Random Quote Generator

Search the exact wording inside quotation marks and look at the earliest results. If every hit is another quotation page, a poster or a social post, and none names a book, letter, speech or interview, you are probably looking at folklore. A date-restricted search of digitised books is the quickest way to find whether the line existed before the person supposedly said it. Quote Investigator has already done this for most famous cases and shows the trail. Two other tells: wording that sounds modern for the period, and a sentiment that flatters the speaker too neatly.

Short quotations used for comment, criticism, review or teaching are normally covered by fair dealing in the UK and fair use in the US, provided you credit the source and take no more than you need. The risk sits in proportion rather than length: four lines of a song or a poem is a large share of the whole work, which is why lyrics cause far more trouble than prose. Commercial use is a separate question — a line printed on a mug is not commentary. Whether something is out of copyright depends on when its author died, and that term differs by country.

A quotation travels better with a famous name attached, so lines drift towards whoever is most quotable in the vicinity: a witty remark goes to Twain, anything about imagination to Einstein, anything defiant to Churchill, anything serene to Rumi or the Buddha. Nobody has to lie for this to happen. An anonymous line picks up a tentative attribution in one collection, the next copies it without the hedge, and the confident version outcompetes the accurate one because it reads better. That is why an attribution repeated everywhere is weak evidence rather than strong.

The public quotation services that supply the text are called by this site's own server, not by your browser, so what reaches them is a request from that server rather than one from you. The page asks a single address on this site and sends no parameters with it — there is nothing to send, since there is no box to type in and no setting to choose. Nothing of yours goes into producing a quotation, and the copy button reads the text already on screen in front of you.

A run-in quotation sits inside quotation marks with the attribution after it, conventionally separated by an em dash and no full stop after the name. Where closing punctuation goes differs by convention: British style keeps a full stop outside the closing mark unless it belongs to the quoted sentence, American style puts commas and full stops inside regardless. Anything longer than about forty words is usually set as an indented block with no quotation marks at all. The line the copy button produces uses straight marks, so a document set in typographic quotes needs them swapped.

Yes, within rules that exist so a reader can see what you did. Mark anything cut with an ellipsis, and put square brackets around any word you added or changed to make the grammar fit its new sentence — a pronoun replaced by the name it referred to is the usual case. What you cannot do is stitch phrases from different parts of a passage together as though they were continuous, or quietly drop the clause that qualified the claim. If the surgery needed is extensive, paraphrase in your own words and credit the source instead.

The pools behind them are smaller than they look — a curated collection is a list someone assembled by hand, and the popular lines are duplicated across several of them. Each draw is independent, too: nothing is dealing from a shrinking deck, so a repeat can turn up on the very next press rather than only once the set is exhausted. Nothing here keeps a record of what you have already been shown, so there is no de-duplication standing in the way. The register can shift between presses as well, since more than one supplier can answer.

Relevance beats profundity. A line that connects to the point you are about to make earns its place; a beautiful line that gestures vaguely at your theme reads as decoration. Say who wrote it and, where it matters, in what context, because an unsourced aphorism floating above a paragraph asks the reader to take it on trust. Keep it short enough to be held in the ear if it will be spoken aloud. And avoid opening with a quotation that makes your argument better than the rest of the piece does.