Quotes about quotation

A collection of quotes on the topic of quotation, likeness, use, books.

Quotes about quotation

“Most people are other people. Their thoughts are someone else's opinions, their lives a mimicry, their passions a quotation.”

Oscar Wilde book De Profundis

De Profundis (1897)

People, Passion

“He wrapped himself in quotations - as a beggar would enfold himself in the purple of Emperors.”

Rudyard Kipling book Many Inventions

The Finest Story in the World http://www.telelib.com/authors/K/KiplingRudyard/prose/ManyInventions/fineststory.html (1893). Other works Source: Many Inventions Context: When next he came to me he was drunk—royally drunk on many poets for the first time revealed to him. His pupils were dilated, his words tumbled over each other, and he wrapped himself in quotations—as a beggar would enfold himself in the purple of emperors.

“[R]eciprocity is barter. I always understood that barter was the last effort of civilization that it was exactly that state of human exchange that separated civilization from savagery; and if reciprocity is only barter, I fear that would hardly help us out of our difficulty. ... [W]hen he taunts me with his quotation of some musty phrases of mine 40 years ago, I must remind him that we had elements then on which treaties of reciprocity could be negotiated. At that time, although the great changes of Sir Robert Peel had taken place, there were 168 articles in the tariff which were materials by which you could have negotiated, if that was a wise and desirable policy, commercial treaties of reciprocity. What is the number you now have in the tariff? Twenty-two. Those who talk of negotiating treaties of reciprocity...have they the materials for negotiating treaties of reciprocity? You have lost the opportunity. I do not want to enter into the argument at the present moment; but England cannot pursue that policy.”

Benjamin Disraeli (1804–1881) British Conservative politician, writer, aristocrat and Prime Minister

Source: Speech in the House of Lords on the agricultural depression (29 April 1879), reported in The Times (30 April 1879), p. 8

Fear, Effort, Change, Time

“That quotation about not having time to stand and stare has never applied to me. I seem to have spent a good part of my life - probably too much - in just standing and staring and I was at it again this morning.”

James Herriot (1916–1995) veterinary surgeon and writer

Source: It Shouldn't Happen to a Vet

Life, Time, Parting

“Quotation is a serviceable substitute for wit.”

Oscar Wilde (1854–1900) Irish writer and poet

“The wisdom of the wise, and the experience of ages, may be preserved by quotation.”

Benjamin Disraeli (1804–1881) British Conservative politician, writer, aristocrat and Prime Minister

Isaac D'Israeli, Curiosities of Literature, "Quotation".
Misattributed, Isaac D'Israeli
Variant: The wisdom of the wise and the experience of the ages are perpetuated by quotations.

Wisdom, Age

“Beware of thinkers whose minds function only when they are fueled by a quotation.”

Emil M. Cioran (1911–1995) Romanian philosopher and essayist

Anathemas and Admirations (1987)

“In this crazy mirror of terror and art a pseudo-quotation made up of obscure Shakespeareanisms (Chapter Three) somehow produces, despite its lack of literal meaning, the blurred diminutive image of the acrobatic performance that so gloriously supplies the bravura ending for the next chapter.”

Vladimir Nabokov book Bend Sinister

Source: Bend Sinister (1963), p. x.

Art

“First words upon returning to Earth, to a woman and a girl near where his capsule landed (12 April 1961) The woman asked: "Can it be that you have come from outer space?" to which Gagarin replied: "As a matter of fact, I have!" As quoted in The Air Up There : More Great Quotations on Flight (2003) by Dave English, p. 118”

Yuri Gagarin (1934–1968) Soviet pilot and cosmonaut, the first human in space

Rays were blazing through the of the earth, the horizon became bright orange, gradually passing into all the colors of the rainbow: from light blue to dark blue, to violet and then to black. What an indescribable gamut of colors! Just like the paintings of the artist Nicholas Roerich.

Quotes, Girl

“In the theater, while you recognized that you were looking at a house, it was a house in quotation marks … on screen, the quotation marks tend to be blotted out by the camera. The problem was to sustain at any cost the feeling you had in the theater that you were watching a real person, yes, but an intense condensation of his experience, not simply a realistic series of episodes. It isn't easy to do in the theater, but it's twice as hard in film.”

