Ivanka Trump tried to quote Socrates and it went horribly wrong

It's unlikely that you'll agree with us, but the Trump family are a philosophers, capable of profound ways of thinking and provoking intense debate and discourse.

That being said, they are hardly on the level of Plato, Aristotle, Kant, Nietzsche or Socrates. Better yet, they aren't even very good at recognising their philosophers, even when they claim to have quoted them.

This brings us to Ivanka Trump who, on Tuesday, shared the following quote from 'Socrates' on her Twitter account.

The secret of change is to focus all of your energy, not on fighting the old but on building the new.

To the untrained eye, this would sound like something the Greek thinker, who died in 399 BC, would have said while gazing out on to the street of ancient Athens.

Although Socrates did say this, it wasn't the Socrates that Ivanka was perhaps thinking of.

This quote actually comes from a fictional Socrates featured in the book Way of the Peaceful Warrior: A Book That Changes Lives by American gymnast Dan Millman.

Given that this came from Ivanka, a lot of people had a lot of fun with this unfortunate case of mistaken identity.

Luckily for the president's daughter, someone clearly told her and she deleted the tweet and reposted, crediting it to the Socrates that it actually came from, which is admirable if not a little embarrassing.

HT Newsweek