If you steal from one author, it’s plagiarism; if you steal from many, it’s research.

A sardonic epigram about authorship and intellectual honesty, the line contrasts “plagiarism” (copying a single source) with “research” (assembling ideas from many sources). Its humor depends on an exaggerated, cynical view of how scholarship and writing can be socially legitimized: the same underlying act—appropriation—seems to change moral status when dispersed across multiple authorities. Read more charitably, it also gestures toward a real distinction between theft and synthesis: good research does not merely copy, but transforms, contextualizes, and credits sources. The quip endures because it skewers the thin line between influence, borrowing, and unethical copying, especially in academic and journalistic cultures.