Arthur Miller (1915–2005) playwright from the United States

On filming a television production of Death of a Salesman, as quoted in The New York Times (15 September 1985) http://query.nytimes.com/gst/fullpage.html?res=9805E2DE133BF936A2575AC0A963948260&sec=&spon=&pagewanted=all

Feeling, Problem, Housing, Personality

“…reciprocity is barter. I always understood that barter was the last effort of civilization that it was exactly that state of human exchange that separated civilization from savagery; and if reciprocity is only barter, I fear that would hardly help us out of our difficulty. My noble friend read some extracts from the speeches of those who had the misfortune to be in Parliament at that time, and he honoured me by reading an extract from the speech I then made in the other House of Parliament. That was a speech in favour of reciprocity, and indicated the means by which reciprocity could be obtained. That is to say…by the negotiation of a treaty of commerce, by reciprocal exchange and the lowering of duties, the products of the two negotiating countries would find a freer access and consumption in the two countries than they formerly possessed. But when he taunts me with his quotation of some musty phrases of mine 40 years ago, I must remind him that we had elements then on which treaties of reciprocity could be negotiated. At that time, although the great changes of Sir Robert Peel had taken place, there were 168 articles in the tariff which were materials by which you could have negotiated, if that was a wise and desirable policy, commercial treaties of reciprocity. What is the number you now have in the tariff? Twenty-two. Those who talk of negotiating treaties of reciprocity…have they the materials for negotiating treaties of reciprocity? You have lost the opportunity. I do not want to enter into the argument at the present moment; but England cannot pursue that policy.”

Benjamin Disraeli (1804–1881) British Conservative politician, writer, aristocrat and Prime Minister

Speech in the House of Lords (29 April 1879), reported in The Times (30 April 1879), p. 8.
1870s

Fear, Effort, Change, Time

“Whenever we would prepare the mind by a forcible appeal, an opening quotation is a symphony preluding on the chords those tones we are about to harmonize.”

Benjamin Disraeli (1804–1881) British Conservative politician, writer, aristocrat and Prime Minister

Isaac D'Israeli, Curiosities of Literature, "Quotation".
Misattributed, Isaac D'Israeli

“Lenin cannot be chopped up into quotations suited for every possible case, because for Lenin the formula never stands higher than the reality; it is always the tool that makes it possible to grasp the reality and to dominate it. It would not be hard to find in Lenin dozens and hundreds of passages which, formally speaking, seem to be contradictory. But what must be seen is not the formal relationship of one passage to another, but the real relationship of each of them to the concrete reality in which the formula was introduced as a lever. The Leninist truth is always concrete!”

Leon Trotsky (1879–1940) Marxist revolutionary from Russia

The New Course (1924)

Truth, Making love, Reality

“I don't like quotes, I prefer quotations”

Mark Hamilton

Quotes

“[A] quotation is a handy thing to have about, saving one the trouble of thinking for oneself, always a laborious business."

()”

A.A. Milne (1882–1956) British author

Source: If I May

Business, Thinking

“Some quotations," said Zellaby, "are greatly improved by lack of context.”

John Wyndham book The Midwich Cuckoos

Source: The Midwich Cuckoos

“Jewels, lies, slips of paper, dried flowers, memories of thing long past, useless quotations, idle hands, beads, buttons, and mischief.”

Holly Black book The Coldest Girl in Coldtown

Source: The Coldest Girl in Coldtown

Flowers, Memory, Past

“Oh, I don't read. I skulk about in search of quotations that might make me appear educated.”

Tasha Alexander (1969) American writer

Source: A Fatal Waltz

Education, Search, Appearance, Reading

“Be careful--with quotations, you can damn anything.”

André Malraux (1901–1976) French novelist, art theorist and politician

“Lord Peter Wimsey: I always have a quotation for everything - it saves original thinking.”

Dorothy L. Sayers book Have His Carcase

Variant: Lord Peter Wimsey: A facility for quotation covers the absence of original thought.
Source: Have His Carcase (1932)

Thinking

“I hate quotations.”

Ralph Waldo Emerson (1803–1882) American philosopher, essayist, and poet

Hate

“Immortality. I notice that as soon as writers broach this question they begin to quote. I hate quotation. Tell me what you know.”

Ralph Waldo Emerson (1803–1882) American philosopher, essayist, and poet

May 1849: This is a remark Emerson wrote referring to the unreliability of second hand testimony and worse upon the subject of immortality. It is often taken out of proper context, and has even begun appearing on the internet as "I hate quotations. Tell me what you know" or sometimes just "I hate quotations".
1820s, Journals (1822–1863)
Source: The Essays of Ralph Waldo Emerson

Hate

“Anyone who sees and paints a sky green and fields blue ought to be sterilized.

--, suspected false quotation”

Adolf Hitler (1889–1945) Führer and Reich Chancellor of Germany, Leader of the Nazi Party

Painting, Falseness

“Quotation, n. The act of repeating erroneously the words of another. The words erroneously repeated.”

Ambrose Bierce (1842–1914) American editorialist, journalist, short story writer, fabulist, and satirist

The Devil's Dictionary (1911)
Source: The Unabridged Devil's Dictionary

“I might repeat to myself, slowly and soothingly, a list of quotations beautiful from minds profound; if I can remember any of the damn things.”

