Our sources

How we verify quotes

Famous quotes change as they get passed around. A line gets shortened. A word gets swapped. A saying gets pinned on a more famous name. This page explains how we check every quote in Patriot Daily Quotes, so you know exactly what you are reading.

We go back to the original

Every quote is checked against the original letter, speech, diary or record. We look for the exact words in the place they first appeared. A quote website or a social media post is never enough on its own.

These are the archives we use most:

• Founders Online at the National Archives, for the papers of Washington, Adams, Jefferson, Franklin, Hamilton, Jay and Madison
• The American Presidency Project at UC Santa Barbara, for presidential speeches, messages and news conferences
• The Library of Congress, for manuscripts, old newspapers and recordings
• Hansard, the official record of debates in the British Parliament
• Project Gutenberg, for first editions and early printings of books, essays and pamphlets
• The presidential libraries run by the National Archives

The app shows the source under every quote, with a link so you can read the original yourself.

We read the whole sentence

Finding the words is only half the job. We also read what comes before and after them, because a real quote can mislead when it is cut short. If we trim a quote, we keep its meaning and mark the cut with an ellipsis (...).

What the labels mean

Most quotes were written down by the person who said them. Some were not. When a quote has a history you should know about, the source line in the app tells you. Here is what each label means, with a real example from the app.

Verified

The words appear in the original document, written or spoken by the person we credit. Most of the quotes in the app are verified.

Example: George Washington, “Discipline is the soul of an army.” From his Instructions to Company Captains, 29 July 1757. Read it on Founders Online.

Reported

Someone else wrote the words down at the time or soon after. We trust the record, and we name the person who kept it.

Example: Benjamin Franklin, “A republic, if you can keep it.” Franklin never wrote this line himself. James McHenry, a delegate to the Constitutional Convention, recorded the exchange in his journal on 18 September 1787. See the Library of Congress article.

Reconstructed

Nobody wrote the words down when they were spoken. The text we have was rebuilt later from memory.

Example: Patrick Henry's “give me liberty or give me death” speech of 23 March 1775. No copy was made that day. The words we know come from William Wirt's biography of Henry, published in 1817, which rebuilt the speech from the memories of men who heard it. Read the 1817 text.

Translation

The person spoke or wrote in another language, and the words you read are an English translation.

Example: Thomas Jefferson, “I prefer dangerous freedom to peaceful slavery.” In a letter to James Madison on 30 January 1787, Jefferson quoted a Latin maxim: “Malo periculosam, libertatem quam quietam servitutem.” The English line is a translation of that Latin. Read the letter on Founders Online.

Attributed

The quote is widely credited to the person, but we could not see it in the original ourselves. We keep it in the app and tell you plainly where the trail stops.

Example: Mark Twain, “The radical of one century is the conservative of the next.” It is credited to his private notebook for 1898, which was published in 1935. We have not been able to view that page.

The portraits are illustrations

The portraits of each speaker in the app are illustrations made with AI. They help you picture the person, and they are not historical paintings or photographs.

The words are a different matter. Every quote is checked against its source. The historical paintings, photographs and documents inside the stories are real, and each one shows its caption, credit and collection.

Our October 2026 audit

In October 2026 we rechecked all 366 quotes in the app against their sources. We also compared every Washington and Jefferson quote with Mount Vernon’s list of spurious Washington quotations and Monticello’s list of spurious Jefferson quotations. None of our quotes was on either list.

The audit did find things to fix. We corrected the wording of a few quotes so they match the original exactly. We changed the label on some others. Franklin's “A republic, if you can keep it” is one of them. It is now marked reported. A small number of quotes are still under review.

Curious which famous lines never made it in? See the founder quotes we left out, and why.

Found a mistake? Tell us

We would rather hear about an error than leave it in the app. If you think a quote, a date or a source is wrong, email us at [email protected].

Tell us which quote and what looks wrong. A link to your source helps. We check every report against the original and fix the app when a report is right.

See the quotes for yourself

Read our weekly quotes, each with its source. Or get the free app for a new quote every morning, with the story behind it.