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

“It takes a thousand men to invent a telegraph, or a steam engine, or a phonograph, or a photograph, or a telephone or any other important thing—and the last man gets the credit and we forget the others. He added his little mite — that is all he did. These object lessons should teach us that ninety-nine parts of all things that proceed from the intellect are plagiarisms, pure and simple; and the lesson ought to make us modest. But nothing can do that.”
― Mark Twain

“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

“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

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

“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

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

“AI fakes will rise, AI fakes will fall, but one thing these vermin must be petrified of, is to be exposed - never tolerate AI slop as normal, just like you no longer tolerate the nazis as normal.”
― Abhijit Naskar, Hazrat-e Humanity: The Uncultured Polyglot

“Never tolerate AI slop as normal, just like you no longer tolerate the nazis as normal.”
― Abhijit Naskar, Hazrat-e Humanity: The Uncultured Polyglot

“Are Human, Support Human (Sonnet 2520)

AI fakes will rise, AI fakes will fall,
and you can never tell them apart,
but one thing these vermin must be
petrified of, is to be exposed -

never tolerate AI slop as normal,
just like you no longer
tolerate the nazis as normal.

To nourish creativity
you must be intolerant of fakes,
for humanity to flourish
you must be intolerant of prejudice.

Those who make AI fakes
and those who knowingly
consume them are equally garbage,
those who howl prejudice and
those who stay silent are equally savage.

Some century when AI does become self aware,
then we might have to reconsider our ethics,
until then preserve human art at all cost,
and banish every last AI slop in the bin.”
― Abhijit Naskar, Hazrat-e Humanity: The Uncultured Polyglot

“They may take your words, but they cannot take the nights that produced them. They may repeat your thoughts, but they cannot live your memories. You know where these sentences were born. You recognize yourself in them wherever and wherever they appear.”
― Shon Mehta, The Uncharted Mind

“Naskar Constitution of GenAI (Sonnet)

At times I'm hard on AI,
at times I'm lenient,
I have just one law on AI,
keep the human at the center,
and be transparent.

Use AI to empower life,
don't abuse AI to ruin life.
AI must orbit humanity,
not turn humanity into a lie.

Don't make the same mistake
with AI as organized religion did,
by destroying human agency.
Once out, AI is here to stay,
but there are meaningful ways
to use AI instead of cheap forgery.

AI may assist, when the human awakens;
machine may speak, what the mind has written.
After I'm gone, you're welcome to clone
my image and voice, but never put words
in my mouth that I've never written.”
― Abhijit Naskar, Hazrat-e Humanity: The Uncultured Polyglot

“I have just one law on AI, keep the human at the center, and be transparent.”
― Abhijit Naskar, Hazrat-e Humanity: The Uncultured Polyglot

“Use AI to empower life,
don't abuse AI to ruin life.
AI must orbit humanity,
not turn humanity into a lie.”
― Abhijit Naskar, Hazrat-e Humanity: The Uncultured Polyglot

“AI must orbit humanity, not turn humanity into a lie.”
― Abhijit Naskar, Hazrat-e Humanity: The Uncultured Polyglot

“AI may assist, when the human awakens; machine may speak, what the mind has written.”
― Abhijit Naskar, Hazrat-e Humanity: The Uncultured Polyglot

“Once out, AI is here to stay, but there are meaningful ways to use AI instead of cheap forgery.”
― Abhijit Naskar, Hazrat-e Humanity: The Uncultured Polyglot

“You can use a telescope to peep through windows or gaze at the stars, the former makes you a creep, the latter makes you a scientist - the same is with AI, you can use AI to undress people or as an additional tool in your broader mission.”
― Abhijit Naskar, Hazrat-e Humanity: The Uncultured Polyglot