Dorothy Parker (1893–1967) American poet, short story writer, critic and satirist

"The Little Hours" in Here Lies (1939)
Source: Here Lies: The Collected Stories of Dorothy Parker

Beauty

“People talk of situations, read books, repeat quotations.”

Bob Dylan (1941) American singer-songwriter, musician, author, and artist

People, Books, Reading

“Every book is a quotation; and every house is a quotation out of all forests and mines and stone-quarries; and every man is a quotation from all his ancestors.”

Ralph Waldo Emerson (1803–1882) American philosopher, essayist, and poet

1870s, Society and Solitude (1870), Quotation and Originality
Source: Prose and Poetry

Books, Housing

“It is a good thing for an uneducated man to read books of quotations. Bartlett's Familiar Quotations is an admirable work, and I studied it intently. The quotations when engraved upon the memory give you good thoughts. They also make you anxious to read the authors and look for more.”

Winston S. Churchill (1874–1965) Prime Minister of the United Kingdom

Source: My Early Life: A Roving Commission (1930), Chapter 9 (Education At Bangalore).

Books, Study, Memory, Reading

“Life itself is a quotation.”

Jorge Luis Borges (1899–1986) Argentine short-story writer, essayist, poet and translator, and a key figure in Spanish language literature

Quoted in Cool Memories (1987) by Jean Baudrillard, (trans. 1990) Ch. 5; heard by Baudrillard at a lecture given in Paris.

Life

“Quotations are useful in periods of ignorance or obscurantist beliefs.”

Guy Debord (1931–1994) French Marxist theorist, writer, filmmaker and founding member of the Situationist International (SI)

Vol. 1, pt. 1.
Panegyric (1989)
Source: Society of the Spectacle

“I want to rip off your logic and make passionate sense to you. I want to ride in the swing of your hips. My fingers will dig in you like quotation marks, blazing your limbs into parts of speech.”

Jeffrey McDaniel (1967) American writer

Sense, Passion, Parting

“After all, all he did was string together a lot of old, well-known quotations.”

H.L. Mencken (1880–1956) American journalist and writer

“Where there is insight in citation, or wisdom winged with wit, especially from the world of letters, I have quoted liberally. For a good epigram not only makes a point, but a point to ponder. This book provides many such quotations that I have unearthed from the tomes of many writers.”

Evan Esar (1899–1995) American writer

20,000 Quips & Quotes, Introduction, pviii

Wisdom, Books, World, Quotes

“My quarrel with him is, that his works contain nothing worth quoting; and a book that furnishes no quotations, is, me judice [in my opinion], no book - it is a plaything.”

Thomas Love Peacock book Crotchet Castle

Crotchet Castle, chapter IX. Though not named, the author under discussion is clearly Sir Walter Scott.

Books, Quotes

“The clash between reason and Portuguese experience. Hooykaas' starting point is the intellectual challenge which, from the early 15th century onward, was posed by the discoveries of the Portuguese mariners… There follows an array of fascinating accounts of, and quotations from, works by contemporary authors who were compelled to face as facts numerous phenomena the ancients had been quite sure could not possibly be observed because they were bound not to exist. Examples are Aristotle's denial that the tropics could be inhabited; Ptolemy's mathematically derived conviction that all dry land is confined to part of the Northern Hemisphere, and so on. …In Hooykaas' view we are witnessing here a birth of 'natural history' in the domain of the hard and given fact… The narrow world of sense-data to which the ancient natural philosophers had confined their all-too-rational speculations was now being blown to pieces. And this was not being done by fellow natural philosophers, but rather at the urging of scarcely literate sailors!”

Floris Cohen (1946) Dutch historian

Floris Cohen, The Scientific Revolution: A Historiographical Inquiry (1994)

World, History, Mathematics, Birth

“Even in his palmiest days there were good friends who could stand only limited stretches of the Lambert barrage of ideas, jokes, fantasy, quotations, apt instances, things that had struck him as he walked through London, not because these lacked quality, on the contrary because the mixture was after a while altogether too rich.”

Constant Lambert (1905–1951) British composer and conductor

Anthony Powell Messengers of Day (1978) p. 60.
Criticism

Idea

“It was Italian playwright and screenwriter Ennio Flaiano who first spoke to Fellini of Fernando Pessoa during their collaboration on I Vitelloni (1953). Fellini claimed, however, that it was not until he lunched with Anthony Burgess in the mid 1970s (when the British writer owned a country house in Bracciano north of Rome) that he began reading the Portuguese poet in earnest. This is not to suggest that Pessoa influenced Fellini in any direct way but simply to note a genial coincidence embedded within two autobiographical masterpieces. The first quotation is from Pessoa’s O Livro do desassossego: ‘These are my Confessions, and if in them I say nothing, it’s because I have nothing to say.’ The second is from Fellini’s Otto e mezzo (1963) during the crucial night scene at the base of the scaffolding when Guido confesses to Rosella, “I have really nothing to say in my film. But I want to say it anyway.” Suddenly, the disparate obsessions of these two great Mediterranean minds seem to fold into one another, if only for an instant, like the sounds of vibrating wires touched simultaneously. Whatever the ultimate significance may be, it amuses me to think that textual coincidences of this nature are proof of the brotherhood of artists.”

