As the Postal Service just discovered, sometimes quotes on the internet are attributed incorrectly—this is actually a quote by Olivia, not Oscar.. But hey, Oscar Wilde, Olivia Wilde, what’s the big difference? (image from the thingswesay.com, via Buzzfeed)

As Abraham Lincoln once said, you can’t believe everything you read on the internet.

The new postage stamp honoring Maya Angelou was unveiled by the U.S. Postal Service yesterday, featuring a quote not actually written by the literary and cultural icon. Although the author was eminently quotable, it seems the USPS may have fallen victim to one of the great hazards of social media: misattributed quotes. As the Los Angeles Times detailed,

The text on the new “forever” stamp reads: “A bird doesn’t sing because it has an answer, it sings because it has a song.” It appears to be a reference to Angelou’s best-known book, her 1969 memoir “I Know Why the Caged Bird Sings.”

But the Washington Post reported yesterday that the quotation can also be found in “A Cup of Sun,” a 1967 poetry collection by children’s author Joan Walsh Anglund. A Postal Service spokesman told the newspaper that the line, which has been widely attributed to Angelou by people including President Obama, was approved for use on the stamp by Angelou’s family.

Mark Saunders, Postal Service spokesperson, sent The Washington Post a statement.

“Maya Angelou was widely quoted as saying, ‘A bird doesn’t sing because it has an answer, it sings because it has a song.’

“There are numerous references in books, magazines, blogs and on the internet crediting Angelou with having said it as well.

Anglund confirmed the origin of the line was A Cup of Sun, and while it’s easy to shake your head at the lack of simple fact checking on the part of the Postal Service, as The Washington Post notes, these “unquotes” are all over the place.

Sometimes, the quote “We are what we repeatedly do. Excellence, then, is not an act, but a habit” is attributed to Shaquille O’Neal. But it also gets attributed to Aristotle. In 2012, a quote on the Martin Luther King Jr. National Memorial was deemed inaccurate and had to be re-chiseled.

The LA Times points out that the Postal Service has made a similar mistake before. The 2010 stamp featuring an image of the Statue of Liberty was later discovered to be an image of a Las Vegas replica.

The stamp was dedicated on April 7, at a USPS ceremony emceed by Melissa Harris-Perry and attended by Oprah Winfrey, among others.