The standard
How we verify
Every attribution here is traced back to a primary source, dated, and cited — and when the trail runs cold, we say so instead of guessing.
What “verified” means here
Traced to a primary source
We work back to the earliest document that actually carries the words — a first edition, a letter, a transcript, a recording — not a later anthology quoting an anthology.
Cited and dated, with links
Each page names the source, the edition or issue, and the date, and links out to the archive or record so you can check it yourself. “Trust us” is not verification.
Re-checked adversarially
Before a page ships, every source link is opened and the claim is tested against it — the goal is to break the attribution, not to confirm what we hoped. Only what survives is published.
Sourced, or honestly marked
We don’t repeat what other quote sites claim just because they claim it. Every attribution is grounded in a primary source — or in the documented research that traces to one. When the trail can’t be closed, the quote is marked Attributed or Disputed, never asserted as fact. What matters is the source behind a claim, not whether a person or a model did the tracing.
Three honest states
Certainty is a spectrum, so we don’t pretend everything is settled. Every quote wears one of three badges:
A primary source — the actual book, letter, speech, or first printing — contains the exact line, in the named author’s own words. We link it.
The credit is old, widespread, and plausible, but no primary source pins it down. We say so plainly rather than manufacture false certainty.
The famous name is wrong, or the wording is a later paraphrase. We show who really said it — or that no one verifiably did — with the receipts.
Two separate questions
“Who really said it?” and “Is it free to reuse?” are different claims, and we keep them apart. A quote can be firmly attributed and still under copyright, or public domain and still misattributed.
So alongside the attribution badge, each page states a rights status — one of three, and marking a line “in copyright” is honest disclosure, not a claim that we own it:
Copyright has expired (or never applied). Free to reuse — here, “verified” and “free to reuse” both hold.
Still protected. We quote the single line for identification and commentary; the full work belongs to its author or estate, and verifying who said it is not a grant of reuse rights. Note that a modern translation of an old work can itself still be in copyright.
Reproduced under a licence from the rightsholder, who retains all reuse rights.
When we get it wrong
Provenance research is never finished — new archives surface and old ones get corrected. If you can point to a primary source that changes an attribution, that is exactly the evidence we want. Every page is dated so you can see how current it is.