Specimen · from Issue No. 02
“I disapprove of what you say, but I will defend to the death your right to say it.”
She was not quoting him. She was summarising him — in her own words, in her own book about his friends. This is a reference of quotations credited to the people who wrote them and the sources that printed them, and a newsletter that takes one sentence an issue back through print to the earliest source we can actually verify: sometimes the wrong mouth, sometimes a meaning that has quietly turned around, sometimes an origin better than the legend.
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Quotations by theme
All quotationsMotivational quotes
Words for the days that need a push.
Love quotes
Declarations, letters and lines from the page.
Valentine’s Day quotes
Something to write in the card.
Stoic quotes
Notes on what is and is not up to us.
Courage quotes
On fear, daring and acting anyway.
Hope quotes
On rising again, and holding on.
Freedom quotes
On chains, choices and the mind’s own country.
Time quotes
On the present, the clock and what we do with both.
Success and failure quotes
On trying, failing and trying again.
Wisdom quotes
On judgement, restraint and knowing yourself.
Nature quotes
On woods, water, seasons and the wider world.
Life quotes
On living, ageing and making sense of the days.
How an issue works
The quotation as people say it, set as a specimen — wording, punctuation and all.
Whose sentence it is, and what that rests on when you go looking for it.
The earliest appearance we can verify, cited so you can check it yourself.
What happened to it since — the anthology, the newspaper, the film, the slow change of meaning.
Every issue carries a classification
The structure never changes; only the answer does. A standing line beneath the issue number records which kind of answer we found.
The line is real, the speaker isn’t
Correctly quoted, meaning inverted over time
Right person, mangled wording
Properly attributed — the origin story is the payload
No traceable source at all
Investigated, genuinely undetermined
The citation
One apparatus, whatever the source turns out to be.
Every issue ends in a citation — a book, a periodical, a letter, a broadcast, or the honest admission that the trail runs out. The accent marks the last thing we can stand behind, and where that is nothing, it marks the boundary instead of a source. A rule that stops short is a finding, not a gap.
Book
Jean-Jacques Rousseau, Les Confessions, Book VI, 1st ed. (Geneva, 1782), p. 176.
Periodical
Laurel Thatcher Ulrich, “Vertuous Women Found,” American Quarterly 28, no. 1 (1976), p. 20.
Letter
Charles Darwin to J. D. Hooker, 11 January 1844 — Cambridge University Library, DAR 114.
Film or broadcast
John F. Kennedy, address at Rudolph Wilde Platz, West Berlin, 26 June 1963 — broadcast recording, at 00:09:04.
No source found
Traced in print to an unsigned column, 1948, and no further. The record stops here.
Unresolved — open in the Errata
The founding issues
All issues“Be the change you wish to see in the world.”
“I disapprove of what you say, but I will defend to the death your right to say it.”
“Let them eat cake.”
One sentence, traced properly, every other Thursday.
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The sourcing standard
Nothing is published without a primary source or a named reputable secondary. When we are wrong, we say so, in public, in the Errata.