How we verify quotes

Most leadership quotes online are copied from other quote lists, and a line can travel for decades with the wrong name under it. Every page on Lead With Quotes is built the other way round: we start from the book, speech, letter or recording, and only keep a line we can place there. This page explains how that works and what our labels mean.

Where we look

• The original text first. Full texts of books and speeches (publisher editions, Project Gutenberg, the Internet Archive), presidential and national archives, official transcripts and the speaker’s own site or recorded talk.
• Research on disputed lines. Quote Investigator and published quotation dictionaries, which trace the earliest known printing of a line.
• Pointers, not proof. Wikiquote and similar collections help us find a source, but we only cite the source itself, never the collection.

What our labels mean

• Sourced or verified: we found the wording in a primary text or recording, and the credit line names the person, the work and the year (often the chapter, section or date as well).
• As recorded by: the words come from a witness, a memoir or a biographer rather than from the speaker’s own text. We name that source.
• Commonly attributed: the line is widely credited to someone, but we could not find it in anything they wrote or said. We say so instead of guessing.
• Misattributed: the evidence points to someone else, or to a later paraphrase. These lines go in a separate section with what the record shows. Our list of quotes leaders never said collects the best-known cases.

How a page is made

Pages are drafted with AI assistance. Before anything is published, every quotation is matched against the source it is credited to, translations are credited to the translator, and lines that fail the check are removed or moved to the misattribution section. We do not publish invented personal stories, testimonials or experiences.

Updates and corrections

A page shows an “Updated” date only when its content changed in a way that matters to a reader, such as a corrected credit line, a replaced quote or a new section. Link fixes and layout changes do not change the date. If you find a quote we have credited wrongly, write to greetingbirdscom@gmail.com with the source, and we will check it and correct the page.