Did you ever dream of your words like the ones of Shakespeare, Einstein, or Trump remaining forever etched in the memory of humanity ? Would you like to be famous ? Then this website might help you !
First, try to write something, we’ll tell you if your words have a chance to become famous (max 140 characters):
Anyway, you better try our famous quote generator if you want to succeed
Click on the button and here we go:
Inspiring no? Post it right away on Twitter or Instagram and let the magic happen…
(What? The syntax isn’t right? Maybe our generator needs a little bit more training)
While you are waiting for the fame to come thanks to your quote, you can explore the data and read more about what makes a quote famous.
Just think about politicians or advertisers that convinced you with just a few words, just by saying ‘Yes we can!’, ‘Make America great again’ or ‘Logarithms are our friends’. These tiny little sentences made of 3 or 4 words have so much power when pronounced by Barack Obama, Donald Trump, or Robert West that they are engraved forever in your mind. Not sure your colleague’s remark in front of the coffee machine ‘The weather is nice today.’ will have as much impact on your brain… Why do these quotes are so powerful? Is it because of their speaker? Is it because of the quote in itself? What makes that some quotes will be remembered forever and others will disappear into nothingness?
That’s what we wanted to investigate with our data story, in order to unravel the mystery behind famous quotes.
First, we tried to look into the soul of the quote to find an answer. For instance, does grammatical syntax play a role in the fame of words? Or are negative quotes more famous than positive ones? Are some topics more trendy than others? Then, we tried to understand the impact of the speaker on his/her quote. Are the emitters of famous quotes distributed equally across continents? Is the fact that the speaker is alive or dead when the quote is cited important? Are people related to sports more mediatized than artists? It is indeed of high interest for politicians, influencers, or companies to generate the perfect quote that will catch people’s attention.
So while you have the time before the celebrity tornado sweeps you away, slip into the shoes of a data analysist to discover what impacts the fame of a quote!
Say Hi to the dataset: Quotebank
The data used in this analysis is Quotebank, a corpus containing citations extracted from newspapers over the years 2008 to 2020. If you are interested in the methods used to extract quotes and attribute them to speakers, have a look at the paper. You can also use this related tool that allows you to enter a keyword and it will search the database for related quotes and show you its occurrence over time.
Using this set of quotes (2015-2020), we selected only the 1% most famous quotes with more than 215 occurrences in newspapers, and also sampled random quotes with less than 10 occurrences to be considered as non-famous. With this set of quotes, we aim at analyzing what makes a quote famous or what makes it fall into the abyss of oblivion. In order to avoid artifacts of quotes being often cited because of differences in fame among speakers we selected famous and non-famous quotes from speakers appearing in the Pantheon database). It was generated on the basis of Wikipedia bibliographies views, the number of different Wikipedia languages, the coefficient of variation etc. and it combines those values in a single metric, the historical popularity index (HPI).
OK enough with the boring pre-processing steps (crucial in data science tho). Now let us dive into the data and see if we can answer our existential question.
Who are the most cited people on this planet?
First, you can take a look at the top 20 of people emitting the most famous quotes, along with their number of cited quotes and THE quote with the most occurrences.
Unsurprisingly we see Donald Trump in the first place! He is even indirectly mentioned in the most famous quote of Pope Francis “A person who thinks only about building walls …”. It is also very interesting to see that politicians emitted the largest number of famous quotes, as they are highly mediatized and all their words are reported and analyzed in newspapers.
Let’s look now at the dynamics over time. The figure below shows the number of famous quotes emitted over time (2015-2020) by the top 20 of the previous speakers. You can slide your cursor over the peaks to see the quote with the most citations at a specific date, you can zoom in, and also deselect some speakers.
It is very interesting to see the different peaks and how they relate to highly mediatized events in English newspapers.
- The peak in September 2016 of Donald Trump is during his presidential campaign where he “unleashes a blizzard of falsehoods, exaggerations and outright lies in the general election, peppering his speeches, interviews and Twitter posts with untruths so frequent that they can seem flighty or random — even compulsive.”
- The peak of quotations in June 2017 of James Comey, former FBI director, coincides with its testimony after being fired by Donald Trump, and with Jeff Sessions peak, who originally recommended Trump about this firing.
- Pope Francis visits Washington and New York City on the 24th of September 2015, which explains the quotations in newspapers, and on February 2016 he pronounces a powerful sentence about the American President “A person who thinks only about building walls – wherever they may be – and not building bridges, is not Christian … ”
- The peak in April 2018 of Emmanuel Macron correspond to his speech to the Congress of the United States of America.
You may already have realized that most of the quotations we collected from Quotebank are largely related to events mediatized in American newspapers. Here, below you can observe the proportion of famous quotes and non-famous quotes according to the speaker’s origin.