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.
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.
Mark Twain
Pen name of Samuel Langhorne Clemens: riverboat pilot, printer, and the father of American vernacular literature. Twain attracts apocrypha like a porch light attracts moths, so every line here carries its printed source.
Read the lines →Muhammad Iqbal
Poet-philosopher of the Indian subcontinent, writing in Urdu and Persian, and the intellectual father of the idea of Pakistan. His verse on selfhood (khudi) still anchors South Asian political and literary imagination.
Read the lines →Oscar Wilde
Irish playwright, novelist, and the most quotable conversationalist of the Victorian age. Wilde polished epigrams the way other writers polish plots, and the corpus keeps the ones that survive with a citation.
Read the lines →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.