Random Quote Generator

Yes. Each one was checked against the work named under it, using the original text where it is online, Wikiquote's sourced entries and Quote Investigator's research. Lines that could not be traced, or that turned out to be someone else's, were removed rather than kept with a hedge — among them the Churchill line about success not being final, which goes back to a 1938 beer advertisement, and the Mandela line about things seeming impossible until they are done, which there is no record of him saying. The quotes appear in English on every language version of this page; those first written in another language are translations.

From papers, books and mailing lists you can still read: Donald Knuth's 1974 paper on structured programming in Computing Surveys, Linus Torvalds on the Linux kernel mailing list in August 2000, Fred Brooks's The Mythical Man-Month, Edsger Dijkstra's 1970 notes on structured programming and Tony Hoare's 1980 Turing Award lecture. Phil Karlton's line about cache invalidation and naming things is the exception: it was a spoken saying, and it reached print through colleagues such as Tim Bray.

Because the famous version is often a later polish. Mark Twain's note of 1897 says the report of his death was an exaggeration; the popular "reports of my death are greatly exaggerated" is a later smoothing. Edison's "10,000 ways that won't work" compresses what a colleague recalled him saying in a 1910 biography: "I know several thousand things that won't work." Where the original wording survives, this list uses it, even when the popular one is snappier.

Not from the Another one button: it always picks one of the other quotes in the current category. Each press is a fresh random draw rather than a shuffled deck, though, so over many presses a quote you have already seen can come round again.

Look for the words in a source the person actually wrote or a transcript of what they said, not a quotation site — those copy each other and an error propagates unchecked. Misattribution has a pattern worth knowing: a line drifts towards whoever is more famous, so quotes migrate to Einstein, Twain and Churchill over time. If the only sources are quote collections, treat the attribution as unverified. Here, the source line under each quote is a place to start.

Usually, but the safe answer depends on where the text was published and when the author died, and it varies by country. A short line from a long-dead author is rarely a problem; a sentence from a living writer's book is a quotation from a copyrighted work, which is normally fine when quoted briefly and with attribution but not when it is the product itself — a poster, a printed card, a paid app of quotations. A translation can also carry its own copyright, the translator's, separate from the original's.