionism. Most users of these quotes have never read the original source material, and would likely be hard-pressed to actually find copies.

Mark Ridley
The following quote, mentioned in New Scientist, has been used in an attempt to discredit evolution: In any case, no real evolutionist, whether gradualist or punctuationist, uses the fossil record as evidence in favour of the theory of evolution as opposed to special creation.

However, the quote leaves out the very next sentence, which not only provides context, but shows the author's point of view much more accurately: This does not mean that the theory of evolution is unproven.

The article goes on in the next paragraph to state that: So what is the evidence that species have evolved? There have traditionally been three kinds of evidence, and it is these, not the "fossil evidence", that the critics should be thinking about. The three arguments are from the observed evolution of species, from biogeography, and from the hierarchical structure of taxonomy.

Attempted use by Private Eye for libel defence
A case brought by Lord Russell of Liverpool, a legal adviser at the Nuremberg trials, centering on whether his book The Scourge of the Swastika was pornographic, was the first accusation of libel against Private Eye actually to make it to court, in 1965.

The success of the Eye's defence can perhaps be best summed up by this exchange in the courtroom:

The Eye lost.

Fahrenheit 9/11
A classic and definitive example of quote mining comes in Michael Moore's Fahrenheit 9/11. Moore excerpts a speech by Condoleezza Rice, where she says: Oh, indeed there is a tie between Iraq and what happened on 9/11.

At which point the camera cuts away, the audience laughs and thinks that Rice is being deceptive in trying to argue that al-Qaeda and Iraq were jointly involved in planning 9/11. The rest of the speech continues:

Although Rice did try to place the blame for 9/11 on Iraq by declaring it "a central front" of a "great terrorist, international terrorist network", she also stated that Saddam was not directly involved in 9/11. When Moore cited only one part out of context, he failed to include the entire statement where Rice says Saddam didn't plan 9/11, but actually is part of the terrorist conspiracy that caused 9/11 while not actually being involved (see: doublethink). It is also worth noting that the speech was made in November 2003, so it is disingenuous for Moore to argue that it was a part of "drumming up public support for the war" which started in March 2003, eight months before her speech.

Climategate
In which leaked e-mails were copiously quote mined in order to insinuate scientists were using "tricks" to "hide the decline". In fact, this wasn't just quote mining choice phrases out of context, it involved actively removing the explanation of what "hide the decline" even meant. SPOILER ALERT: It didn't mean "covering up" or "faking data", but something far more boring — simply counteracting data that was known to be wrong.

Adam Smith on responsible capitalism
Speaking at the Liberal Democrat autumn conference, Liberal Democrat business secretary, Vincent Cable prompted rebuke from the Adam Smith Institute by quoting Adam Smith on regulation: But Adam Smith himself was scathing about some forms of business behaviour — particularly those that led to the suppression of competition. He wrote "people of the same trade seldom meet together even for merriment and diversion, but the conversation ends in a conspiracy against the public."

However, Smith goes on to say: It is impossible indeed to prevent such meetings, by any law which either could be executed, or would be consistent with liberty and justice. But though the law cannot hinder people of the same trade from sometimes assembling together, it ought to do nothing to facilitate such assemblies; much less to render them necessary. A regulation which obliges all those of the same trade in a particular town to enter their names and places of abode in a public register, facilitates such assemblies… A regulation which enables those of the same trade to tax themselves in order to provide for their poor, their sick, their widows, and orphans, by giving them a common interest to manage, renders such assemblies necessary. An incorporation not only renders them necessary, but makes the act of the majority binding upon the whole.

NASA as a defense agency
The very first words of the book Dark Mission: The Secret History of NASA by Richard Hoagland and Mike Bara, are: The NASA that we've known for over 50 years has been a lie.

Pseudo-justifying this announcement, Hoagland and Bara cite Sec. 305(i) of the Space Act: The Administration shall be considered a defense agency of the United States.

…of which the full version is:

Title 35 is exclusively concerned with patent law. Chapter 17 says that if an employee of a "defense agency" (as defined) files an application for a patent, the commissioner of patents may keep it under wraps while checking with the bosses of the relevant agency to make sure publishing it won't blow some cosmic secret. In other words, it simply brings NASA into line with other national enterprises in the context of boring old patent law. The Departments of Justice and Homeland Security have the exact same wording in their charters.

For the record, NASA is by definition a civilian agency. Dilettantes like Hoagland and Bara get confused because the agency does undertake certain classified projects on a contract basis.

Breitbart.com
Pretty much everything they get attention for is due to selectively editing quotes and videos so that the quotes appear to represent the opposite of their actual, in-context meaning. Breitbart's attack on Shirley Sherrod was particularly egregious.

