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About Famously Said
Famous quotes, who said them, and where
The quotes
Famously Said has 13,273 quotes from 1,510 people, sorted into 126 topics. The core of the collection, 4,087 quotes, comes from QuoteDB, a quotations site from the early 2000s whose editor read and sorted every quote into its topics by hand; the same editor runs this site. 9,186 more were added in 2026 from Wikiquote, picked for being well known (each is repeated on other Wikiquote pages) and for having a source, and sorted the same way.
Who really said it
Every quote was checked against Wikiquote in October 2026. When a well-known line turns out to have been said or written by someone other than the person it’s usually credited to, it’s filed under the person who said it, with a note naming the person it’s often credited to (169 quotes so far). Quotes whose author nobody can pin down are filed under Unattributed.
Sources
10,633 quotes show where they come from: the book, play, speech, letter or interview, usually with its year and often the chapter, act or page. Quotes without a source line are ones that haven’t been traced to one yet.
Speeches
The 94 speeches run from Pericles’ Funeral Oration (431 BC) to Donald Trump’s Second Inaugural Address (2025). All are in the public domain in the United States (published before 1931, or official speeches of presidents and other federal officers), so each is shown in full.
Literature
The 485 books, plays, poems and essays are shown in full, split into their chapters, acts and scenes. All are in the public domain in the United States: published before 1931, and, for works first written in another language, in English translations published before 1931. Each work’s best-known lines are marked in its text and have pages of their own, sorted into topics like the rest of the quotes.
Portraits
The portraits (1,337 of them) are drawings in the manner of an engraved frontispiece, made from photographs, paintings and sculptures on Wikimedia Commons. Each person’s page credits the picture its portrait was drawn from, with its licence. Drawings made from pictures under a Creative Commons ShareAlike licence are shared under the same licence.
Wikiquote
Quotes and sources taken from Wikiquote are shared under the Creative Commons Attribution-ShareAlike 4.0 licence; each such quote’s page links to the Wikiquote page it came from.
Sister sites
Movie Quote DB has quotes from films, and TV Quotes has quotes from television.