Method
Quotes travel. They are cut down, translated, retranslated, fused with other lines and credited to whoever sounds right. Quotogeny traces each one back to the page, the way a family tree traces a person back through their ancestors: the passage it comes from, the translations and misquotes that grew out of it, the older texts it draws on, and the writers who took it up. The name says so: -geny is Greek for origin.
Evidence
Where a person's works are in the public domain, a quote marked genuine is found word for word in the full text, in the original language and in a public-domain translation, by a program that reads both. The place, part and chapter, comes from the text itself. Where the works are still in copyright, as for most living people, a quote rests on a checked citation: the publication and page, or the recording and minute.
- Genuine found in their own words.
- Paraphrase circulates in other words; the real passage is given.
- Misattributed someone else said or wrote it, and we say who.
- Not found in their works no source has been found; we say what is known.
Voices
Not every line in a person's work is their view. Dostoevsky gave his strongest lines to the people his novels argue with: Ivan Karamazov, the Grand Inquisitor, the Underground Man. So every quote names its speaker, says how the work stands towards it, and warns when a line means something else out of context.
Whose words
The commonest fake is a real quote with the wrong name on it. The checker searches the texts of everyone in the atlas, so a line credited to one person but written by another is caught.
What a quote is made of
Each quote is described by the choices it is made of, in eight facets; finding a quote for an occasion works with them.
- Theme
- What is it about?
- Claim
- What kind of statement is it?
- Figure
- Which figure of speech carries it?
- Voice
- Who says it, and how?
- Stance
- How does the work stand towards it?
- Tone
- How does it sound?
- Shape
- How does it sit on the page?
- Use
- What can you use it for?
AI, and its limits
Entries are researched by AI agents working from the source texts, then checked by a program that finds every passage word for word. Topics, occasions and a safety screen for submissions come from a separate AI judge (Jev, by TypeSafe). AI can be wrong: every entry stays marked as a draft until a person has reviewed it, and we never present a quote as genuine without the words on the page.
Submissions
Anyone can submit a quote. Every submission is logged, checked and screened for safety; clear ones are published as submitted, with what the check found, the rest wait for a person. We don't keep your address or e-mail.