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

“Consciousness automated is consciousness muted, academia prompted is academia infected.”
― Abhijit Naskar, With Love From A Blue Rock

“Vegetables with limbs (Sonnet 2824)

Now more than ever, if the human race
stops doing art, writing literature,
writing philosophy, poetry, code,
writing songs, music and mathematics, because
apparently generative ai can do all of that,
soon indistinguishable from the human article,

then this is the exact moment in history
when the human brain, particularly
the prefrontal cortex, starts to shrink,
rendering our species into vegetable with limbs.

Generative AI is going to have
the biggest impact on brain evolution,
since primitive humans learnt
to harness fire, for better or worse.

I'm not asking you to avoid ai altogether,
even if you try you cannot, any more than
you can refuse internet or electricity,
because, more and more, ai is going to infiltrate
every aspect of the global tech infrastructure -

all I'm saying is, get your priorities straight,
no matter what you do in any other aspect of life,
keep the central art of your life untouched by ai,
use ai as assistant, not as ghostwriter.”
― Abhijit Naskar, Tierra Carta: Naskar Charter of Earth

“Now more than ever, if the human race stops doing art, writing literature, writing philosophy, poetry, code, writing songs, music and mathematics, because apparently generative ai can do all of that, soon indistinguishable from the human article, then this is the exact moment in history when the human brain, particularly the prefrontal cortex, starts to shrink, rendering our species into vegetable with limbs.”
― Abhijit Naskar, Tierra Carta: Naskar Charter of Earth

“Generative AI is going to have the biggest impact on brain evolution, since primitive humans learnt to harness fire, for better or worse.”
― Abhijit Naskar, Tierra Carta: Naskar Charter of Earth

“Use ai as assistant, not as ghostwriter.”
― Abhijit Naskar, Tierra Carta: Naskar Charter of Earth

“It’s not enough to call out ai fakes, if you really got some brain and integrity, then call out the fakes already normalized, call out fake wellness influencers, call out anorexic beauty standards, call out fake action heroes, call out ghostwritten celebrity slop, call out warmongers posing as peace icons, otherwise, keep your gob shut!”
― Abhijit Naskar, Tierra Carta: Naskar Charter of Earth

“Prompting is not art (Sonnet 2916)

Prompting is not art,
prompting is not poetry,
prompting is not literature,
prompting is not music,
prompting is not cinema -

but then come the bigger fakes
you've been normalizing for ages
without batting an eyelid -

influencers are not physicians,
filmstars are not psychologists,
politicians are not peacemakers,
militant atheists are not humanist,
evangelists are not holy beings.

Don't cherrypick ethics and rights,
either dive in all the way, or do not,
but do not dangle halfway
like spoilt little rich twits,
with your posh purse and pretend intellect,
disconnected from the struggles of life.”
― Abhijit Naskar, Tierra Carta: Naskar Charter of Earth

“I'll never let ai come within a million lightyears of my literature, but I wanted to find out what the fuss was about, so I prompted a couple of ai audio tracks from my texts, and at the end of a few wasted hours, I felt neither pride nor fulfillment, all I felt was a vacuum in the pit of my stomach - that, my friend, is the Artist's Curse, an invisible compass of conscience, that'll eat you alive at the slightest chance of your art being contaminated.”
― Abhijit Naskar, Tierra Carta: Naskar Charter of Earth

“Prompting is not art,
prompting is not poetry,
prompting is not literature,
prompting is not music,
prompting is not cinema -

but then come the bigger fakes
you've been normalizing for ages
without batting an eyelid -

influencers are not physicians,
filmstars are not psychologists,
politicians are not peacemakers,
militant atheists are not humanist,
evangelists are not holy beings.”
― Abhijit Naskar, Tierra Carta: Naskar Charter of Earth

“History of the west is history of plagiarism.”
― Abhijit Naskar, Tierra Carta: Naskar Charter of Earth

“Mel Brooks never even acknowledged my father during Blazing Saddles (1974) initial theatrical run; It wasn’t until the 1978 re-release, the West Coast Writers’ Guild ordered Warner Brothers to re-print the film with Richard Pryor’s name amended to the opening credits sequence (and marketing materials); After Brooks “accidentally” omitted his “Screenplay by” credit. Whenever Brooks was asked about my dad’s potential lead role in the film, the actor/director would insist he really wanted Richard Pryor in the picture but the studio forbade him. But my father still had a record contract with Warner Brothers and his comedy albums were still making money for them, that’s why they reached out to him, letting him know that decision wasn’t theirs. Blazing Saddles was actually the last picture, in a three-picture deal, Brooks had with the studio and he desperately needed it to be a box-office hit (after his first two pictures were financial losers), moreover, he believed Blazing Saddles needed to be an original “Mel Brooks” comedic hit. It was the first real showbiz betrayal my father endured while in the entertainment industry, some colleagues and close friends believed it was actually the worst, and he never really got over it.”
― Elizabeth Stordeur Pryor, Something We Said: Richard Pryor, a Notorious Word, and Me