QUOTE_AUTHENTICITY — fake/floating quote policy (Goethe)

Goethe is one of the most misquoted authors alive or dead: motivational
posters, loose Victorian verse translations quoted as prose, devil's lines
from Faust attributed to the author. This page is the предохранитель.

Statuses

  • verified_primary — verbatim (after normalization) in an ingested unit;
    carries unit_id.
  • verified_secondary_only — genuine Goethe, but in works outside the
    ingested corpus (Faust, Eckermann, Divan, letters…).
  • disputed_authorship — printed under Goethe's name, authorship contested
    (the nat.* fragment).
  • popular_but_unverified — circulates widely, no edition trace found.
  • misattributed — verifiably not Goethe.

Verification rule

A quote candidate is matched (case/punctuation/whitespace-normalized
substring) against the ingested EN corpus (sources/maxims_en_units.json) by
sources/check_quotes.py. 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
«Никто не является большим рабом, чем тот, кто считает себя свободным, не будучи им» verified_primary mx.268 — genuine, in corpus
«В начале было Дело» (Im Anfang war die Tat) verified_secondary_only Faust I, Studierzimmer — Faust's own translation scene; NOT in the Maxims
«Теория, мой друг, суха, но зеленеет жизни древо» verified_secondary_only + persona trap Faust I — Mephistopheles speaking, not Goethe's own voice
«Лишь тот достоин жизни и свободы, кто каждый день за них идёт на бой» verified_secondary_only + persona trap Faust II, act V — Faust's dying speech
«Wer immer strebend sich bemüht, den können wir erlösen» verified_secondary_only + persona trap Faust II — the angels' lines
«В ограничении познаётся мастер» (In der Beschränkung zeigt sich erst der Meister) verified_secondary_only sonnet «Natur und Kunst» — genuine, poem outside corpus; corpus carries the theme in mx.18, mx.269
"Whatever you can do, or dream you can, begin it. Boldness has genius, power, and magic in it." misattributed John Anster's very free 1835 Faust versification, not Goethe's text
"Nature! We are surrounded by her and locked in her clasp…" (весь фрагмент «Природа») disputed_authorship nat.* — Tobler's pen, Goethe's acknowledged ideas (1828); never quote as Goethe's own sentence
«Разделяй и властвуй — мудрое правило, но объединяй и направляй — лучше» popular_but_unverified in corpus attributed to Sprüche; not in Saunders' 590 → treat as outside evidence pool
«Кто не знает иностранных языков, не знает ничего о своём» verified_secondary_only (pending) genuine Maximen item, but NOT in Saunders' selection → not in the evidence pool; do not pin to mx.*

KB build verification (2026-07-07, hand-built KB)

  • sources/check_quotes.py: 126 block-evidence > EN: lines in
    concepts/, principles/, chains/ verified as verbatim substrings of
    their pinned mx.* unit; 0 failures. (Note: ~19 additional inline EN
    phrases appear in prose notes, e.g. term glosses — these are not evidence
    lines and are not checked by the gate. The gate targets > EN: blocks only.)
  • Negative controls confirmed the gate works: "Boldness has genius, power, and
    magic in it" and "In the beginning was the Deed" are both rejected
    (NOT-IN-CORPUS).
  • das Dämonische, Urphänomen: 0 occurrences in the EN corpus — concept
    pages exist with evidence: not_in_ingested_corpus, no quotes attributed
    to the Maxims.
  • Persona/reported speech inside maxims (Lessing in mx.52, Kepler in
    mx.354, Timon in mx.127) marked as reported speech at usage sites.
    Napoleon in mx.241 (reported belief) tagged "(Гёте передаёт убеждение
    Наполеона)" at the usage site.
  • nat.* fragment used nowhere as primary evidence for Goethe's voice.