Topic summary
Quote mining
Extracted from the Wikipedia article Quoting out of context.
Quoting out of context (sometimes referred to as contextomy or quote mining) is an informal fallacy in which a passage is removed from its surrounding matter in such a way as to distort its intended meaning. Context may be omitted intentionally or accidentally, thinking it to be non-essential. As a fallacy, quoting out of context differs from false attribution, in that the out of context quote is still attributed to the correct source. Also described as selective quoting, the practice alters the apparent sense of a statement by omitting the surrounding material that qualifies it.