Damian Pettigrew Canadian filmmaker

On Fellini and Fernando Pessoa
Federico Fellini: Sou um Grande Mentiroso (2008)

Way, Nature, Thinking, Reading

“We will encourage reporters to be as specific as possible about the source of any anonymous quotation.”

Alan Rusbridger (1953) British newspaper editor

Alan Rusbridger. " No more ghostly voices http://www.theguardian.com/politics/2000/jul/15/labour.labour1997to99." The Guardian. 14 July 2000; As cited in Bob Franklin, ‎Martin Hamer, ‎Mark Hanna (2005) Key Concepts in Journalism Studies. p. 134. 2000s

“In general, when reading a scholarly critic, one profits more from his quotations than from his comments.”

W. H. Auden book The Dyer's Hand

"Reading", p. 9
The Dyer's Hand, and Other Essays (1962)

Reading

“A fine quotation is a diamond on the finger of a man of wit, and a pebble in the hand of a fool.”

Joseph Roux (1834–1905) French poet

Part 1, LXXIV
Meditations of a Parish Priest (1866)

Fools

“Furthermore, we are instructed, when we do come across instances of temple destruction, as in the case of Aurangzeb, we have to be circumspect in inferring what has happened and why…. the early monuments – like the Quwwat-ul-Islam mosque in Delhi – had to be built in ‘great haste’, we are instructed…Proclamation of political power, alone! And what about the religion which insists that religious faith is all, that the political cannot be separated from the religious? And the name: the Quwwat-ul-Islam mosque, the Might of Islam mosque? Of course, that must be taken to be mere genuflection! And notice: ‘available materials were assembled and incorporated’, they ‘clearly came from Hindu sources’ – may be the materials were just lying about; may be the temples had crumbled on their own earlier; may be the Hindus voluntarily broke their temples and donated the materials? No? After all, there is no proof they didn’t! And so, the word ‘plundered’ is repeatedly put within quotation marks!
In fact, there is more. The use of such materials – from Hindu temples – for constructing Islamic mosques is part of ‘a process of architectural definition and accommodation by local workmen essential to the further development of a South Asian architecture for Islamic use’. The primary responsibility thus becomes that of those ‘local workmen’ and their ‘accommodation’. Hence, features in the Qutb complex come to ‘demonstrate a creative response by architects and carvers to a new programme’. A mosque that has clearly used materials, including pillars, from Hindu temples, in which undeniably ‘in the fabric of the central dome, a lintel carved with Hindu deities has been turned around so that its images face into the rubble wall’ comes ‘not to fix the rule’. ‘Rather, it stands in contrast to the rapid exploration of collaborative and creative possibilities – architectural, decorative, and synthetic – found in less fortified contexts.’ Conclusions to the contrary have been ‘misevaluations’. We are making the error of ‘seeing salvaged pieces’ – what a good word that, ‘salvaged ’: the pieces were not obtained by breaking down temples; they were lying as rubble and would inevitably have disintegrated with the passage of time; instead they were ‘salvaged ’, and given the honour of becoming part of new, pious buildings – ‘seeing salvaged pieces where healthy collaborative creativity was producing new forms’.”

Arun Shourie (1941) Indian journalist and politician

Eminent Historians: Their Technology, Their Line, Their Fraud

Faith, Religion, Error, Lying

“When the modern scholar cites from a classic text, the quotation seems to burn a hole in his own drab page.”

George Steiner (1929–2020) American writer

Source: The Death of Tragedy (1961), Ch. IX: (p. 314).

“Chairman Mao was the first in the world to use Twitter. All his quotations are within 140 words.”

Ai Weiwei (1957) Chinese concept artist

2000-09, The Bold and the Beautiful, 2009

World

“I am only too aware that I am open to Rees's Second Law of Quotation: "However sure you are that you have attributed a quotation correctly, an earlier source will be pointed out to you."”

Nigel Rees (1944) British writer and broadcaster

Brewer's Quotations (London: Cassell, 1994), p. x.

Law

“[On what she learned from working on The L Word] I think that I learned the most clearly was how connected we all are. And that (does air quotation marks) "gay issues" are also women's issues because homophobia is a form of misogyny…And I feel much more motivated to speak out when I see something that I don't like or that just smells wrong…I see how all women are connected. You know, and that we are all either repressed or we repress ourselves in certain ways, and that's truly codified within the culture. And that I'm not so far removed from that woman in the Congo who's terrified to go out into the woods to look for firewood.”

