Who are the most quoted people in UN history?

Research Methodology

1. Building the Figure Database

We curated a database of 179 notable figures across 10 categories: philosophers, political thinkers, economists, scientists, writers, historical figures, civil rights leaders, religious figures, UN leaders, and world leaders. For each figure, we store name variations to catch different spellings and references (e.g., "Mahatma Gandhi", "Mohandas Gandhi", "M.K. Gandhi").

2. Extracting Mentions

We analyzed over 120,000 text segments ("chunks") from UN General Assembly speeches spanning 1946-2024. Each chunk was searched for mentions of our notable figures using pattern matching against their name variations.

3. Identifying Direct Quotations

Not every mention is a quote. To distinguish actual quotations from mere references, we look for attribution patterns where the quoted text is explicitly attributed to the figure. This prevents false positives like marking random quoted text near a name mention as a "quote by" that person.

# Patterns for quotes ATTRIBUTED to a figure

# "Gandhi said '...'"
r'{name}\s+said[,:]?\s*["'](.+)["']'

# "'...' - Gandhi"
r'["'](.+)["']\s*[-–]\s*{name}'

# "As Gandhi wrote, '...'"
r'as\s+{name}\s+wrote[,:]?\s*["'](.+)["']'

4. Confidence Scoring

Each mention receives a confidence score from 0.3 to 1.0:

• 0.95 — Clear attribution with quoted text (e.g., "Gandhi said, 'Be the change...'")
• 0.5 — Weaker indicators (e.g., "according to Gandhi", "Gandhi believed")
• 0.3 — Simple mention without attribution context

Only mentions with clear attribution patterns (confidence ≥ 0.9) are marked as "direct quotes" and displayed in the quotation sections. All other mentions are tracked but shown separately.

5. Full Transparency

Every quotation links directly to its source speech. Click on any figure's name to see all their quotations with the exact speech, year, and country where each quote was cited. This allows you to verify any data point against the original source material.

CREATE TABLE notable_figures (
  id INTEGER PRIMARY KEY,
  name TEXT NOT NULL,
  category TEXT NOT NULL
);

CREATE TABLE quotations (
  id INTEGER PRIMARY KEY,
  figure_id INTEGER,
  speech_id INTEGER,
  quote_text TEXT,
  confidence REAL
);

Limitations

This methodology has some inherent limitations:

• Paraphrased quotes without quotation marks are not captured as direct quotes
• Misattributed quotes (where a speaker incorrectly attributes a quote) are included as-is
• Some figures with common names may have fewer results due to stricter matching to avoid false positives
• Translations of speeches may vary in how they render quotations