How to verify and cite quotations: an essential guide

A well-chosen supporting quotation can help to make your message relatable and memorable. But misquoting sources and omitting citations can harm your authority in the eyes of your readers. To cite quotations accurately, you need to choose high-quality sources, be transparent if you can’t track down the original, and be consistent about the information you include in your citations. This guide walks you through how to properly use and cite quotations in a non-fiction book – whether you’re writing for a blog post or for an academic article.

I have a confession: part of my job necessarily involves being a professional killjoy. When I encounter certain quotations in a manuscript, my heart sinks because I know I’m going to have to ask the author to change their carefully crafted text.

For example, consider the following:

‘Be yourself; everyone else is taken’

Oscar Wilde

‘They may forget what you said, but they will never forget how you made them feel’

Maya Angelou

‘The secret of getting ahead is getting started’

Mark Twain

These quotes frequently come up in the business and charity books I edit, and it’s easy to see why – they acknowledge our human insecurities and struggles, and empower us with a path forward.

But they are all three also completely misattributed. The Wilde quote first appeared 99 years after his death, the Angelou quote seems to have originated with a high-level official in the Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-Day Saints, and the Twain quote is a murky mess of obscurity (but almost certainly not bona fide Twain).

Why proper attribution matters

You might be thinking, ‘Pfft, what does it matter? The quotes are just as powerful whatever name appears after them, and loads of people attribute them to those authors on the internet.’

Well, yes, but that last bit is precisely the problem.

When you don’t verify and cite quotations properly in your manuscript, you risk signalling to readers that your writing belongs with that low-quality soup. Today, when generative AI has made it easier to become a published author, it’s more important than ever to robustly establish your credentials as a human writer of integrity.

Verifying a quotation means looking up the source so as to:

• Check the author
• Check where the quote was originally published
• Check the exact words of the original quote

Doing this, and then deploying quotations with care, signals that:

• You’re trustworthy and value accuracy
• You’ve shown similar care and precision in building your argument
• You recognize others’ ideas and the mental labour that went into them
• You value your place in the pantheon of writers (after all, presumably you’d prefer others to quote you accurately too)
• You respect your readers’ time and attention

Whether you’re quoting one of the greats or your high-school history teacher, it shows respect to verify the source and credit them properly.

Why sources get misattributed or misquoted

This guide is primarily about how to cite quotations properly. But it’s worth briefly examining why sources get misattributed or misquoted, because understanding this can help us to be alert to the phoney and the baloney.

The appeal of big names

We want powerful people to be behind powerful quotes. For example, ‘well-behaved women seldom make history’ is compelling in its own right, but even more so when paired with the cultural heft of Marilyn Monroe (or Eleanor Roosevelt or Anne Boleyn or one of the other women to whom the quote is frequently misattributed).

Once a quotation has been connected with such dazzle in the public consciousness, it’s easy for the original author to be swept aside, however respected (the true author of this quotation is the Pulitzer Prize-winning Laurel Thatcher Ulrich).

In some cases, this misattribution process happens easily because the erroneous author is simply irresistible as a quote magnet. For example, Oscar Wilde’s and Mark Twain’s works practically froth with brilliant observations, so once a quote is linked to them – however falsely – it sticks.

The temptation to shorten

Author Scott Berkun has pointed out that shorter quotes are more appealing – and more likely to be misquoted as a result. He includes some great examples of famous quotes being changed (sometimes to the utterly opposite meaning) by having a few words chopped off.

A hierarchy of quote sources

When you’re checking the true authorship of a quote, it’s vital to understand that not all sources are created equal. Here’s a hierarchy from most to least reliable.

Tier 1: original sources (gold standard)

The only truly trustworthy source is the original one.

So, when you come across a good quote in a book, article or other source, make a note of where you found it. This can save you a lot of archaeological work in your research notes later.

Note: for older books, if you know the book title but not the exact location within it, try Hathi Trust or the Internet Archive. They have digitized, searchable versions of millions of older books.