Jennifer Beals (1963) American actress and a former teen model

New York Times Talks Panel (20 April 2009) http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=oeZgJ3EJrbE.

Women, Way, Feeling, Motivation

“Treatment of the apparently whimsical fluctuations of the stock quotations as truly non stationary processes requires a model of such complexity that its practical value is likely to be limited. An additional complication, not encompassed by most stock market models, arises from the manifestation of the market as a nonzero sum game.”

Richard Arnold Epstein (1927) American physicist

Source: The Theory of Gambling and Statistical Logic (Revised Edition) 1977, Chapter Nine, Weighted Statistical Logic And Statistical Games, p. 295

Game

“One of the hardest-to-down myths about the evolution of mass production at Ford is one which credits much of the accomplishment to 'scientific management.' No one at Ford—not Mr. Ford, Couzens, Flanders, Wills, Pete Martin, nor I—was acquainted with the theories of the 'father of scientific management,' Frederick W. Taylor. Years later I ran across a quotation from a two-volume book about Taylor by Frank Barkley Copley, who reports a visit Taylor made to Detroit late in 1914, nearly a year after the moving assembly line had been installed at our Highland Park plant. Taylor expressed surprise to find that Detroit industrialists 'had undertaken to install the principles of scientific management without the aid of experts.' To my mind this unconscious admission by an expert is expert testimony on the futility of too great reliance on experts and should forever dispose of the legend that Taylor's ideas had any influence at Ford.”

Charles E. Sorensen (1881–1968) American businessman

Source: My Forty Years with Ford, 1956, p. 41

Books, Idea

“A Song for September, reported in Bartlett's Familiar Quotations, 10th ed.”

Thomas William Parsons (1819–1892) American writer

1919
Variant: On a Bust of Dante, reported in Bartlett's Familiar Quotations, 10th ed. (1919).

“John Kenneth Galbraith doesn't get enough praise. The Affluent Society is a great insight, and has become so much a part of our understanding of contemporary capitalism that we forget where it began. It's like reading Hamlet and deciding it's full of quotations.”

Amartya Sen (1933) Indian economist

Amartya Sen, quoted in Jonathan Steele, " Last of the old-style liberals http://www.theguardian.com/education/2002/apr/06/socialsciences.highereducation", The Guardian (2002) 2000s

Understanding, Reading, Parting, Forgetting

“Now shall we say that only the first men were well alive, and the existing generation is invalided and degenerate? … A more subtle and severe criticism might suggest that some dislocation has befallen the race; that men are off their centre; that multitudes of men do not live with Nature, but behold it as exiles. People go out to look at sunrises and sunsets who do not recognize their own quietly and happily, but know that it is foreign to them. As they do by books, so they quote the sunset and the star, and do not make them theirs. Worse yet, they live as foreigners in the world of truth, and quote thoughts, and thus disown them. Quotation confesses inferiority.”

Ralph Waldo Emerson (1803–1882) American philosopher, essayist, and poet

1870s, Society and Solitude (1870), Quotation and Originality

Men, People, Truth, Books

“I must stop to lament, that we cannot evince an admiring gratitude towards other excellent things by a like readiness of quotation: that we cannot, for instance, quote a star that we have been watching; or a hue of sunset; or a friend's voice, and his shake of the hand (I had almost said heart); or a beautiful picture—a Claude or Titian, for example.”

Samuel Laman Blanchard (1804–1845) British author and journalist

"Quotations"
Sketches from Life (1846)

Beauty, Quotes, Star, Heart

“The cult of the individual of Stalin should, of course be overcome. But can it be said, as it has been claimed, that Stalin himself was the sponsor of this cult of the individual? The cult of the individual should be overthrown without fail, but was it necessary and was it right to go to such lengths as to point the finger at any one who mentioned Stalin's name, to look askance at any one who used a quotation from Stalin with great speed and zeal? Certain persons smashed statues raised to Stalin and changed the names of cities that had been named after him. But why go any further?”

Enver Hoxha (1908–1985) the Communist leader of Albania from 1944 until his death in 1985, as the First Secretary of the Party of L…

Speeches, Moscow Address

Change, Personality, Speed

“I do not by any means want to deny that I and my fellow workers selected news and quotations following a certain tendency. It is the curse of propaganda during war that one works only with black and white. But to my knowledge it is a mistake to believe that in the Propaganda Ministry thousands of little lies were hatched out. If we had lied on a thousand small things, the enemy would have been able to deal with us more easily than was the case.”

