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Verify Every Quote Before You Publish
Before a quote goes out under your name, check it against the original: the exact words, who said them, when, and what came before and after. Quote sites and memes are where misquotes live, not where they get checked.
Purpose
A quote is the most checkable thing in your work, and the easiest to get wrong. Words get trimmed, a phrase drifts, a line said by one person gets pinned on someone more famous, and a remark made in one context gets used in another. Once you publish it, the error is yours.
Verifying a quote means going back to where the words were first spoken or written: the transcript, the court opinion, the book page, the official statement, the recording. There you check four things: the exact wording, the speaker, the date, and the context around it.
Famous names attract quotes they never said. The Princeton University Press reference The Ultimate Quotable Einstein has a whole section of lines misattributed to him. Quote Investigator, a site run by a researcher who writes as Garson O’Toole, has traced more than 2,100 sayings back toward their earliest known sources.
When you need it
You’re about to put words inside quotation marks in anything you publish, submit or present.
The quote is credited to a famous person, especially one who died before the internet.
You found the quote on a quote site, a poster, a meme or a slide deck.
The quote is short, polished and perfectly on point. Real speech is rarely that tidy.
You copied the quote from a secondary source, such as an article quoting a speech.
A quote from your own interview notes or recording is going into print.
How to do it
1List every quote in your draft
Go through the draft and mark every passage in quotation marks, plus any close paraphrase you attribute to a named person. For each, note where you got it. If the answer is “a quote site” or “I don’t remember,” that quote is unverified.
2Find the original, not a collection
Quote sites, quote-a-day accounts and image macros are aggregators: they copy each other and rarely say where a line came from. They aren’t sources. Look for the place the words first appeared:
- Speeches and remarks: an official transcript or video from the speaker’s office or the event.
- Court cases: the opinion on the court’s own website. The U.S. Supreme Court posts oral argument transcripts on supremecourt.gov the same day an argument is heard.
- Congress: the Congressional Record, on govinfo.gov and congress.gov.
- Books and articles: the page itself, in a library copy, a publisher preview or a scan.
- Interviews you did: your own recording, not your notes.
3Check the exact words
Compare your version against the original word by word. Mark every cut with an ellipsis and every word you add with square brackets. Make sure a cut doesn’t change the meaning. Fix spelling and punctuation to match the source, not your memory.
4Check the speaker and the date
Confirm who said it, in what role, and when. A line in a speech may be the speaker quoting someone else. A line in a book may belong to a character, not the author. If the earliest version you can find appeared years after the person’s death, the attribution is almost certainly wrong.
5Read what comes before and after
Read at least a paragraph on each side of the quote. Was the speaker joking, describing a view they then rejected, answering a narrow question, or summarizing someone else’s argument? A quote that’s accurate word for word can still mislead if the context reverses it.
6Know the quirks of official records
Official records aren’t always verbatim. The Congressional Record is described by the Congressional Research Service as “substantially verbatim”: members can revise their remarks, and the House can add speeches that were never delivered. Undelivered remarks are marked, by a different typeface in the House and historically by a bullet symbol in the Senate. If the exact spoken words matter, check the video too.
7If you can’t find the original, say so or cut it
If you trace a line as far as you can and still can’t reach the original, don’t present it as a quote. Either attribute it honestly (“often attributed to…”, “quoted in…”) or leave it out.
Try it
Your task
“Insanity is doing the same thing over and over again and expecting different results.” It’s usually credited to Albert Einstein. Find out whether he said it, where the line actually first appears in print, and when it was first pinned on Einstein.
Show a hint
Search Quote Investigator (quoteinvestigator.com) for the word “insanity.”
Show the answer and the path
Quote Investigator’s article “Insanity Is Doing the Same Thing Over and Over Again and Expecting Different Results” (posted March 23, 2017) traces it:
- There is no good evidence Einstein said or wrote it. The Ultimate Quotable Einstein lists it among the quotes misattributed to him.
- The earliest strong match Quote Investigator found is a Knoxville, Tennessee newspaper, the Knoxville News-Sentinel, on October 11, 1981, in an article about Al-Anon (a support group for families and friends of alcoholics). A member at a meeting is quoted saying it.
- The second-earliest is a Narcotics Anonymous pamphlet printed in November 1981, with slightly different wording (“repeating the same mistakes”).
- A character in Rita Mae Brown’s 1983 novel Sudden Death says a version of it.
- By 1990 it was being credited to Einstein, in the Austin American-Statesman.
So the line most likely came out of twelve-step recovery groups in the early 1980s, from no single known author, and got attached to Einstein about a decade later, 35 years after he died. If you want to use it, the honest attribution is “a saying from twelve-step groups,” not Einstein.
The path: search the quote site, read its citations (a reliable trace names the newspaper, date and page), and note that the earliest sources are the ones that settle it.
Common mistakes
Citing a quote site as the source. A collection that doesn’t name where a line first appeared tells you nothing about who said it.
Trusting a quote because many sites agree. They often copy each other. A thousand copies of a misattribution are still one misattribution.
Quoting from memory or from your notes. Check the recording or the page. Small slips in wording add up to changed meaning.
Silent edits. Cutting words without an ellipsis, or merging two separate sentences into one, makes the quote yours, not theirs.
Missing the context. A speaker describing a view, then arguing against it, gets quoted as holding it.
Taking a transcript as gospel. Official records can be edited or include remarks never spoken. Check the video when the exact words matter.
Limits
Some quotes can’t be fully settled. Old newspapers aren’t all digitized, private letters stay private, and a line said aloud may never have been written down by anyone present. Quote Investigator itself treats its findings as the best current answer, open to revision when an earlier source turns up.
An earliest known appearance is not proof of who said something first. It’s the earliest anyone has found so far. Say “the earliest known source” rather than “the origin” unless the source itself establishes it.
Checking a quote tells you whether the person said it, not whether it’s true or wise. A real quote from an expert can still be wrong.
Sources & further reading
- Quote Investigator, “Insanity Is Doing the Same Thing Over and Over Again and Expecting Different Results,” March 23, 2017
- Quote Investigator, “Not Everything That Counts Can Be Counted,” May 26, 2010: a line from sociologist William Bruce Cameron’s 1963 book, later credited to Einstein
- Quote Investigator, About page: who runs the site and how it works
- Alice Calaprice, ed., The Ultimate Quotable Einstein, Princeton University Press
- Mildred Amer, “A User’s Guide to the Congressional Record,” Congressional Research Service, 2003
- Congressional Record on govinfo, U.S. Government Publishing Office
- Supreme Court of the United States, oral argument transcripts
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