Quote Verification
The process of tracing a quotation to its earliest reliable source before publishing it.
Quote verification is the discipline of establishing that a person actually said or wrote the words attributed to them, in that form. It has a standard method: find the earliest printed appearance, check whether that appearance cites a source, and follow the chain back until it either reaches a primary document or breaks.
A chain that breaks is the diagnostic signal. Most fake quotations look identical to real ones on the surface; what distinguishes them is that every citation points to another quotation collection rather than to a letter, transcript, recording or published work.
Practical tools include full-text archives (newspaper databases, Google Books with date-limited searching), the author's collected works, and dedicated research sites such as Quote Investigator. Date-limiting is the single most useful technique: a quotation about the internet supposedly said in 1935 will show no pre-1990 hits.
Common mistake: treating volume of results as verification. Ten thousand identical web pages are one source copied ten thousand times. Verification counts independent early sources, not repetitions.
“"Be the change you wish to see in the world" — attributed to Gandhi; no source in his collected works, first traced to a 1970s American paraphrase.”
Keep reading the glossary
A research tradition (and a well-known website) devoted to tracing the true origin of famous quotations.
Assigning a quote to the wrong person — the most common error in quotation.
A quote attributed to a famous person that they almost certainly never said.
A quote deliberately invented and attributed to someone for credibility, humour, or harm.