Hans Fritzsche (1900–1953) German Nazi official

September, 1946, at the Nuremberg Trials, quoted in "The Trial of the Germans" - Page 543 by Eugene Davidson - History - 1997

War, Knowledge

“It is in the world of words, amid the dull but perhaps necessary detail of every-day events—that quotations come with a warmth and a welcome upon memory, and like Milton's fish, "Show to the sun their wav'd coats dropt with gold." …In the dry and laboring essay, amid the windings of many words and the accumulation of antecedents, we hail their sudden and familiar appearances as patches of Nature's green to repose on by the way; their "dulcet and harmonious breath" animates a train of associations that dwell in the most sylvan haunts of emotion and sentiment; to their fountains of "loosened silver" we turn for a refreshing and a pleasant abstraction.”

Samuel Laman Blanchard (1804–1845) British author and journalist

"Quotations".
Sketches from Life (1846)

World, Way, Nature, Fish

“Suspecting that we would be accused of apologetics for the Khmer Rouge, Chomsky and I went to some pains to point out Khmer Rouge crimes and to stress that our purpose was to emphasize the discrepancy between available facts and media claims and to lay bare what we saw to be a propaganda campaign of selective indignation and benevolence. This effort was futile. With such a powerful propaganda bandwagon underway, from the very beginning the mass media were closed to oppositional voices on the issue, and any scepticism, even identification of outright lies, was treated with hostility and tabbed apologetics for the Khmer Rouge. Our crime was the very act of criticizing the workings of the propaganda system and its relation to US power and policy, instead of focusing attention on approved villainy, which could be assailed violently and ignorantly, without penalty. The issue was framed as a simple one: those for and against Pol Pot. […] I would estimate with some confidence that over 90 percent of the journalists who mentioned Chomsky's name in connection with Cambodia never looked at his original writings on the subject, but merely regurgitated a quickly adopted line. The critics who helped formulate the line also could hardly be bothered looking at the actual writings; the method was almost invariably the use of a few selected quotations taken out of context and embedded in a mass of sarcastic and violent denunciation.”

Edward S. Herman (1925–2017) American journalist

Herman, “Pol Pot, Faurisson, and the Process of Derogation”, in Otero, Ed. (1994), Noam Chomsky: Critical Assessments, pp. 598-615.
1990s

Pain, Hostility, Penalty, Confidence

“Like Bradley Pearson in The Black Prince, 'N', as he is called, uses quotation marks for such vulgarisms as 'sulks,' 'commuters' and 'worthwhile activities', as well as for phrases like 'too good to be true', 'the wrong end of the stick' and 'keep in touch.' The reader reflects that a cliché or approximation, wedged between two inverted commas, is still a cliché or approximation. Besides, you see how it would 'get on your nerves' if I were to 'go on' like this 'the whole time'…”

Martin Amis (1949) Welsh novelist

Review of The Philosopher's Pupil by Iris Murdoch, p. 92
The War Against Cliché: Essays and Reviews 1971-2000 (2001)

Time

“I was reminded of a quotation by the famous American physicist Steven Weinberg, Nobel Prize-winning theoretical physicist. Weinberg said: "Religion is an insult to human dignity. Without it, you'd have good people doing good things, and evil people doing evil things. But for good people to do evil things, it takes religion."”

Richard Dawkins (1941) English ethologist, evolutionary biologist and author

Part 2, 00:35:01
The Root of All Evil? (January 2006)

People, Religion, Evil, Parting

“She had a pretty gift for quotation, which is a serviceable substitute for wit…”

W. Somerset Maugham (1874–1965) British playwright, novelist, short story writer

[1926, August, The Creative Impulse, Harper's Bazar, 41, 0017-7873, Hearst Corp., New York]
Revised with quotation in the 1931 compilation Six Stories Written in the First Person Singular.
Often misattributed to George Bernard Shaw or Oscar Wilde
Short Stories

“The first article in the foregoing quotation brings to my recollection the extraordinary performances of a professed fire-eater, whose name was Powel, well known in different parts of the kingdom about forty years ago. Among other wonderful feats, I saw him do the following: He ate the burning coals from the fire; he put a large bunch of matches lighted into his mouth, and blew the smoke of the sulphur through his nostrils; he carried a red-hot heater round the room in his teeth; and broiled a piece of beef-steak upon his tongue. To perform this, he lighted a piece of charcoal, which he put into his mouth beneath his tongue, the beef was laid upon the top; and one of the spectators blew upon the charcoal, to prevent the heat decreasing, till the meat was sufficiently broiled. By way of conclusion, he made a composition of pitch, brimstone, and other compustibles, to which he added several pieces of lead; the whole was melted in an iron ladle, and then set on fire; this he called his soup; and, taking it out of the ladle with a spoon of the same metal, he ate it in its state of liquefaction, and blazing furiously, without appearing to sustain the least injury.”

