Orphan Quotation
A quotation in circulation with no traceable source or verified speaker.
An orphan quotation is one nobody can father. It appears in books, slide decks and social posts with either no attribution at all or a name that no researcher has been able to link to a document.
Orphans arise in a few ways: a paraphrase of a real passage detaches and hardens into a quotation, a translation gets re-translated until it no longer matches any original, or an anonymous saying is later assigned to a famous name for extra authority.
Handling them honestly means labelling rather than deleting. 'Widely quoted but unverified' or 'no source located before 1998' tells the reader exactly what is known, and is far better than a confident false credit.
Common mistake: treating repetition as evidence. A line appearing in a thousand places usually means one source was copied a thousand times.
“"Be kind, for everyone you meet is fighting a hard battle." — widely attributed to Plato; earliest known source is Ian Maclaren, 1897.”
Keep reading the glossary
A quote attributed to a famous person that they almost certainly never said.
Assigning a quote to the wrong person — the most common error in quotation.
The process by which a quotation gradually shifts to a more famous name through repeated sharing.
A research tradition (and a well-known website) devoted to tracing the true origin of famous quotations.