Plagiarism Quotes

The ideas I stand for are not mine. I borrowed some from Socrates. I swiped some from Chesterfield. I stole some from Jesus, and I put them in a book. If you don’t like their ideas, whose would you use?

The immature artist imitates. The mature artist steals.

If we steal thoughts from the moderns, it will be cried down as plagiarism; if from the ancients, it will be cried up as erudition.

All our phrasings are spiritualized shadows cast multitudinously from our readings.

Receiving the invitation to write with Paul was very exciting, but not without its anxieties. I had always tried to be ingenious when borrowing ideas from Lennon and McCartney, but sometimes it’s a thin line between influence and larceny.

I know one thing – that a certain amount of pride always goes along with a teaspoonful of brains, and that this pride protects a man from deliberately stealing other people’s ideas. That is what a teaspoonful of brains will do for a man – and admirers had often told me I had nearly a […]

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.