Plagiarism Quotes

I hate the situation of the plagiarist; the glass I drink from is not large, but at least it is my own.

The kernel, the soul – let us go further and say the substance, the bulk, the actual and valuable material of all human utterances – is plagiarism.

I don’t like composers who think. It gets in the way of their plagiarism.

A grown person’s memory-tablet is as a palm, with hardly a bare space upon which to engrave a phrase.

Damn those who have said what we wanted to say!

Substantially all ideas are second-hand, consciously and unconsciously drawn from a million outside sources, and daily used by the garnerer with a pride and satisfaction born of the superstition that he originated them; whereas there is not a rag of originality about them anywhere except the little discoloration they get from his mental and moral […]

When a thing has been said and well said, have no scruple; take it and copy it.

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.

Instead of forming new words I recommend to you any kind of artful management by which you may be able to give cost to old ones.

In 1886 I read Dr. Holmes’s poems, in the Sandwich Islands. A year and a half later I stole his dedication, without knowing it, and used it to dedicate my “Innocents Abroad” with. Ten years afterward I was talking with Dr. Holmes about it. He was not an ignorant ass – no, not he;… and […]