About and disclaimer

What the badges mean

• Well attested. The sentence is securely the author’s, in their own language, or a close standard translation of a specific passage.
• Paraphrase or translation. The thought is in the source, but the English is a translation, a freer rendering, or a shortened form of a longer passage.
• Summary. A short restatement of the argument, not a sentence the person wrote. Shown without quotation marks, and left out of the misquote game.
• Questionable. There is a real doubt: the wording is late, the book’s authorship is disputed, or the line is only an anecdote.
• Misattributed. The familiar sentence was not said or written by this person. The note names a better source when there is one. These are here as lessons in checking.

How we source quotes

Interpretations

“What it’s commonly taken to mean”, the two applications, and “Understand the philosophy” are short, common readings for study. They are not definitive commentaries, not a full account of scholarly disagreement, and not a substitute for the book. Where specialists split, the note tries to say so. Where a rendering is freer than it looks, the badge says paraphrase.

Not advice

CritThinker is an educational tool. It is not professional, medical, legal, or psychological advice, and it is not a crisis service. Stoic and Buddhist lines about worry or death are philosophy, not treatment. If you are in despair or thinking about suicide, please speak to someone who can help you now. In the UK and Ireland, Samaritans are free to call on 116 123, at any time.

Your data

Version one has no accounts and no tracking. Saved quotations and test scores are stored in local storage on this device. They are not sent to an account, because there isn’t one. Clearing your browser data clears them. The quote of the day is chosen from the date so that everyone sees the same line; it does not use a questionable or misattributed sentence.

Search engines

robots.txt allows crawling, and a sitemap lists the philosopher and quotation pages. The host still sends an x-robots-tag: noindex header on this preview, which tells search engines not to index the site. There is no public or custom-domain switch in this project. Indexing starts when the site is served from a host that does not send that header.

Adding more

Thinkers, quotations, and questions live in JSON files in the project data folder. New entries can be added there without changing the pages, as long as they use the same fields, themes, and attribution labels.