Tier 2: reputable secondary sources

Your second option should be reputable collections of quotes that cite or explain their sources. Examples include:

• Oxford Reference has over 12,600 quotations at the time of writing, searchable and indexed by author and topic
• Quote Investigator specializes in investigating (and commonly debunking) the often misquoted and misattributed
• Specialist archives, such as the Theodore Roosevelt Center, should be trustworthy, especially if linked to a university or similar
• Specialist debunking sites, such as FakeBuddhaQuotes.com, can be helpful when you have a niche query

Tier 3: community sourced but unverified

Semi-curated sources of quotes can often provide helpful clues:

• Wikiquote often includes useful commentary that can help you decide whether to trust the source provided or look it up in a Tier 1 or Tier 2 source.
• Try author pages on Goodreads and similar sites – for example, this page on the wonderfully ludicrous Jodi Taylor has book titles for each quote (but not page numbers; more on these below).
• You can also often get sources from academic publications. Scholars sometimes use famous quotations as epigraphs, and they will often include citations. Sometimes simply Googling the quotation in quote marks will bring up a link to a paper that includes a source. But I’ve put this option in level 3 rather than level 2, because busy academics are as fallible as anybody else when it comes to citational discipline. Don’t assume academic papers are correct.

Tier 4: quote swamps (avoid!)

Sites like BrainyQuote and Quozio can be great places to find quotes but you should always seek to verify the sources elsewhere.

These sites tend to be echo chambers of misinformation, with the same quotes repeated endlessly without verification.

A word about AI: You can use AI to help you verify quotes, but always click through to the sources (or look them up yourself). Don’t get caught up in an AI’s hallucination.

What do you do if this all sounds exhaustingly tedious? I'll give you a hint: I have a high boredom threshold. Take a look at my referencing support service if you'd like help to verify and cite quotations with a professional level of polish.

How to judge source reliability

It’s often unclear whether to trust a source or not. At one end of the scale is the gold standard of the actual original publication (Tier 1). At the other end are the quote swamps mentioned above (Tier 4, or perhaps we should call this the ‘swamp standard’). In the middle, there’s a huge range of sources where you’ll have to make your own judgement about whether the source is reputable (Tiers 2 and 3).

Sometimes, like a detective constructing a case or a genealogist piecing together a lineage, you need to correlate multiple sources. For example, you might get a clue from a Tier 3 source and then get a digital copy of the relevant publication (Tier 1) to verify against. Or you might decide that one slightly dodgy Tier 2 source and two decent-looking Tier 3 sources together are sufficient.

Deciding whether to trust a source is about balancing the rigour your readers expect with the time and effort required to verify the source. The higher your readers’ expectations and the more formal your publication, the more effort you should put in.

What to do when you can’t find the source

Sometimes, despite your best efforts, you won’t be able to verify the source of a quotation with certainty. But what if the quotation is too perfect to delete? You might want to keep it regardless.

In this case, you have four options:

Option 1: Delete the quotation

Technically the correct choice, but even my killjoy nature doesn’t recommend this for anything but the most flimsy of sources.

Option 2: Use ‘quoted in’

This is a good option when:

• You’ve found a likely-looking source but you don’t trust it 100% or
• You’ve found the quotation in a reputable source (Tier 1 or 2) but the original source is either not known or not given

In these cases, consider using ‘quoted in’ or ‘quoted by’. For example:

‘Do your little bit of good where you are; it’s those little bits of good put together that overwhelm the world’

Desmond Tutu, quoted by the Tutu Foundation, https://tutufoundationuk.org/2022/12/20/remembering-archbishop-desmond-tutu-who-passed-away-last-christmas

Option 3: Use ‘attributed to’

When you use this phrase, you’re acknowledging that a quote is widely attributed to someone but that you can’t supply the actual source.

This can be a handy get-out-of-jail-free card, but use it with caution. If people commonly attribute a quote to someone and you know the attribution isn’t correct, it would be disingenuous to go ahead with the phoney name. One option in this case is to list both the person the quote has reasonably been attributed to and the real person. So, building on one of the Quote Investigator examples above, you might say:

‘They may forget what you said, but they will never forget how you made them feel’

Carl W. Buehner, but widely attributed to Maya Angelou

What to do when you want to cite a paraphrase

Sometimes, when a quote is widely known in its paraphrased form, using the original version risks looking pedantic or silly. Alternatively, the original might lack the impact or message of the paraphrased version.

