Plagiarism Quotes

“All I could think of was that the teachers must've found the illegal stash of candy I'd been selling out of my dorms room. Or maybe they'd realized I got my Essay on Tom Sawyer from the Internet without ever reading the book and now they were going to take away my grade. Or worse, they were going to make me read the book.”
― Rick Riordan, The Lightning Thief

“Immature poets imitate; mature poets steal.”
― T.S. Eliot, The Sacred Wood

“I've been imitated so well I've heard people copy my mistakes.”
― Jimi Hendrix

“When you have wit of your own, it's a pleasure to credit other people for theirs.”
― Criss Jami, Killosophy

“When a thing has been said and said well, have no scruple. Take it and copy it.”
― Anatole France

“To steal ideas from one person is plagiarism; to steal from many is research.”
― Steven Wright

“As a convinced atheist, I ought to agree with Voltaire that Judaism is not just one more religion, but in its way the root of religious evil. Without the stern, joyless rabbis and their 613 dour prohibitions, we might have avoided the whole nightmare of the Old Testament, and the brutal, crude wrenching of that into prophecy-derived Christianity, and the later plagiarism and mutation of Judaism and Christianity into the various rival forms of Islam. Much of the time, I do concur with Voltaire, but not without acknowledging that Judaism is dialectical. There is, after all, a specifically Jewish version of the eighteenth-century Enlightenment, with a specifically Jewish name—the Haskalah—for itself. The term derives from the word for 'mind' or 'intellect,' and it is naturally associated with ethics rather than rituals, life rather than prohibitions, and assimilation over 'exile' or 'return.' It's everlastingly linked to the name of the great German teacher Moses Mendelssohn, one of those conspicuous Jewish hunchbacks who so upset and embarrassed Isaiah Berlin. (The other way to upset or embarrass Berlin, I found, was to mention that he himself was a cousin of Menachem Schneerson, the 'messianic' Lubavitcher rebbe.) However, even pre-enlightenment Judaism forces its adherents to study and think, it reluctantly teaches them what others think, and it may even teach them how to think also.”
― Christopher Hitchens, Hitch 22: A Memoir

“I am never forget the day I first meet the great Lobachevsky.
In one word he told me secret of success in mathematics:
Plagiarize!

Plagiarize!
Let no one else's work evade your eyes!
Remember why the good Lord made your eyes!
So don't shade your eyes,
But plagiarize, plagiarize, plagiarize -
Only be sure always to call it please 'research'."

[Lobachevsky]”
― Tom Lehrer

“Anticipatory plagiarism occurs when someone steals your original idea and publishes it a hundred years before you were born.”
― Robert Merton

“People seldom improve when they have no model but themselves to copy after.”
― Oliver Goldsmith

“Plagiarism is the fear of a blank page.”
― Mokokoma Mokhonoana

“The ethics of plagiarism have turned into the narcissism of small differences: because journalism cannot own up to its heavily derivative nature, it must enforce originality on the level of the sentence.”
― Malcolm Gladwell, What the Dog Saw and Other Adventures

“I get a lot of big ideas, and occasionally I actually come up with one myself.”
― Bauvard, Some Inspiration for the Overenthusiastic

“A wise man will always allow a fool to rob him of ideas without yelling “Thief.”
If he is wise he has not been impoverished.
Nor has the fool been enriched.
The thief flatters us by stealing.
We flatter him by complaining.”
― Ben Hecht, A Child of the Century

“Plagiarists, at least, have the merit of preservation”
― Benjamin Disraeli

“God loves the plagiarist. And so it is written, 'God created humankind in His image, in the image of God He created them." God is the original plagiarizer. With a lack of reasonable sources from which to filch - man created in the image of what? the animals? - the creation of man was an act of reflexive plagiarizing; God looted the mirror. When we plagiarize, we are likewise creating in the image and participating in the completion of Creation.”
― Jonathan Safran Foer, Everything is Illuminated

