How we check quotes

Quotes travel faster than their sources. A line gets attached to a famous name, gets copied by a thousand quote sites, and becomes "true" by repetition. Vitiquotes goes the other way: a quote only gets the green stamp when we can point to where it was written or said.

The five stamps

• SourcedTraced to a primary source: the work, letter or speech.
• AttributedReported by a reliable secondary source, but no original text.
• MisquotedBased on something real, but the famous wording is not theirs.
• No source foundWidely credited, never located in their work.
• Not theirsTraced to someone else — or invented later.

Where we look

First, the author's own text: the book, play, letter or speech, in the original or a standard translation. Then reliable reference work — Wikiquote's sourced sections, the Yale Book of Quotations, the Oxford Dictionary of Quotations, author-specific collections such as The Ultimate Quotable Einstein, and Garson O'Toole's Quote Investigator for the trail of a misattribution.

Translations

For authors who did not write in English we name the translator, preferring older public-domain translations (Long, Gummere, Legge, Garnett, Maude). Wording differs between translations; the meaning is what we check.

The archive

Vitiquotes has existed for years as a plain quote collection. Those quotes are kept under "From the archive" with a dashed stamp until someone checks them. We are working through them author by author.

Found a mistake?

Good — that is the point. Write to info@vitiquotes.com with the quote and the source, and we will fix it.