About
Who really said it — and can you use it?
Quotle.info traces any quote to who actually said it and whether it’s cleared to reuse. Here’s where it came from and how it works.
How this started
Quotle.info began as the companion to Quotle, a daily quote-guessing game in the Game Shelf. Building the game meant handling a lot of famous quotations — and it kept surfacing the same uncomfortable pattern: a startling share of “famous quotes” are misattributed, mangled in the retelling, or simply invented. Einstein and Twain get credited with lines they never said; movie quotes drift a word at a time; proverbs get pinned on the Bible.
So this site grew out of that curiosity into a focused job: for any given quote, figure out who really said it, trace it to a primary source, and — the part almost every other quote site skips — say whether it’s actually cleared to reuse.
What it’s for
If you’re about to put a quote in a slide deck, a paper, an article, or a post, quotle.info is a fast way to check three things before you do:
- Is it real, and who actually said it? Not the popular misattribution — the documented source.
- Can you reuse it? Public domain, still under copyright, or licensed — stated plainly.
- How sure are we? Every quote is marked verified, attributed, or disputed, with the receipts. When we can’t confirm something, we say so.
Our standard is on the How we verify page.
Is it maintained?
Yes. The corpus is actively growing in adversarially-audited batches, and every quote page carries a “last verified” date so you can see how current it is. Provenance research is never truly finished — if you can point to a primary source that changes an attribution, tell us; that’s exactly the evidence we want.
Independent, and honest about its sources
Quotle.info is independent and unaffiliated — not endorsed by, partnered with, or speaking for anyone. It is grounded in primary sources, and where others have already done the detective work it cites and defers to them: Quote Investigator, Wikiquote, and archives such as the Internet Archive and Project Gutenberg. We don’t claim credibility by association; the sources on each page are the credibility, and you can click every one.
Who runs it
Quotle.info is a Game Shelf project, built and maintained by David Stewart and operated by runMast LLC. There are no ads and no accounts. Questions, corrections, and rights inquiries: help@quotle.info.