Quotes

What we publish here

A quote page on this site is not just a sentence with a name attached. Before a quotation is published, the editorial team requires the following:

• Exact wording. The quotation matches a specific edition. We do not modernise the wording silently, and we do not stitch together phrases drawn from different passages.
• The work it comes from. Named, and cited by the convention appropriate to the tradition — Stephanus for Plato, Bekker for Aristotle, book and chapter (or section) for the historians and the scriptures.
• The translator and the edition, where the quotation appears in translation. The text of an ancient author is in the public domain; the modern translation that shapes the English wording is often not. We say which edition the wording follows.
• Enough context to read it. An isolated line, prised out of its argument, usually misleads. Every quote entry includes a short editorial framing of what the passage is doing in the work it comes from.

The fuller statement of the standards governing the library sits on the editorial policy page; the editions we read from are on Sources.

Why the library is small

Many of the most widely shared classical quotations on the modern web do not, in fact, originate where they are said to. Some are paraphrases that have hardened into “quotations.” Some are nineteenth- or twentieth-century lines that have drifted backwards in time. Some are simply invented. We will publish a smaller library for that reason. The library opens largely empty by design.