Verify a quote
Paste a quotation. We will tell you what we can prove — and what we can't.
How to check a quote yourself
Ask one question: what is the primary source? A real quotation can be traced to a specific book, letter, speech, or interview, with a date and a findable passage. If everything you can find is another website repeating the same sentence, with no original work named, you are looking at folklore rather than a quotation.
Two patterns account for most fakes. The first is drift toward fame — an anonymous saying gradually acquires a famous name, because a famous name makes a sentence feel more true. The second is paraphrase promotion — someone accurately summarises a thinker, the summary is catchier than the original, and eventually the summary gets quotation marks around it.
Mark Twain, who suffered plenty of both, put it best in 1897: nearly any invented quotation, played with confidence, stands a good chance to deceive.