Joseph Strutt (1749–1802) British engraver, artist, antiquary and writer

pg. 237
The Sports and Pastimes of the People of England (1801), Public entertainment

Way, Light, Appearance, Parting

“The work process begins when I start selecting quotations from a large collection I already have, given that I use such texts often in my work and have for a long time. In fact, appropriation of this kind––along with other kinds––has been part of my work since the beginning in the ’60s. I go through hundreds of these amassed quotes from my own research and that of my staff, make my choices, and then continually add them in relation to the quotes I already have selected. The surplus meaning that is constructed by using the words of others in conjunction with each other, which is my goal, is a far more delicate operation than it may seem.”

Joseph Kosuth (1945) American conceptual artist

Joseph Kosuth at artforum.com http://artforum.com/words/id=28992, 09.20.11

Quotes, Time, Parting

“The true investor scarcely ever has to sell his shares, and at all other times he is free di disregard the current price quotation. He need pay attention to it and act upon it only to the extent that it suits his book, and no more. Thus the investor who permits himself to be stampeded or unduly worried by unjustified market declines in his holdings is perversely transforming his basic advantage into a basic disadvantage. That man would be better off if his stocks had no market quotation at all, for he would then be spared the mental anguish caused him by other persons mistakes of judgement.”

Benjamin Graham (1894–1976) American investor

Source: The Intelligent Investor: The Classic Text on Value Investing (1949), Chapter II, The Investor and Stock-Market Fluctuations, p. 40

Books, Time, Personality

“The most superficial fact regarding the Discourses, the fact that the number of its chapters equals the number of books of Livy's History, compelled us to start a chain of tentative reasoning which brings us suddenly face to face with the only New Testament quotation that ever appears in Machiavelli's two books and with an enormous blasphemy.”

Leo Strauss book Thoughts on Machiavelli

Source: Thoughts on Machiavelli (1958), p. 49

Books, History, Appearance

“I heard the quotation read in a summary of the speech. I thought the words sounded familiar and suddenly it dawned on me that they were out of my little book.”

Minnie Haskins (1875–1957) British poet and sociologist

Her reaction on hearing her poem. Daily Telegraph, 16 Aug 2008 http://www.telegraph.co.uk/comment/columnists/christopherhowse/3561497/At-the-Gate-of-the-Year.html

Books, Reading

“When I want to use a quotation, I can very seldom do it properly, as the difficulty arises where to look for it in order to work it up.”

Thomas Dewar, 1st Baron Dewar book A Ramble Round the Globe

A Ramble Round the Globe, Ch. I, pub. Chatto and Windus, London (1894)

“"Yields falsehood when preceded by its quotation" yields falsehood when preceded by its quotation.”

Willard van Orman Quine (1908–2000) American philosopher and logician

Quine's paradox, in "The Ways of Paradox" in "The Ways of Paradox and other Essays" (1976)
1970s

“Kuhn cannot take seriously that “there is some one full, objective, true account of nature.” Does this mean that he does not take truth seriously? Not at all. […]
Kuhn did reject a simple “correspondence theory” which says true statements correspond to facts about the world. […]
In the wave of skepticism that swept American scholarship at the end of the twentieth century, many influential intellectuals took Kuhn as an ally in their denials of truth as a virtue. I mean the thinkers of the sort that cannot write down or utter the word true except by literally or figuratively putting quotation marks around it—to indicate how they shudder at the very thought of so harmful a notion. Many reflective scientists, who admire much of what Kuhn says about the sciences, believe he encouraged deniers.
It is true that Structure gave enormous impetus to sociological studies of science. Some of that work, with its emphasis on the idea that facts are “socially constructed” and apparent participation in the denial of “truth,” is exactly what conservative scientists protest against. Kuhn made plain that he himself detested that development of his work…”

Ian Hacking (1936) Canadian philosopher

Ian Hacking (2012), Introductory Essay, in 50th anniversary edition of Thomas Kuhn's The Structure of Scientific Revolution

Truth, World, Idea, Nature

“The wisdom of the wise and the experience of the ages is preserved into perpetuity by a nation's proverbs, fables, folk sayings and quotations.”

William Feather (1889–1981) Publisher, Author

Attributed in Zebras & Picket Fences (2008) by Jakob Weiss; if this is a statement by Feather, it clearly derives from the earlier remarks of Isaac D'Israeli: "The wisdom of the wise, and the experience of ages, may be preserved by quotation." Since at least 1986 a paraphrased form misattributed to his son Benjamin Disraeli has also often been quoted: "The wisdom of the wise and the experience of the ages are perpetuated by quotations."
Disputed

Wisdom, Age

“The present book is not a methodology of mathematics in the sense that I will systematically show how some teaching matter should taught; it is not even a systematic analysis of subject matter. I hardly ever refer to well-organized classroom experiments evaluated by statistical methods, nor do I cite experimental results of developmental psychology or the psychology of learning. Maybe the most striking feature is that this book contains few quotations. I will try to justify all these features.”

