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Part of Inspirational quotes: the directory, with corrections
How to verify sources for best inspirational quotes
For best inspirational quotes, use a sourcing method that checks each line, sorts it by risk, and records the work, edition, page or timestamp, and speaker.
When you search for the best inspirational quotes, a page that promises a ready-made list can leave you with lines whose sources you cannot inspect. Build your own set instead, so you can defend each line you choose to keep.
Copy twenty-five lines into a speech and you take on twenty-five separate risks somebody in the room can check on a phone.
This is a method for assembling your own set of lines you can defend, and sorting the ones worth keeping from the ones that will embarrass you.
What to take away
- Before anything else, decide who is going to check.
- The good news is that there is an enormous supply of defensible material, and it comes from places nobody thinks to look because they are not organized as quotation lists.
The embarrassment test
Before anything else, decide who is going to check. That single question sets how much work each line deserves.
A quotation makes two separate claims: that the wording is accurate and that the attribution is correct. Nobody checks a note on your own wall. Somebody usually checks a line printed in a book, because books get reviewed and readers write in.
A line on a conference slide gets checked live, by whoever in the room already knows it is wrong, and they will tell the person next to them rather than you. A line in a printed program, on merchandise, or in a company's public material gets checked by strangers with no reason to be kind.
The cost of being wrong is not that the quotation was inaccurate. It is that everything else you said now looks unchecked too.
Risk tiers
Who checks
- Private notebook, phone wallpaper
- No one
- Internal team message
- A colleague, occasionally
- Conference slide, classroom
- Someone in the room, in real time
- Published article or book
- Readers, reviewers, editors
- Printed program, engraving, merchandise
- Strangers, permanently
- Anything attributed to a living person
- Potentially that person
Standard to hold it to
- Private notebook, phone wallpaper
- Whatever you like
- Internal team message
- Name the source if you have one, hedge if you do not
- Conference slide, classroom
- Source on the slide, or no attribution
- Published article or book
- Full citation you can produce on request
- Printed program, engraving, merchandise
- Full citation, plus a rights check if the work is recent
- Anything attributed to a living person
- Primary source, or drop it
Where lines you can actually source come from
The good news is that there is an enormous supply of defensible material, and it comes from places nobody thinks to look because they are not organized as quotation lists.
- Books you own.The single most underused source. Open one, find a sentence you liked, note the page. That is a complete citation in under a minute, and it is a line nobody else is using.
- Out-of-copyright full texts.Older works may be available in full and searchable through library digitization projects. Check the edition and copyright status, cite the chapter or page, and link to the text you read.
- Speeches with official transcripts.For U.S. congressional speeches, search the Congressional Record through GovInfo; for other formal addresses, look for a dated transcript from the institution that hosted them. These are rarely mined for quotations because reading them takes longer than reading a list.
- Interviews in outlets with real archives.The original publication, not an aggregator's reprint.
- Recordings.A timestamp in a public recording is as good a citation as a page number, and it settles delivery as well as wording.
- Your own writing.Genuinely. A sentence you wrote about your own situation beats a borrowed one, and you can answer any question about it.
Quotation references are leads, not proof. Check Bartlett's Familiar Quotations, the Oxford Dictionary of Quotations, or the Yale Book of Quotations, then follow their citations to the work itself. Quote Investigator can help trace disputed attributions; Google Books and HathiTrust offer searchable book catalogs and digitized texts, though access varies. For historical U.S. newspapers, search the Library of Congress's Chronicling America collection and confirm its coverage.
The line “Well-behaved women seldom make history” is traceable to historian Laurel Thatcher Ulrich's article “Vertuous Women Found” in American Quarterly; it is often misattributed to Marilyn Monroe. Compare the wording and context in the article itself, then record the edition and page you consulted.
The filter
Seven pass-fail gates. A line that fails any of them does not go into the file.
Seven pass-fail gates
- Can you name the work?
- Can you open it?
- Have you read the paragraph around it?
- Is the speaker the author?
- Is the wording yours to use?
- Is the person living?
- Comfortable showing your source?
- Can you name the work?Not the person: the work. If no, it is a lead.
- Can you open it?A book you can borrow, a text online, a recording. If no, it is a lead.
- Have you read the paragraph around it?If no, you do not yet know what the line means.
- Is the speaker the author?Or a character, or someone the author is quoting, or a translator? Write down which.
- Is the wording yours to use?Whether a quotation is accurately sourced and whether you may reproduce it are separate questions. For U.S. copyright permissions, consult the U.S. Copyright Office and Title 17 of the U.S. Code. Fair use weighs the purpose and character of the use, the nature of the work, the amount and substantiality used, and the effect on the work's potential market. Read the permissions question and ask the rights holder when the answer is unclear.
- Is the person living?If so, gates 1 and 2 are mandatory, not preferred.
- Would you be comfortable showing your source to whoever asks?If the honest answer is "I found it on a graphic", that is the answer you would have to give.
What the file stores
Keep one line per entry with the wording exact and the punctuation unchanged. Then record the work, the edition and page or timestamp, the date it was written or said, and who the speaker is inside the work. Add the translator if there is one, where you personally found it, and anything you could not resolve.
Fields each entry stores
- Exact wording, punctuation unchanged
- Work, edition, page or timestamp
- Date written or said
- Speaker inside the work
- Translator if any
- Where you personally found it
- Anything unresolved
The last field is the one that saves the most time. Six months later you will meet the same line again from a different direction, and without a note you will do the whole search a second time.
The ones that fail
Do not delete them; move them. A "not established" list is a genuinely useful thing to keep, because these lines come back around and because your own notes are more reliable than your memory of having once doubted something.
For a line you love that failed, three honest exits: use it with no name, use it with an explicit hedge, or say the idea in your own words. None of them costs you anything but the borrowed authority, which was the part that was not yours.
Common questions
Twenty-five sounds like a lot of work.
The first three take an hour between them. After that you develop an eye for which lines will survive a check, and you stop collecting the ones that will not. A set you built yourself is also considerably more interesting than the set everyone else copied from the same page.
What if I only want one, for one speech?
The work is fifteen minutes; standard is higher, not lower, because one quotation carries great weight in a short talk.
Pick a line from a book you have actually read; it will fit your argument better. Check its wording and context in the book itself, then record the edition and page.
Can I use a line from a quotation site if I cite the site?
Citing the site is honest about where you got it, which is worth something. It also announces that you did not check, since the site is not a source and everyone knows it. Better to spend the two minutes finding the work, or drop the attribution.
