Why I built this
Quotes travel. Every time one gets shared it can lose a word, pick up a new one, or end up with a more famous name attached. A few years later everyone "knows" who said it, and nobody can point to where.
Take "Insanity is doing the same thing over and over again and expecting different results." It's usually credited to Albert Einstein, but there's no evidence he ever said it. The earliest match Quote Investigator found is a 1981 newspaper report on an Al-Anon meeting in Knoxville, Tennessee.
Ask a chatbot where a quote comes from and you'll get a confident answer, and sometimes a source that doesn't exist. Said Who? works differently. Instead of guessing, it reads the pages it finds, checks that the quote is really on them, and only then tells you what it found.
What you see
- You paste a quote, and the name it's usually credited to if you know it.
- Each step of the search shows up as it happens.
- Each page that carries the quote gets a card showing the sentence copied from it. Cards sit in columns by year, oldest on the left. If the sentence isn't really on the page, the card is crossed out.
- At the end you get a short verdict: whether the usual name holds up, the earliest source found, and how sure it is. The verdict links back to the cards it rests on.
Sometimes the honest answer is "people disagree" or "nothing old enough turned up". Said Who? says that rather than make something up.
Example cases
The home page lists ten finished investigations. Each is a quote from the test set, run once and saved as it happened. Each case has its own page, such as /cases/insanity-same-thing, where you can replay the run and see the known answer next to what Said Who? concluded.
Eight of the ten come from the first full eval, run on October 12, Henry Ford's "Whether you think you can" from the third, on October 14 (see below), and Gandhi's was run again on October 15, after the Planner started searching for a likely first source by name and year. Said Who? reaches the same verdict as the known answer in eight of the ten, though the earliest source it finds isn't always the one on record. The other two are kept on purpose, and their pages say that the verdict differs. Each case's reasoning is the Judge's own words, kept as the run wrote them, and it can overstate: in the Henry Ford case it calls a 1947 Reader's Digest credit, printed after Ford died, a contemporaneous record.
| Quote | Usually credited to | Known answer | Said Who?'s verdict |
|---|
| "Insanity is doing the same thing over and over again..." | Albert Einstein | misattributed | misattributed |
| "Never in the field of human conflict was so much owed..." | Winston Churchill | said it | said it |
| "Be the change you wish to see in the world." | Mahatma Gandhi | misattributed | misattributed |
| "The only thing necessary for the triumph of evil..." | Edmund Burke | misattributed | misattributed |
| "Let them eat cake." | Marie Antoinette | misattributed | misattributed |
| "The only thing we have to fear is fear itself." | Franklin D. Roosevelt | said it | said it |
| "Gel, gel, ne olursan ol yine gel" | Mevlana (Rumi) | contested | contested |
| "If I had asked people what they wanted..." | Henry Ford | no known source | misattributed |
| "Whether you think you can, or you think you can't..." | Henry Ford | said it | said it |
| "Hayatta en hakiki mürşit ilimdir." | Mustafa Kemal Atatürk | said it | no known source |
Most runs took 25 to 39 seconds, Henry Ford's 52 and Gandhi's 61. Roosevelt's and Churchill's took three and four minutes, because Nebius answered slowly for part of that afternoon and one planning call had to be tried again. Each cost less than a cent in model use, except Gandhi's at about 3 cents, most of it a second verdict written on Nemotron 3 Ultra.
How it works
Each quote goes through six steps, each with one job:
This is the beginning of the README. Read the rest at the original. Read the full README ↗
