About Dead Smart People
Dead Smart People is a place to scroll through real excerpts by classic thinkers instead of opinions from strangers online. Each quote is drawn from original texts, sourced through Wikisource and other public domain archives, and served without commentary. You can read them at random, click on an author to see more, or click on a post to view and access its source. You can mark favorites, which are saved in your browser, and you can switch between languages (French and English for now).
Excerpts are pulled directly from a large library of texts, drawn from philosophy and literature from Antiquity to the present day. You won't find the usual cliché quotes here, and you might come across insights, expressions, ideas, or entire books you've never seen before.
The site runs on a simple stack with a small database and a bit of AI behind the scenes to help extract and sort the quotes. It's lightweight, fast, and built to grow if needed, but the idea is to keep it focused.
Since excerpts are extracted with the help of AI, some details like publication dates or ambiguous author attributions might occasionally be incorrect. These issues will be fixed as soon as possible whenever they come up.