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

“Only I don't know what it is I want to say anymore. I don't know if I ever did. And I'm terrified that the only thing I'll ever be remembered for, and the only method by which I can produce good work, is slipping on someone else's skin”
― R.F. Kuang, Yellowface

“Chatgpt is cheatgpt.”
― Abhijit Naskar, World War Human: 100 New Earthling Sonnets

“Even onlyfans is more honorable than content made by Generative AI.”
― Abhijit Naskar, World War Human: 100 New Earthling Sonnets

“Either do something original,
or expand on another's originality,
with honor and integrity, but never
confuse plagiarism with creativity.”
― Abhijit Naskar, World War Human: 100 New Earthling Sonnets

“Labor of AI (The Sonnet)

Asking AI to help you
write, is not writing.
Asking AI to tune your
voice, is not singing.

Asking AI to help you
paint, is not painting.
Asking AI to help you
code, is not coding.

Asking AI to help you
create, is not creativity.
Asking AI to build your
dream, is not dreaming.

Asking AI to narrate
books, is not storytelling.
AI oughta do manual labor,
so humans can do the creating.”
― Abhijit Naskar, The Divine Refugee

“Asking AI to help you create, is not creativity.”
― Abhijit Naskar, The Divine Refugee

“There's nothing uglier than an endangered mind, reaping the ruins of its own invention.”
― Abhijit Naskar, Brit Actually: Nursery Rhymes of Reparations

“There's no greater shame than the human universe rendered legless by its senseless pursuit of nuts.”
― Abhijit Naskar, Brit Actually: Nursery Rhymes of Reparations

“Algorithm that generates deceit is a bug.”
― Abhijit Naskar, Brit Actually: Nursery Rhymes of Reparations

“AI will not replace you, but those using AI will - thus goes the AI commercial! Here's what'll actually happen, AI will not destroy the world, but frauds using AI will.”
― Abhijit Naskar, The Humanitarian Dictator

“Age of AI (The Sonnet)

Welcome to the age of AI, where algorithms
grow bigger, and minds get smaller,
where freedom is the new prison,
character retreats as cave dweller.

Welcome to the age of AI,
where deceit is the new creativity,
where hate is a human right,
malinformation is a legal industry.

Welcome to the age of AI,
where algorithms are still nonsentient,
but so are the people that use them,
mindlessness is trend of the new sapiens.

Welcome to the age of AI, where global goals
are still a dream, only more distant.
Prove me wrong - I beg of you -
Stand up and behave, a proper Sapiens!”
― Abhijit Naskar, The Humanitarian Dictator