But do trust this one, it's fab: http://quoteinvestigator.com. I mean the top post there right now is that "a million deaths is a statistic" traces to Beilby Porteus, a classics scholar from 1759. How can you beat that?
It's not only quotation websites.
In Germany "If I Had More Time, I Would Have Written a Shorter Letter" is a well-known quote from Goethe - except that it isn't from Goethe.
To the best of my knowledge it is from Blaise Pascal and it took me about an hour of research to be confident enough use the quote with this attribution.
This was way too much time spent for a simple quotation, so my question is: Is there a reliable canonical source for quotations? Maybe something good journalists use?
I know there are several quotation dictionaries but are they any good?
Interesting. I've always heard that quote ascribed to Niels Bohr.
Perhaps he was just the first Dane to use it. I guess in older times, you could get credit for a quote if you were the first in a country to use it. From http://quoteinvestigator.com/2012/04/28/shorter-letter/ it looks like Benjamin Franklin was among the first Americans. But then again, what can we really trust?
Maybe we should just attribute all quotes to Mark Twain and be done with it.
Textual evidence. The first demonstrable text wins, until an earlier is found. Sometimes it's fuzzy, because quotes morph (they get pithier over time). But most of the time it's clear enough, and the techniques for studying it are well understood.
Edit: The same is true in reverse, too: if a famous person really said X, it will be easy to find a precise textual source for X by googling. I don't mean a website claiming they said it (those are legion), but the original text, e.g. from their collected works, or an original newspaper interview. Since they're famous, that territory will have been trodden many times and there will be websites linking to it. Therefore if you can't find it, the famous person probably didn't say it. “Absence of evidence is evidence of absence” (hey, I wonder who said that one?) really works in this case.
Bartlett's Familiar Quotations is one of the classic gold standards. It's reasonably well-sourced, and it separates out "attributed" but uncomfirmed remarks. It's not as comprehensive as the online sites, since it's edited as a physical book, but it's pretty reliable:
> I know there are several quotation dictionaries but are they any good?
Oh for sure, the best ones are masterpieces of scholarship. Anything edited by Fred Shapiro, for example.
The 'shorter letter' quote, is well known to be from Pascal's letter to his sister (http://quoteinvestigator.com/2012/04/28/shorter-letter/). But the smoke of bogus internet attributions can really be hard to see through.
A friend of mine curated a couple hundred pages worth of quotations with citations to original works into a book called Quotes of Note: Brilliant Thoughts Arranged by Subject (there's another Quotes of Note that came later and is probably a TM violation). It's on Amazon.
IANAL and off-topic, but if it was a series title, your friend might have a case but, at least in North America, the titles of single works are generally not protectable under trademark law.
If the book became strongly associated with your friend, then a consumer protection exemption under "Passing Off" rules might allow the work to be protected but the onus would be on your friend to prove it.
There's a book that only includes researched and vetted quotations: Respectfully quoted: A dictionary of quotations requested from the Congressional Research Service
If you create a website with wrongly attributed quotes Google will pick it up. And the more people complain and link to your website as incorrect the more popular it will get and eventually people just start making memes and sharing on all social networks and then the quotes becomes true in the eyes of the googlers.
> If enough people say that the quote is attributed to the wrong person then does it become fact like the redefinition of "literally"?
I think that's funny as a question, but has the wrong premise. There is no 'actual' meaning of words; they have meaning only by mass human consensus. (What is the actual meaning of 'flumbiliable'?) By contrast, there is an 'actual' first utterer of a quote, whether or not there is any consensus on his or her identity.
(I suppose that you could argue, though, that it is only mass observation of a quote that makes it a quote per se, rather than just something I said; if I mutter something under my breath, and it later occurs as a widely quoted line in a movie, then should it be attributed to me, to the screenwriter, or to the character who said it?)
WikiQuote is quite reliable, despite what you'd think. If I hear a quote and want to know who actually said it, WikiQuote usually has the answer, or can at least tell me it was misattributed.
though, in magritte's case, the visual-linguistic paradox is central; to claim that a picture of a pipe is not a pipe requires the pipe to exist as a physical, real object. in this case, a citation is a linguistic creation, which can be faked but cannot exist as the real.
Relatedly, Martin Porter (of Porter stemmer fame) has a great pair of essays on the famous Burke quote about the triumph of evil (which, of course, he never said), starting with http://tartarus.org/martin/essays/burkequote.html
I wouldn't exactly say it's irrelevant. It can be a good way of showing how easy it is to just make up quotes in a very obvious way, but I would be lying if I said it wasn't a bit overused on some sites.
I always considered that quote something the rest of the world made up in jest, because in retrospect, that wasn't enough memory and it was annoying. im kinda surprised people apparently think it is something anybody ever actually said.
Ironically, this quotation is itself routinely taken out of context, as it was being applied specifically to writers who fall back on quotation when discussing the subject of immortality.
Also, Wikiquote is good as a base.