QUOTE_AUTHENTICITY — fake/floating quote policy (Machiavelli)

Machiavelli's reception is meme-distorted to an extreme: the single most famous
"Machiavelli quote" is not a verbatim line at all. This page is the предохранитель.

Statuses

  • verified_primary — verbatim (after normalization) in an ingested unit; carries
    a prince.NN unit id.
  • paraphrase — captures the sense but is not a literal line of the text
    (the dangerous class for Machiavelli).
  • popular_but_unverified — circulates widely, no edition trace.
  • misattributed — verifiably not Machiavelli.

Verification rule

A quote candidate is matched (case/punctuation/whitespace-normalized substring,
footnote markers [n] stripped) against the ingested Marriott EN pool
(sources/prince.json). The evidence pool is English (Marriott); Italian is the
term arbiter only. RAG-time rule: a popular-quote-shaped query with no corpus
match answers NO_RELEVANT_KB_EVIDENCE, and never "confirms" a paraphrase as a
quote.

Starter list (extend as encountered)

Quote (common form) Status Note
«The ends justify the means» / «Цель оправдывает средства» paraphrase NOT a verbatim line of The Prince. It compresses ch. XVIII. The nearest real lines: «one judges by the result» and «the means will always be considered honest». The pithy maxim is a later distillation (cf. IT «si guarda al fine»), never a sentence Machiavelli wrote. Query for it → return the ch. XVIII passage, flagged as paraphrase.
«It is better to be feared than loved» verified_primary (needs the caveat) ch. XVII prince.17 (Marriott: «it is much safer to be feared than loved, when, of the two, either must be dispensed with»). The meme drops both the «when… either must be dispensed with» condition AND the «avoids hatred» caveat. Never quote without the avoid-hatred clause.
«The lion cannot defend himself against snares…» verified_primary ch. XVIII prince.18, verbatim in Marriott.
«Fortune is a woman…» verified_primary ch. XXV prince.25, verbatim but often quoted stripped of context (advice on impetuosity vs caution).
«Never was anything great achieved without danger» popular_but_unverified motivational-collection form; no verbatim trace in The Prince. Nearest real material is ch. VI on the peril of new orders («there is nothing more difficult to take in hand, more perilous to conduct… than to take the lead in the introduction of a new order of things», prince.6) — but the aphorism itself is not Machiavelli's line. Reject by default.
«Politics have no relation to morals» misattributed / paraphrase not in The Prince; a summary imposed by readers.

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

  • 71 evidence blockquotes across concepts/, principles/, chains/ verified
    as verbatim (whitespace + [n]-footnote-normalized) substrings of their cited
    prince.* unit in the Marriott EN pool. Result: 0 fabricated, 71/71 pass.
  • Inline English «…» fragments in prose audited against the whole EN pool; the only
    non-verbatim inline fragments are Italian term-labels in frontmatter/term-notes
    (intentional, arbiter language), not attributed evidence.
  • Negative controls (gate works):
    • «the ends justify the means» → OUT (correctly rejected as paraphrase)
    • «the end justifies the means» → OUT
    • a fabricated line «a prince must always be cruel to rule well» → OUT
    • real lines «one judges by the result», «the means will always be considered
      honest» → IN.
  • Voice check: Virgil/Dido and the Italian proverb («Alexander never did what he
    said…») in ch. XVII–XVIII are quotations inside Machiavelli's text, not used
    as his own soul-core lines.
  • Terminological trap logged: virtù is rendered by Marriott as ability/valour/
    virtue in different chapters; RU must not flatten it to «добродетель»
    (see TERMINOLOGY.md).

Verification script

Reproduce with the block in sources/ (extracts prince.json, normalizes, checks
every blockquote is a substring of its cited unit, runs the negative controls).