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PLAGIARISM quotes
Borrowed thoughts, like borrowed money, only show the poverty of the borrower.
Horace or Boileau have said such a thing, before.—I take your word for it, but I said it as my own; and may I not have the same just thoughts after them, as others may have after me?
Plagiarists are always suspicious of being stolen from.
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.—But in this respect every author is a Spartan, more ashamed of the discovery than of the depredation.
Most plagiarists, like the drone, have not the taste to select, the industry to acquire, nor the skill to improve, but impudently pilfer the honey ready prepared, from the hive.
Plagiarists have, at least, the merit of preservation.
It has come to be practically a sort of rule in literature, that a man, having once shown himself capable of original writing, is entitled, thenceforth, to steal from the writings of others at discretion. Thought is the property of him who can entertain it and of him who can adequately place it.—A certain awkwardness marks the use of borrowed thoughts; but as soon as we have learned what to do with them, they become our own.
Nothing is sillier than this charge of plagiarism. There is no sixth commandment in art. The poet dare help himself wherever he lists—wherever he finds material suited to his work. He may even appropriate entire columns with their carved capitals, if the temple he thus supports be a beautiful one. Goethe understood this very well, and so did Shakespeare before him.
It is not strange that remembered ideas should often take advantage of the crowd of thoughts and smuggle themselves in as original.—Honest thinkers are always stealing unconsciously from each other.—Our minds are full of waifs and estrays which we think our own.— Innocent plagiarism turns up everywhere.
Literature is full of coincidences, which some love to believe are plagiarisms.—There are thoughts always abroad in the air which it takes more wit to avoid than to hit upon.
No earnest thinker is a plagiarist pure and simple. He will never borrow from others that which he has not already, more or less, thought out for himself.
Borrowed garments never keep one warm. A curse goes with them, as with Harry Gill's blankets. Nor can one get smuggled goods safely into kingdom come. How lank and pitiful does one of these gentry look, after posterity's customs-officers have had the plucking of him!
There is a very pretty Eastern tale, of which the fate of plagiarists often reminds us. The slave of a magician saw his master wave his wand, and heard him give orders to the spirits who arose at the summons. The slave stole the wand, and waved it himself in the air; but he had not observed that his master used the left hand for that purpose. The spirits thus irregularly summoned, tore the thief to pieces instead of obeying his orders.
Touching plagiarism in general, it is to be remembered that all men who have sense and feeling are being continually helped; they are taught by every person whom they meet and enriched by everything that falls in their way. The greatest is he who has been oftenest aided; and, if the attainments of all human minds could be traced to their real sources, it would be found that the world had been laid most under contribution by the men of most original power, and that every day of their existence deepened their debt, to their race, while it enlarged their gifts to it.
Steal! to be sure they may, and, egad, serve your best thoughts as gipsies do stolen children—disfigure them to make them pass for their own.
As monarchs have a right to call in the specie of a state, and raise its value by their own impression; so are there certain prerogative geniuses, who are above plagiaries, who cannot be said to steal, but, from their improvement of a thought, rather to borrow it, and repay the commonwealth of letters with interest; and may more properly be said to adopt than to kidnap a sentiment, by leaving it heir to their own fame.
Keep your hands from literary picking and stealing. But if you cannot refrain from this kind of stealth, abstain from murdering what you steal.
All the makers of dictionaries, and all compilers who do nothing else than repeat backwards and forwards the opinions, the errors, the impostures, and the truths already printed, we may term plagiarists; but they are honest plagiarists, who do not arrogate the merit of invention.—Call them, if you please, book-makers, not authors; rather secondhand dealers than plagiarists.
It is a special trick of low cunning to squeeze out knowledge from a modest man who is eminent in any science, and then to use it as legally acquired, and pass the source in total silence.
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