QUOTE_AUTHENTICITY — fake/floating quote policy (Samuel Smiles)

Smiles founded the self-improvement genre, so his name attracts motivational
mis-quotes and the general fog of «Victorian wisdom» attributions. This page is
the предохранитель.

Statuses

  • verified_primary — verbatim (after whitespace normalization, case-exact) in
    the ingested corpus (sources/selfhelp_pg935.txt).
  • reported_by_smiles — a quotation Smiles himself puts in his text (Mill,
    Buffon, Cobden, Wellington, a proverb …). Verbatim in the corpus, but the
    words are the reported speaker's; Smiles endorses them by citing them.
  • verified_secondary_only — attested in Smiles's other works or in scholarship,
    but not in the ingested Self-Help corpus.
  • popular_but_unverified — circulates as «Samuel Smiles said…», no edition
    trace found.
  • misattributed — verifiably not Smiles (often Franklin, Emerson, or anonymous).

Verification rule

A quote candidate is matched (whitespace-normalized, case-exact substring, with
a one-mark quote-wrapper strip fallback) against the English corpus — Self-Help
is our single ingested layer. RU renderings are «перевод наш» and are not
matched (they are translations, not evidence). RAG-time rule: a
popular-quote-shaped query with no corpus match answers
NO_RELEVANT_KB_EVIDENCE, never confirms.

Starter list (extend as encountered)

Quote (common form) Status Note
«Heaven helps those who help themselves» verified_primary (as reported maxim) Self-Help opens: “‘HEAVEN helps those who help themselves’ is a well-tried maxim”. Smiles quotes it as a well-tried maxim, not as coined by him; genuine to the corpus.
«The spirit of self-help is the root of all genuine growth in the individual» verified_primary Self-Help ch. I.
«The crown and glory of life is Character» verified_primary Self-Help ch. XIII (in the corpus «THE crown…» with a drop-cap; quote mid-sentence for the verbatim gate).
«Genius is patience» / «it is patience» reported_by_smiles (Buffon) Self-Help ch. IV: “Buffon said of genius ‘it is patience.’” Buffon's line, reported by Smiles.
«Either I will find a way or make one» reported_by_smiles (motto) Self-Help ch. VIII cites it as an ancient crest motto; not coined by Smiles.
«Money is character» reported_by_smiles (Bulwer Lytton) Self-Help ch. X epigraph, attributed by Smiles to Sir E. L. Bulwer Lytton.
«Whatever is worth doing at all, is worth doing well» misattributed / popular_but_unverified Chesterfield/proverb; not this corpus. Reject as Smiles.
«A place for everything, and everything in its place» misattributed Franklin-adjacent proverb; not Self-Help.
Generic «Samuel Smiles motivation» posters popular_but_unverified reject by default.

Pipeline hooks

  1. scripts/verify_quotes.py verbatim gate — invented evidence is structurally
    impossible in the KB (every blockquote must be a real substring).
  2. reported_by_smiles discipline — where a note quotes Mill/Buffon/Cobden/etc.,
    the reported speaker is named in the surrounding prose; the quote is not
    presented as Smiles's own coinage.
  3. Voice check — Self-Help is almost entirely Smiles's own expository voice; the
    only «other voices» are the reported quotations above, always attributed.

KB build verification (2026-07-08, Self-Help hand-built KB)

  • Every evidence blockquote in concepts/, principles/, chains/ verified as
    a case-exact, whitespace-normalized substring of selfhelp_pg935.txt
    (scripts/verify_quotes.py, 0 failures — see scripts/CRITIC_REPORT.md).
  • Drop-cap chapter openings («THE», «HOW», «EXAMPLE») are quoted mid-sentence so
    the case-exact gate passes; the reconstruction note lives here.
  • Reported quotations (Buffon «it is patience», Cobden on savers, Wellington on
    the officer's word) are marked as reported speech at their usage sites.