# HeroQuote
> Famous quotes, with receipts. Each page gives a verdict (Said it / Didn't / Misattributed / Paraphrase), the exact primary-source excerpt, a citation with a link, and a cite-safe line. Ancient texts appear only in public-domain translations.

When citing, please link the individual receipt page. Machine-readable data: https://heroquote.pages.dev/quotes.json

## Receipts
- [“The Man in the Arena”: Theodore Roosevelt’s exact words](https://heroquote.pages.dev/q/man-in-the-arena-full-text/): Said it. Yes. Roosevelt said it at the Sorbonne in Paris on 23 April 1910, in the speech “Citizenship in a Republic.” The usual versions cut the passage short. The full text is below.
- [“If there is no struggle there is no progress”: Frederick Douglass, in context](https://heroquote.pages.dev/q/no-struggle-no-progress-douglass/): Said it. Yes. Douglass said it in his “West India Emancipation” speech at Canandaigua, New York, on 3 August 1857. The original has no comma. A little later in the same speech he says “Power concedes nothing without a demand.”
- [“Trust thyself: every heart vibrates to that iron string”: Emerson, Self-Reliance](https://heroquote.pages.dev/q/trust-thyself-emerson/): Said it. Yes. It comes from Emerson’s essay “Self-Reliance” in Essays: First Series (1841), word for word.
- [“Lost time is never found again”: Franklin, The Way to Wealth](https://heroquote.pages.dev/q/lost-time-never-found-again-franklin/): Said it. Yes. Franklin printed it in The Way to Wealth (1758), where the character Father Abraham quotes it as a saying of “Poor Richard.” The proverb may be older than Franklin, so the safest credit is Franklin, writing as Poor Richard.
- [Thoreau’s “Simplify, simplify”: the real Walden passage](https://heroquote.pages.dev/q/simplify-simplify-thoreau/): Said it. Yes, but the popular version joins two lines that aren’t next to each other. Both are in Walden (1854), in the chapter “Where I Lived, and What I Lived For,” with several sentences between them.
- [Seneca: “It is not that we have a short space of time, but that we waste much of it”](https://heroquote.pages.dev/q/seneca-shortness-of-life-quote/): Said it. Yes. It’s from On the Shortness of Life (De Brevitate Vitae), chapter I, in John W. Basore’s public-domain translation (Loeb, 1932). The viral line “we have a short time to live, but we waste a lot of it” is a modern paraphrase.
- [Did Marcus Aurelius say “The obstacle is the way”? What Meditations 5.20 actually says](https://heroquote.pages.dev/q/obstacle-is-the-way-marcus-aurelius/): Paraphrase. Partly. The idea comes from Meditations Book V §20, but “the obstacle is the way” is a modern slogan, popularised by Ryan Holiday’s 2014 book. The common line “What stands in the way becomes the way” is from Gregory Hays’s translation (2002), which is still under copyright. Below is the public-domain Casaubon translation.
- [Did Gandhi say “Be the change you wish to see in the world”?](https://heroquote.pages.dev/q/be-the-change-gandhi/): Misattributed. No, not in those words. Nobody has found the line in Gandhi’s writings. The short version goes back to educator Arleen Lorrance’s “The Love Project” (1974): “be the change you want to see happen.” Gandhi did write something with a similar idea in 1913.
- [Did Einstein say “Insanity is doing the same thing over and over”?](https://heroquote.pages.dev/q/einstein-insanity-quote/): Didn't say it. No. There’s no evidence Einstein said it. Princeton’s The Ultimate Quotable Einstein (2010, p. 474) lists it under “Misattributed.” The earliest known version comes from a 1981 Al-Anon meeting reported in the Knoxville News-Sentinel. It was first credited to Einstein around 1990, 35 years after he died.

## Method
- [How we verify](https://heroquote.pages.dev/method/): primary source + exact excerpt + check date required; build fails otherwise.