In these cases, you can still include the well-known version (although it’s wise to check the meaning hasn’t been fundamentally changed from the original). But it’s best practice to acknowledge to your readers that what you’re presenting to them isn’t what the author originally wrote.

For example, you might use:

As a widely used paraphrase of Carl Jung says, ‘Until you make the unconscious conscious, it will direct your life and you will call it fate.’

What should the citation contain?

There is a huge variety of citation and referencing approaches out there. As a professional editor, I have on my print and digital shelves literally hundreds of pages worth of detailed guidance from style giants such as Oxford University Press, the Chicago Manual of Style and the American Psychological Association.

If you’re using one of these official style guides (or have been asked to use one by your publisher), follow the formats and requirements there. If not, choose from the following options according to your publication's formality and what your readers will expect.

Minimum requirement for a citation

The author’s name:

‘Mary wished to say something sensible, but knew not how’

Jane Austen

Going the extra mile

Include the title and perhaps original date of the work:

‘Mary wished to say something sensible, but knew not how’

Jane Austen, Pride and Prejudice, 1813

Getting fancy

Give the details of the specific edition you’ve consulted:

‘Mary wished to say something sensible, but knew not how’

Jane Austen, Pride and Prejudice, San Diego: Canterbury Classics, 2012

Alternatively, for electronic references, you can include the URL, like in the Desmond Tutu example above.

Citation deity

In the most formal contexts, which include academic writing and many of the business and charity books I edit, you'll need the page number too:

‘Mary wished to say something sensible, but knew not how’

Jane Austen, Pride and Prejudice, San Diego: Canterbury Classics, 2012, p. 5

Obviously you only need to consider including a page number if a work is paginated. But don't assume that this only applies to books and other physical publications. PDFs have page numbers too. Or an electronic publication might have paragraph or section numbers you can include instead.

Choosing whether to include page numbers isn't always straightforward, so let's take a look at the question in more detail.

Do you need page numbers?

Whether you include the page number (or paragraph or section number, as noted above) when you cite quotations depends on the nature of the publication you’re writing for.

As always, the more formal the publication, the more likely you should use page numbers. For example, academic publications will almost always want page numbers, to maintain the principle that every piece of information should be precisely sourced. However, other publications may not require them.

Epigraphs (quotations, often with a fancy design, that appear at the start of a book or article) are an exception: these will commonly not have page numbers (although it’s no less important to verify the quotation's accuracy!).

An alternative approach is to include a chapter number instead. For example, Oxford Reference (a Tier 2 source in the hierarchy above) only provides chapter numbers (not page numbers) for its quotes from Elizabeth Gaskell.

If you have a publisher, ask for their requirements. If you have an editor, ask them what they’d recommend for your publication. If you’re making the decision for yourself, put yourself in your readers’ shoes and ask whether they would expect, require or be reassured by the presence of page numbers.

Does the edition matter?

The older a source, the more likely it is to have been published in multiple editions. And every time a new edition is published, the pagination is likely to be different. So, for example, a quote that appears on page 250 of the 1993 Wordsworth edition of Elizabeth Gaskell’s Cranford is almost certainly on a different page in the 1907 Oxford University Press edition.

Therefore, if you’re including a page number, you always need to include the details of the edition, like in the 'getting fancy' example above.

If you’re not including a page number, again this question comes down to the style guide you’re following and what your readers will want, expect and be reassured by. Don’t waste time tracking down details your readers won’t care about, but do ensure your publication conveys the necessary level of authority.

Get in touch if you’re stuck deciding on or implementing a citation strategy in your publication – I’ve helped thousands of authors implement their publisher’s required style or develop their own.

Final thoughts

Verifying and citing quotations properly is about more than just accuracy – it’s about establishing your credibility as a writer who respects both sources and readers. In an age of information overload and AI-generated content, taking the time to verify and cite quotations sets you apart as a writer of integrity.