Where quotes come from

Quotes are drawn from the public record: the Congressional Record, official government transcripts and presidential document archives, and reporting from established news outlets. Each one is stored with the URL it came from, and that citation is shown on the quote's page.

Nothing is written for this site. If a quote has no source, it does not get published.

What we check before publishing

Attribution. A quote has to be tied to a specific, identified speaker. When two sources credit the same words to different people, the second version is held back for review rather than published alongside the first.

Chronology. A quote cannot be dated after the speaker's death. Records that fail that check are rejected automatically.

Verbatim text. We publish what a speaker actually said, in the language they said it. A foreign outlet's translation of a speech is that outlet's wording, not the speaker's, so translations are not published as verbatim quotes.

Duplicates. The same statement is often reported by several outlets with small differences in transcription. Those are collapsed into a single entry that carries every source that reported it, rather than appearing multiple times.

Sources can disappear — so we archive them

News URLs rot. Where a snapshot exists, quote pages link to an archived copy of the source on the Internet Archive's Wayback Machine alongside the original link, so the evidence survives even if the publisher takes the page down.

Corrections

This archive is large and assembled largely by automated collection, which means errors are possible: a misattribution, a bad transcription, a wrong date. Every quote page has a report link. Reports are reviewed, and quotes that cannot be substantiated are removed rather than left up with a caveat.

If something here is wrong, tell us and we will fix it.