Questions tagged [quotes]

Use this tag when the question is about whether someone said or wrote a quote.

The repetition of someone else's statement or thoughts.

This tag is appropriate for questions where the authenticity of a quote is being questioned rather than questions where a quotation is the source of a claim. In other words, the underlying claim is about the authenticity of the quote itself rather than any claims made within the quotation.

Example appropriate questions for the tag
  • Famous Person X claims in his recent book that Famous Person Y gave a speech claiming that the sky is green. Did Famous Person Y really give a speech in which he claimed that the sky is green?
  • Smith (2019), in a paper published in Science, claims that his assertion that "x is bounded by the lesser hyperbola when n < 3" is a quotation from a paper by Johnson (1995), but I cannot find this paper anywhere. Does it really exist and does it in fact contain the claimed mathematical assertion?
Example inappropriate questions for the tag (choose a more appropriate tag)
  • Famous Person Y claims that the sky is green, is it really green?
  • A paper by Johnson (1995) claims that "x is bounded by the lesser hyperbola when n < 3". Is x actually so bounded? The proof that Johnson provides appears very specious, and I have these specific concerns about it specifically....
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Did Ataturk say that Islam is "an absurd theology" and "a rotting corpse which poisons our lives"?

Various places (for example, the books Reset: Iran, Turkey, and America's Future by Stephen Kinzer and From the Ruins of Empire: The Revolt Against the West and the Remaking of Asia by Pankaj Mishra) claim Ataturk said: This is Islam, an absurd…
chx
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Did Haj Amin al-Husseini tell Hitler to exterminate the Jews?

Israeli Prime Minister Bibi Netanyahu recently made the following claim: “Hitler didn’t want to exterminate the Jews at the time, he wanted to expel the Jews. And Haj Amin al-Husseini went to Hitler and said: ‘If you expel them, they’ll all come…
user29507
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Was marriage defined as "selling your daughter for three goats and a cow" in the Bible?

The organisation Planting Peace recently put up a billboard in controversial county clerk Kim Davis' hometown: Dear Kim Davis, The fact that you can't sell your daughter for three goats and a cow means we've already REDEFINED MARRIAGE. They then…
March Ho
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Did Fidel Castro ever make this prediction?

The Bimini Times just put out this pretty interesting and prophetic Castro quote, The US will come to talk to us when they have a black president and the world has a Latin American Pope. - Fidel Castro 1973 I've also seen it on twitter,
Evan Carroll
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Did a Jewish prisoner write this quote about God and forgiveness?

According to a number of social media sites, including Reddit: “If there is a God, He will have to beg my forgiveness.” — A phrase that was carved on the walls of a concentration camp cell during WWII by a Jewish prisoner. Is this attribution…
iamgopal
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Did a lawyer representing the Charlottesville flamethrower man say to kill little babies?

According the article Black nationalist lawyer accused of anti-Semitic remarks to investigate response to rally: In addition to the allegations of promoting anti-Semitic conspiracy theories, the report includes remarks Shabazz allegedly made at a…
DavePhD
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Did Fidel Castro ever say "I will not die until America is destroyed"

A massively popular tweet (50k retweets) by Ryan Holmquist quotes Fidel Castro It reads, Castro: I will not die until America is destroyed Trump: I'm gonna be the president Castro: well then There are quite a few other tweets along the same…
Evan Carroll
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Did René Descartes say “People would get rid of half of their problems if they could agree on the meaning of words”?

In many Russian language articles and sources (for example, wikiquote) I come across the quote attributed to René Descartes, which can be translated “People would get rid of half of their problems if they could agree on the meaning of words”, or…
stansult
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Did Winston Churchill say we should not cut art funding?

There's a famous quote by Winston Churchill that, when asked to cut arts funding in favour of the war effort, he replied: “Then what are we fighting for?” (it can be found here, among other places). Is this true?
Marcel Korpel
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Did George Bernard Shaw convert on his death bed?

I've seen this quote floating around all over the place. It's often used in popular Christian-lite reading (see the first page of the Google Books search for the quote), but is it true? I have never seen a worthwhile publication linked as a source,…
John Lyon
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Did Hitler say that "private enterprise cannot be maintained in a democracy"?

There are a bunch of sources claiming he said it, but the earliest one I was able to find is a 1968 book The Arms of Krupp, which also gives it in German as "privates Unternehmertum könne in der Demokratie nicht bestehen". However, oddly enough,…
Fizz
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Does this line appear in 50 Shades of Grey?

Just saw this on Facebook, thought I'd better check that it's for real before sharing. "His pointed finger circled my puckered love cave. 'Are you ready for this?' he mewled, smirking at me like a mother hamster about to ear her three-legged…
dwjohnston
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Did Sophocles write "Success is dependent on effort"?

I'm trying to find the source of the quote "Success is dependent on effort." There are lots and lots of quotation sites that attribute it to Sophocles. However, I have yet to find a single site that attributes it to any particular work of Sophocles,…
Tom Zych
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Did the New York Post publish authentic email correspondence of Hunter Biden?

The New York Post recently published a story (October 2020) alleging it had found a cache of emails on a laptop apparently belonging to Hunter Biden that demonstrate widespread allegations of nepotism and corruption during US vice presidential spell…
matt_black
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Did George Biddell Airy write a paper "On Certain conditions under which a Perpetual Motion is possible"?

George Biddell Airy was an English mathematician. He was Astronomer Royal from 1835 to 1881 According to the Bessler Wheel web-site (a site dedicated to investigationg perpetual motion machines, Airy wrote the paper titled On certain Conditions…