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. However, they were never the only people saying impactful, valuable, human things, and quoting them by default slowly tells everyone else that insight has a single face.

QuoteThem™ 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, yet it signals whose ideas we take seriously and who belongs in the room. Diversity, equity, inclusion and belonging (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.

We are not against quoting anyone. If the sharpest line on a subject comes from an often represented community or source, and there is no equivalent from an under-represented voice, quote them.

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, people of colour, 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 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.

An ally is someone who uses whatever standing they have to make room for people who have less of it.

For QuoteThem™ it 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 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.

However, nothing is published on that basis alone and every quote will then be checked by a person against its original source, and a person decides whether it belongs here at all.

Just because a good quote comes from a person that is part of a certain community or field, it does not mean we automatically want their voice on this site. 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.

Every quote carries one of four labels.

Where a quote is doubtful we make it clear and where possible we link out to the earliest reference. If you spot an error, every quote has a 'Something Wrong?' button. Corrections make this better for everyone.

QuoteThem™ is a non-profit project, not a registered charity. Donations cover our running costs; hosting, the domain and other admin costs.

Anything left over is given, once each quarter, to one of the organisations listed on our Charities page.

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.

QuoteThem™ does not use cookies or track visitors. We do not build a profile of you. When you use the Copy Quote or Share buttons, 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.

We want this site to work for everyone, including people using a screen reader, keyboard navigation, or other assistive technology. QuoteThem™ aims to meet WCAG 2.1 AA, and we check things like colour contrast, keyboard access and heading structure as we build.

We test with automated tools rather than a formal third-party audit, so we cannot claim official certification, and we know automated testing cannot catch everything a real person would notice.

If something on the site does not work well for you, please tell us through Give Feedback. We read every message and will do our best to fix it.