Public Domain Quotes
Quotations whose copyright has expired — free to reuse without permission.
A quotation enters the public domain when its copyright expires. The exact term varies by country and by the date of the original publication, but a working rule of thumb is that anything published before 1929 in the United States is public domain, and works by authors who died more than seventy years ago are public domain in most of the European Union and the United Kingdom.
Public domain status applies to the text. It does not apply to a recent translation, a recent edition's editorial apparatus, or a designer's typographic treatment, each of which may carry its own copyright.
Ancient and early-modern quotation — Aurelius, Shakespeare, the King James Bible, Austen, Emerson — is largely public domain, which is one reason these voices saturate the genre.
“We hold these truths to be self-evident, that all men are created equal.”
Keep reading the glossary
A US legal doctrine that permits limited quotation of copyrighted material without permission.
The act of naming the original speaker or writer of a quote.
The convention of citing only the author's name when quoting in casual writing.
An adjective describing a phrase, person, or work that lends itself naturally to being quoted.