A curated register of quotes from under-represented voices.

Open almost any slide deck, or scroll a week of conference talks and business posts, and you meet the same handful of voices: mostly old, mostly white, mostly men. They said plenty worth repeating. But they were never the only people saying sharp, useful, human things, and quoting them by default quietly tells everyone else that insight has a single face. Quote Them exists to make it just as easy to quote a woman, a non-binary writer, a queer activist, a disabled leader or any other under-represented voice as it is to quote the usual names.

Who we quote is a small act with a long shadow. It signals whose ideas we take seriously and who belongs in the room. DEIB is not a box to tick; it widens the set of people whose experience counts, and that changes the quality of the thinking in a field. When a stage, a report or a feed reflects only one kind of person, everyone loses the ideas that never got heard.

An ally is someone who uses whatever standing they have to make room for people who have less of it. Here that has a precise meaning: we include quotes from people outside these communities when they spoke clearly in support of them, and we tag them as allies rather than as members. Standing with a group is not the same as belonging to it, and both deserve to be named accurately.

We are not against quoting anyone. If the sharpest line on a subject comes from an old white man and there is no equivalent from an under-represented voice, quote him. Our aim is not to erase, it is to widen the default, so that you reach for one of these voices first whenever a good one exists.

In some fields the recorded voices are overwhelmingly male, and it is worth being honest about why. For long stretches of history, women, queer people, disabled people and many others were oppressed: their work went uncredited, their words were suppressed, and in some cases they were erased from the record entirely. Their absence from the canon is evidence of that injustice, not evidence that they were absent from the world. These communities have always been here, and part of this project is helping return their words to circulation.

Every quote carries one of four labels. Verified means a human has confirmed the quote against a primary source. Confirmed means AI has confirmed the quote is real and it awaits a final human check. Attributed means it is widely and credibly credited to that person, but a single original source has not been confirmed. Ambiguous means the attribution is contested or unconfirmed. Where a quote is doubtful we say so rather than pass it on, and where we can we link out to the earliest reference. If you spot an error, every quote has a Report a Misattribution button. Corrections make this better.

We use AI to help surface candidate quotes from across the communities and fields we cover — it is good at casting a wide net across a lot of material. But nothing is published on that basis alone. Every quote is then checked by a person against its original source, and a person decides whether it belongs here at all. Fitting a category is not the same as being someone we want to hold up: a person can belong to one of these communities and still not be someone whose words we choose to celebrate. That judgement is human, and always will be.

Portraits shown on Their Stories and in the Featured Quote are drawn from Wikipedia and licensed under Creative Commons via Wikimedia Commons, with attribution to the original photographers where required.

Quote Them does not use cookies or track visitors. We do not build a profile of you. When you use Copy Quote or Share, the counts we show are stored only on your device — the site does not send them anywhere. If you submit a quote or report a misattribution, the details you type reach us by email and are used only to review that submission.

Quote Them is a non-profit project, not a registered charity. Donations cover our running costs: hosting, the domain, and the careful work of checking sources. Anything left over is pooled and given, once each quarter, to one of the organisations listed on our Charities page. Where a quarter's surplus is above $100, we publish which charity received it and how much, so you can see exactly where the money went.