QUOTE_AUTHENTICITY — fake/floating quote policy (Wattles)

Wattles sits at the head of the modern self-help / New-Thought lineage (his book
fed directly into Napoleon Hill's Think and Grow Rich and, a century later, into
The Secret). That reception generates a dense field of paraphrases sold as
verbatim Wattles
— polished one-liners, "law of attraction" reformulations, and
lines actually written by later authors. This page is the предохранитель.

Statuses

  • verified_primary — verbatim (after normalization) in an ingested SGR unit;
    carries unit_id (e.g. sgr.6.1).
  • verified_secondary_only — attested in Wattles' other books (Being Well,
    Being Great) or the Nautilus articles, but not in the ingested SGR corpus.
  • new_thought_paraphrase — a New-Thought / law-of-attraction reformulation that
    captures the gist but is not Wattles' wording; circulates as a "Wattles
    quote". Flag, never quote as verbatim.
  • popular_but_unverified — circulates widely, no SGR edition trace.
  • misattributed — verifiably not Wattles (later author, or generic New-Thought).

Verification rule

A quote candidate is matched (case/punctuation/whitespace-normalized substring)
against the ingested SGR corpus (sources/sgr_en_units.json). English is the
original, so the English text is the gate; RU reading-layer lines («перевод наш»)
are not gated. RAG-time rule: a popular-quote-shaped query with no SGR match
answers NO_RELEVANT_KB_EVIDENCE, never confirms.

Starter list (extend as encountered)

Quote (common form) Status Note
"There is a thinking stuff from which all things are made…" verified_primary SGR creed, repeated verbatim at sgr.4.11, sgr.4.30, sgr.17.1 etc.
"You are to create, not to compete for what is already created." verified_primary sgr.5.26 — the core ethical line, often mis-shortened
"Give every man more in use value than you take from him in cash value." verified_primary close to sgr.6.1/sgr.6.7; check exact wording, popular form drifts
"By thought the thing you want is brought to you; by action you receive it." verified_primary sgr.11.18 — genuine
"Whatever you want, you can have — the universe is conspiring to give it to you." new_thought_paraphrase law-of-attraction gloss; SGR says "Substance is friendly to you" (sgr.9.9), not this
"Thoughts become things." new_thought_paraphrase / likely misattributed Hill/Secret-era slogan, not SGR wording; SGR: "a thought… produces the thing that is imaged by the thought"
"Gratitude is the attitude." popular_but_unverified motivational rhyme, no SGR trace; SGR has "the Law of Gratitude", not this
"Ask, believe, receive." misattributed The Secret formula, not Wattles; SGR's own phrasing is "believe that ye receive them" (quoting the Gospel, sgr.8.13)

KB build verification (2026-07-08, SGR hand-built KB)

  • All evidence blockquotes in concepts/, principles/, chains/ carry a
    > EN: "…" line verified as a verbatim (whitespace/quote-normalized) substring
    of their cited sgr.* unit; sources/check_quotes.py is the gate.
  • RU translation lines are marked «перевод наш» and are the reading layer only.
  • New-Thought paraphrases above are catalogued OUTSIDE the blockquote system, so a
    law-of-attraction reformulation can never be served as a real Wattles quote.
  • Wattles quotes the Bible often (Jesus, Paul); those lines are marked as Wattles
    quoting scripture, not as Wattles' own doctrine, at their usage sites.