“Muslims must be warned that plagiarists and pretenders as well as ignorant imitators affect great mischief by debasing values, imposing upon the ignorant, and encouraging the rise of mediocrity. The appropriate original ideas for hasty implementation and make false claims for themselves. Original ideas cannot be implemented when vulgarized; on the contrary, what is praiseworthy in them will turn out to become blameworthy, and their rejection will follow with the dissatisfaction that will emerge. So in this way authentic and creative intellectual effort will continually be sabotaged. It is not surprising that the situation arising out of the loss of adab also provides the breeding ground for the emergence of extremists who make ignorance their capital.”
― Syed Muhammad Naquib al-Attas, Islam and Secularism

“This applause is a plagiarism. Yesterday another audience applauded in exactly the same manner.”
― Ljupka Cvetanova, The New Land

“Nachahmung ist die aufrichtigste Form der Schmeichelei.”
― Charles Caleb Colton

“Someone asked me, 'politicians and celebrities are plagiarizing your statements quite a lot, yet you keep silent, why!' I replied, 'all I care about is to unite the humankind - whether someone quotes me without crediting, is not my concern, I leave that to the people'.”
― Abhijit Naskar

“Plagiarism was not considered blameworthy in the ancient world. Authors freely copied from predecessors without recognition. Thus, the world has no idea about what outside materials, and other teachings were added to the four authorized Gospels of the New Testament. On the other hand, the age and authenticity of the Nag Hammadi texts are not disputed. They were not subjected to two-thousand years of translating, editing, embellishing and re-copying as were the four traditional Gospels. These Nag Hammadi Gospels, and other writings found at Nag Hammadi, challenge the long-held precepts of the Roman Catholic Church, as well as the Christian churches (Lutheran, Baptist, Anglican, Methodist, Presbyterian, Evangelical and the like) of today. The Roman Catholic Church and Christian churches are unwilling, unprepared and reluctant to accept these long-hidden gospels.”
― Laurence Galian, Alien Parasites: 40 Gnostic Truths to Defeat the Archon Invasion!

“To the extent that Catholicism contains any good ideas, they all come from the covert Mithraic and Platonic pagan elements of the religion. The Protestants got rid of the pagan elements and returned Christianity to a type of Judaism. In the absence of pagan elements, Christianity was never anything other than Messianic Judaism based on Jesus Christ as the Jewish Messiah, so the Messianic Jews are unquestionably the purest Christians in the world. Protestants are Jews who haven’t realised they’re Jews and Catholics are pagans who haven’t realised they’re pagans.”
― Adam Weishaupt

“Sell yourself, else another person will steal and sell you at a heavy cost.”
― Utibe Samuel Mbom, The Event Usher’s Handbook

“I tried to come up with a smartass quote and ended up on someone's shoulder.”
― Andrei Paler

“The internet makes it extremely easy to plagiarize, and even easier to get caught.”
― @Mokokoma Mokhonoana

“Diu æstuanti commodum succurrebat, quod olim ab erudito apud nostrates viro audiveram, T e u t o n i c o s h o m i n e s i n s a t i a b i l e s c r i b e n d i c a c oe t h es t e n e r e : verum paucissimis datum aliquid producere , quod inventionis acumine , aut genii lepore politi applausum seculi possit provocare. Ne tamen perituræ parcatur chartæ, pleramque turbam petitas passim particulas in unam compingere massam , vix uspiam adspersa judicii mica.
Nec plagii apud ipsos habere crimen , aliorum opera paucis interpolata locis pro novis venditare. Aliquos denique sibi locum inter autores deberi credere, quod diffusius aliquod scriptum in compendium, aut, si Diis placet , in tabellas, memoriæ , an stupiditati juvandæ ? redegerint.”
― Samuel von Pufendorf, Severini De Monzambano Veronensis De Statu Imperii Germanici Ad Laelium Fratrem Dominum Trezolani: Liber Unus

“The most plagiarised word in this world is plagiarism.”
― Vikrmn: CA Vikram Verma, Slate

“There's a fine line between inspiration and plagiarism. A.I only feeds the dominant side of its human operator”
― Clyde DeSouza

“The kernel, the soul — let us go further and say the substance, the bulk, the actual and valuable material of all human utterances — is plagiarism.”
― Jonathan Lethem

“Where is the authority and authenticity in plagiarizing somebody else's authority and authenticity?”
― Loren Weisman