QUOTE_AUTHENTICITY — fake/floating quote policy (John D. Rockefeller)

Rockefeller is one of the most mis-quoted figures in business folklore. His name
is a magnet for LinkedIn-grade «success» aphorisms, hustle-culture posters, and
lines actually coined by others (or by nobody). This page is the предохранитель.
The single ingested corpus is Random Reminiscences of Men and Events (1909);
a quote is genuine to this KB only if it is verbatim in that text.

Statuses

  • verified_primary — verbatim (after whitespace normalization, case-exact) in
    the ingested corpus (sources/rockefeller_pg17090.txt).
  • reported_by_rockefeller — a quotation Rockefeller himself puts in his text
    (Flagler, his mother, his father, the Boston merchant on rebates, Mr. Foley).
    Verbatim in the corpus, but the words are the reported speaker's; Rockefeller
    reports or endorses them.
  • verified_secondary_only — attested in Rockefeller's other statements
    (testimony, letters) or in scholarship, but not in this memoir. Not
    evidence in v1.
  • popular_but_unverified — circulates as «Rockefeller said…», no edition trace.
  • misattributed / fabricated — verifiably not Rockefeller, or invented.

Verification rule

A quote candidate is matched (whitespace-normalized, case-exact substring, with a
one-mark quote-wrapper strip fallback) against the English corpus. RU renderings
are «перевод наш» and are not matched (they are translations, not evidence).
RAG-time rule: a popular-quote-shaped query with no corpus match answers
NO_RELEVANT_KB_EVIDENCE, never confirms.

Starter list (extend as encountered)

Quote (common form) Status Note
«I would rather earn 1% off 100 people's efforts than 100% of my own efforts» fabricated / popular_but_unverified The single most-cited «Rockefeller quote» on the internet. Not in this memoir, and no primary-source citation exists for it anywhere; widely flagged as apocryphal. Reject as Rockefeller.
«The way to make money is to buy when blood is running in the streets» misattributed Attributed variously to a Rothschild / J. P. Getty; not Rockefeller and not in this corpus. Reject.
«Don't be afraid to give up the good to go for the great» popular_but_unverified Motivational-poster line, no edition trace. Reject as Rockefeller.
«If you want to succeed you should strike out on new paths rather than travel the worn paths of accepted success» popular_but_unverified (paraphrase) A paraphrase of a real passage — the corpus has «It requires a better type of mind to seek out and to support or to create the new than to follow the worn paths of accepted success.» The poster form is reworded, so it fails the case/word-exact gate. Quote the real form (cooperation-over-competition / giving-as-a-science), not the poster.
«Singleness of purpose is one of the chief essentials for success in life» verified_secondary_only Attributed to Rockefeller in other collections, but not in Random Reminiscences. Not evidence here.
«Good leadership consists of showing average people how to do the work of superior people» popular_but_unverified No edition trace in this corpus. Reject as Rockefeller.
«Heaven helps those who help themselves» misattributed (to Rockefeller) This is Smiles's well-tried maxim; Rockefeller's corpus does carry the cognate «If the people can be educated to help themselves…» and «help people to help themselves» — quote those verbatim forms, not the Smiles maxim as if Rockefeller coined it.
«Every right-minded man has a philosophy of life» verified_primary Random Reminiscences ch. VI.
«friendship founded on business … better than a business founded on friendship» reported_by_rockefeller (Flagler) ch. I: Rockefeller attributes the epigram to Flagler and agrees with it.
Generic «Rockefeller hustle / money mindset» posters popular_but_unverified reject by default.

Pipeline hooks

  1. scripts/verify_quotes.py verbatim gate — invented evidence is structurally
    impossible in the KB (every blockquote must be a real substring).
  2. reported_by_rockefeller discipline — where a note quotes Flagler / his
    mother / the Boston merchant / Foley, the reported speaker is named in the
    surrounding prose; the quote is not presented as Rockefeller's own coinage.
  3. Voice check — the memoir is almost entirely Rockefeller's own first-person
    voice; the only «other voices» are the reported quotations above, always
    attributed.
  4. Poster-vs-primary discipline — where a famous poster line is a reworded
    version of a real passage (the «worn paths» case above), the note quotes the
    primary wording and flags the poster form as unverified.

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

  • Every evidence blockquote in concepts/, principles/, chains/ verified as
    a case-exact, whitespace-normalized substring of rockefeller_pg17090.txt
    (scripts/verify_quotes.py, 0 failures — see scripts/CRITIC_REPORT.md).
  • Sentence-initial words (capital-letter openers like «He acted quickly…») are
    quoted mid-sentence so the case-exact gate passes.
  • The cooeperation / cooeperative oe-ligature spelling is Rockefeller's own
    and is preserved verbatim in the blockquotes.