How can I find a specific quotation?

Quotations abound on the internet.  Unfortunately while it can be quite easy to find a great quotation, they're often attributed to a famous name without any indication where the person said or wrote the quotation- and they're often wrong. If you find a quote that's repeated all over the internet and attached to a famous person's name without any other information, it's probably misquoted (has been restated whether purposely or by mistake), misattributed (attached to the wrong person), or both.

The first thing a librarian usually does to try to identify a quotation is to put it into Google Books or HathiTrust (see links below under Publicly Available Online). These sites are how we search the full text of millions of books (and other textual materials) at once.

Experiment with it. For instance: if it's a long quote, choose a distinctive phrase from within it and enter that inside quotation marks. Try it outside quotation marks, too. Choose fairly unusual keywords from the quotation and just search those. Put in or leave out the name of the person you suspect to have said it. If the person it's attributed to wrote or spoke in another language from the one the quotation is in (for instance, if they wrote in French but the quotation is in English), consider that translations can vary.

Below are some suggested places to search for complete citations so you'll be able to verify that the citation is correct and/or locate where it originated. 

Electronic sources at Harvard

A HarvardKey (available to current Harvard faculty, staff and students only) is needed for these links. If you don't have a HarvardKey, check your local library to see if you have access to any of these (and they may recommend others as well).

Oxford Reference Online Premium Collection  For best results click Advanced Search, limit to Quotation
Literature Online (LION)

Publicly available online

Remember to evaluate your source. Some sites just repeat information found in other places, rather than confirming it for themselves.

Bartleby.com-  operated by the Barnes & Noble Education company, this site allows you to search all many reputable sources simultaneously, notably Bartlett’s Quotations as well as Respectfully Quoted, a dictionary of quotes requested from and investigated by the Congressional Research Service.
Google Books Advanced Book Search – try surrounding the quote (in full or in part) with quotation marks, or specify author and then a few keywords from the quotation. 
Other Digital Libraries- These are similar to Google Books, and you can search across the full text of millions of books. There is a lot of overlapping content, but there are some unique items in each of these, and each searches a little differently so that you may get different results. These are 3 of the largest:

• HathiTrust
• Internet Archive
• Project Gutenberg

Wikiquote is Wikipedia for quotes. As with Wikipedia, pay attention to cited sources, because it's difficult to evaluate the author of each article or item in a crowdsourced resource.

Quoteinvestigator.com and Garson O'Toole's book, Hemingway Didn't Say That

Google Groups  Submit a quote to the collective wisdom of a quotations group to get more leads. Social media platforms like Reddit have similar groups.

Unfortunately, the right information may not exist online, or it may not be possible to find it (because the quote is not exact or has been misattributed for so long).

Quotations Dictionaries and other books in Print at Harvard Library (for Harvard affiliates who have access to the buildings)

Major print sources can be found in the Loker Reading Room at Widener, starting with call number RR 3021.1
Search HOLLIS or other catalogs for keywords such as: women quotations dictionaries or politics quotations dictionaries.