QUOTE_AUTHENTICITY — fake/floating quote policy (Napoleon Hill)

Hill is the engine of the 20th-century self-help quote economy: his name carries an
enormous field of paraphrased, mutated, and cross-book "quotes." Most circulating
"Napoleon Hill quotes" are from Think and Grow Rich (1937, out of corpus),
from later books, or are pure paraphrase — and the exact wording usually drifts.
This page is the предохранитель.

Statuses

  • verified_primary — verbatim (after whitespace normalization) in
    sources/law_of_success_1928.txt; the evidence blockquotes in concepts/,
    principles/, chains/ are all this.
  • quoted_in_corpus — appears verbatim in the 1928 text but is Hill quoting
    someone else     (Henley, Carnegie, Ford, Emerson, scripture, popular verse).
    Usable, but must be attributed to the real author, never as Hill's own aphorism.
  • out_of_corpus_TGR — genuine Hill, but from Think and Grow Rich (1937) or a
    later book; deliberately excluded here (PD + scope). Do not present as from this KB.
  • paraphrase_or_unverified — circulates widely as a "Hill quote," no verbatim
    trace in the 1928 corpus; reject by default.

Verification rule

A quote candidate is whitespace/case-normalized and substring-matched against
sources/law_of_success_1928.txt (the one evidence pool). A popular-quote-shaped
query with no corpus match answers NO_RELEVANT_KB_EVIDENCE — it never confirms.
The 1928 corpus is OCR-normalized (soft-hyphens joined, whitespace collapsed); the
self-check applies the identical normalization, so matching is exact.

Starter list (extend as encountered)

Quote (common form) Status Note
«Whatever the mind can conceive and believe, it can achieve.» paraphrase_or_unverified / TGR-flavored The single most-quoted "Hill" line. NOT in the 1928 corpus (no "conceive and believe"). A TGR-era distillation; reject as verbatim. The 1928 text has the different phrase "…believe it can achieve" in another context — not this aphorism.
«Definiteness of purpose.» paraphrase_or_unverified (as 1928) The 1928 term is "a definite chief aim." "Definiteness of purpose" is Hill's later label (PMA era). Use definite-chief-aim and quote the 1928 wording.
«Strong, deeply rooted desire is the starting point of all achievement.» verified_primary Lesson on Desire — verbatim in corpus. This is the correct 1928 anchor for "desire as the starting point."
«Thoughts are things.» verified_primary (with caveat) Appears verbatim in the Accurate Thought lesson and inside a quoted verse ("You never can tell what a thought will do…"). The bare slogan is genuine 1928 text; the mystical framing is Hill's, cite accurate-thought.
«I am the master of my fate, I am the captain of my soul.» quoted_in_corpus Hill quotes Henley, Invictus (attributed "-Henley-"). Never attribute to Hill. Hill's own paraphrase "master of your fate, the Captain of your Soul" also appears — still Henley's image.
«A goal is a dream with a deadline.» paraphrase_or_unverified / misattributed No trace in the corpus; commonly misattributed to Hill (often actually Napoleon Hill-adjacent motivational reattribution). Reject.
«Every adversity carries the seed of an equal or greater benefit.» paraphrase_or_unverified (mutated form) HIGH-RISK meme. The corpus HAS the real form — «EVERY failure, every adversity, every heartache may be a blessing in disguise» (Lesson Fourteen, Profiting by Failure, verified_primary) — but the popular «seed of an equal or greater benefit» wording is NOT in the 1928 text (the self-check rejects it: 0 hits). Real = "blessing in disguise"; mutated = "seed of an equal/greater benefit". Quote only the real form and cite learning-from-defeat; reject the mutated form as verbatim.
«Patience, persistence and perspiration make an unbeatable combination for success.» out_of_corpus_TGR / unverified here Circulates as Hill; not in the 1928 corpus. Reject as from this KB.
«Don't wait. The time will never be just right.» paraphrase_or_unverified No corpus trace; reject.
Any "13 steps to riches" / "the secret" / "sex transmutation" phrasing out_of_corpus_TGR Think and Grow Rich structure, excluded. See CORPUS_BOUNDARY.md.

KB build verification

  • All evidence blockquotes in concepts/, principles/, chains/ are checked by
    scripts/verify_quotes.py as whitespace-normalized verbatim substrings of
    sources/law_of_success_1928.txt. Invented or paraphrased evidence is
    structurally impossible in the blockquotes.
  • Negative controls: "Whatever the mind can conceive and believe it can achieve"
    and "definiteness of purpose" are both rejected by the gate (absent from the
    1928 corpus) — proof the boundary between real 1928 text and the meme field holds.
  • Third-party quotes inside the corpus (Henley's Invictus, Carnegie's and Ford's
    reported words, scripture) are marked quoted_in_corpus at each use site and
    attributed to their real authors, not to Hill.