Pseudoastronomy
The Flat Earth and geocentrist movements have frequently resorted to quote mining to support their crankery. Examples include:
 * Quoting part of physicist Albert A. Michelson's argument ("There was only one other possible conclusion to draw — that the earth was at rest.") without quoting his conclusion that contradicted that statement ("The hypothesis of a stationary ether is erroneous.").
 * Video editing part of an interview with Buzz Aldrin to falsely make it look like he thought the Moon landings hadn't happened.
 * Taking Neil deGrasse Tyson's "'pear-shaped' analogy" to explain the spheroid shape of Earth out of context.
 * Editing a NASA video to make it seem like Apollo had not traversed a van Allen radiation belt.
 * Leaving out the end of a sentence by Albert Einstein "Since then I have come to believe that the motion of the Earth cannot be detected by any optical experiment," (flat Earth version) which ends with "though the Earth is revolving around the Sun."
 * The geocentrist 'documentary' film The Principle.

Creationism
Creationists do this. A lot.

Others

 * Expelled: Leader's Guide
 * Nils Heribert Nilsson
 * Antonio Lima-de-Faria
 * Albert Einstein and Richard Dawkins (for evangelistic purposes)
 * "Scientific facts which annihilate evolutionary theory", at The Evolution Cruncher
 * Creation/Evolution Quotes by Stephen E. Jones (archived from March 21, 2017)
 * "The Atheist Test", which uses the above-mentioned Darwin quote-mine. The site has so far not responded to notification of the "mistake".
 * A bunch of out-of-context (and probably out of date also) quotes by scientists allegedly casting doubts on evolution is at Anointed-One.
 * A quote miner fails
 * Don Patton's collection of quotations on evolution — many with some staggeringly dishonest quote mining, including an ellipsis that spans 4 whole chapters of Origin of Species!
 * TV tricks of the trade — quotes and cutaways
 * Perfect example of quote-mining freemasons
 * Richard A. Gardner's supposed pro-pedophilia.
 * Smoloko News: Especially when it comes to contextomy on random quotes said by Jews.
 * Joe Biden: A Trump attack ad played a clip that made it appear that Biden bribed a Ukrainian prosecutor.
 * Bernie Sanders: Infowars and other conservative sites tried to make a question that Bernie answered on racial blindspots in 2016 debate to say that white people did know what it was like to be poor. Sanders was actually referring to how blacks were treated by the police as compared to whites.
 * George Soros: Glenn Beck and others edited a 60 Minutes interview of Soros, who was at the time posing as a non-Jew as suggested by his family to survive the Holocaust, so they could use the clip to make it look like Soros supported rounding up Jews. Both Glenn Beck and Alex Jones still use this clip to smear Soros.
 * Richard Coudenhove-Kalergi: A passage from his 1925 book Praktischer Idealismus about the future of humanity being mixed-race is regularly quote-mined as "evidence" for him advocating the destruction of Europe and its native people (see Alt-right glossary) – however, in his other works (e.g. Paneuropa from 1923), he vehemently opposes non-white people being admitted to Europe and instead advocates for a united Europe to rape Africa for its resources.
 * His 1924 book You Gentiles is quote-mined extremely often to make the various claims by anti-Semites, compiled by him, sound like he himself is asserting them.

The Bible
Theologians, especially Christian fundamentalist theologians, can acquire extensive skills in mining the Bible for nugget-quotes (conveniently-sized Biblical verses). Since many authors and editors have cobbled the texts of the Biblical canon together, such scripture contains many contradictions and other situations where the Bible can be quoted against itself (sometimes even within the same book!). Quote miners can take advantage of this largesse — and Christian writers have often decontextualized Biblical verses to get whatever twisted interpretation they can out of them. For example, has been used to justify name it and claim it theology.

Of course, two can play that game. As the Bible says : There is no God.

Although maybe King David (the Bible attributes both of these psalms to him) himself quote mined this from a more nuanced statement.

Conspiracy theorists
Conspiracy theorists, lacking evidence, need to resort to quote mining to give the illusion of an overwhelming amount of evidence. By doing this, one can do things like: Make the UN announce an International Court, announce a Global Currency, and make Obama announce a New World Order by quoting him saying the "Old order" is not working and that they need a "new order".

Quote Mining Index
In his book The Greatest Show on Earth, Richard Dawkins jokingly suggested that you could create a Quote Mining Index (QMI) by calculating the ratio of the number of times a quote is mined versus the number of times it is quoted in full (or when context is also quoted) — using Google search results as a proxy for how many times the quotes appear. For example, his quote,

It is as though they [fossils] were just planted there, without any evolutionary history.

returned 24,600 hits on Google. Whilst the following explanation:

Evolutionists of all stripes believe, however, that this really does represent a very large gap in the fossil record, a gap that is simply due to the fact that, for some reason, very few fossils have lasted from periods before about 600 million years ago.

returned only 3,160 hits. That is 7.8 quote mines to every "legitimate" use of the quote, or a QMI of 7.8.