Figures

People we keep on the record.

Each figure's page holds verbatim lines, dated and linked to their sources. Historical and public-domain figures come first; every entry carries a citation, and any reader can challenge one.

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121–1802

Marcus Aurelius

Roman emperor and Stoic philosopher.

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1858–19191

Theodore Roosevelt

26th President. Naturalist, soldier, reformer.

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The reference corpus

Authors indexed from Bartlett's 1905 and Wikiquote — cited reference lines, distinct from the curated registry. Curated figures above carry their corpus lines too.

551–479 BC9

Confucius

Chinese teacher and philosopher whose recorded conversations, the Analects, shaped East Asian ethics and statecraft for two and a half millennia. Few thinkers have been quoted longer — or misquoted more cheerfully.

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Verbatim only

Every figure entry uses the exact words as reported by a citable source. We don't paraphrase, condense, or invent. If an entry is wrong or there's a better source, open the figure's page and use the correction form — every change is logged in public.