Hans Freudenthal (1905–1990) Dutch mathematician

Source: Mathematics as an Educational Task (1973), p. v;As cited in: Ben Wilbrink (2013)

Books, Mathematics, Sense, Learning

“Bullett's poem criticising Cosmo Gordon Lang for his speech on Edward VIII's abdictation. Quoted in Ross McKibben, Classes and Cultures 1918–51, (2000), Oxford University Press, also in Anthony Jay, Lend Me Your Ears:Oxford Dictionary of Political Quotations,(2010), Oxford”

Gerald Bullett (1893–1958) British writer

Quotes, Universe

“To be apt in quotation is a splendid and dangerous gift. Splendid, because it ornaments a man's speech with other men's jewels; dangerous, for the same reason.”

Robertson Davies (1913–1995) Canadian journalist, playwright, professor, critic, and novelist

Robertson Davies Dangerous Jewels (1960).

Men

“Wrongly attributed to Noel Coward is a quotation about the Queen of Tonga. He is alleged to have been sitting under cover from the heavy rain with Princess Marina, Duchess of Kent at the Coronation in London in 1953. Opposite them was the vast Queen Salote of Tonga. Princess Marina is supposed to have asked "Noel, who is that little man sheltering under Queen Salote's umbrella?" Coward is said to have peered through the rain and said "Oh, her lunch, my dear." In a later interview with Walter Harris, Coward revealed it had been said by someone at White's Club and was immediately attributed to Coward. "It was very flattering of course, except that I had intended to visit Tonga the following winter, and after that of course it was quite impossible."”

Noel Coward (1899–1973) English playwright, composer, director, actor and singer

Interview with Walter Harris in 1960 reported in The Times (26 May 2009).

Winter, Princess

“The Quantum Universe has a quotation from me in every chapter — but it's a damn good book anyway.”

Richard Feynman (1918–1988) American theoretical physicist

Review blurb for the first edition of The Quantum Universe http://www.cambridge.org/catalogue/catalogue.asp?isbn=0521564573 (1987)

Books, Universe

“In your number of March 3rd [1860] I observe a long quotation from The Times, stating that Mr. Darwin "professes to have discovered the existence and modus operandi of the natural law of selection," that is, "the power in nature which takes the place of man and performs a selection, sua sponte," in organic life. This discovery recently published as "the results of 20 years' investigation and reflection" by Mr. Darwin turns out to be what I published very fully and brought to apply practically to forestry in my work Naval Timber and Arboriculture, published as far back as January 1, 1831, by Adam & Charles Black, Edinburgh, and Longman & Co., London, and reviewed in numerous periodicals, so as to have full publicity in the "Metropolitan Magazine," the "Quarterly Review," the "Gardeners' Magazine," by Loudon… and repeatedly in the "United Service Magazine" for 1831, &c. The following is an extract from this volume, which clearly proves a prior claim.”

Patrick Matthew (1790–1874) British scientist

excerpt follows
Gardeners' Chronicle

Life, Law, Nature, Time

“A quotation's only a short neat way of sayin' somethin' everybody knows, like "It's crackers to slip a rozzer the dropsy in snide."”

Margery Allingham book The Fashion in Shrouds

Italics in original
The Fashion in Shrouds, New York: Felony & Mayhem, 2008, chapter six, p. 58 (Originally published in 1938)
In standard English the italicized text means, "It's crazy to give a policeman the bribe in counterfeit money." It was popularized as a nonsense catchphrase by Mad magazine.
Fiction Writings

Way

“In our online descriptions and program literature we describe the cloisters as a public sphere for networked interaction, the gathering place for students, professors, and librarians engaged in planning, evaluating, or reviewing the efforts of research and study utilizing the whole range of technologies of literacy. We go further and describe the task of the cloisters as to "channel flows of research, learning and teaching between the increasingly networked world of the library and the intimacy and engagement of our classrooms and other campus spaces". There we continue to explore the "collectible object", which I tentatively described in Othermindedness in terms of maintaining an archive of "the successive choices, the errors and losses, of our own human community" and suggesting that what constitutes the collectible object is the value which suffuses our choices. It seemed to me then that electronic media are especially suited to tracking such "changing change".
I think it still seems so to me now but I do fear we have lost track of the beauty and nimbleness of new media in representing and preserving the meaning-making quotidian, the ordinary mindfulness which makes human life possible and valuable.
It is interesting, I think, that recounting and rehearsing this notion leaves this interview layered and speckled with (self) quotations, documentations, implicit genealogies, images, and traditions of continuity, change, and difference. Perhaps the most quoted line of afternoon over the years has been the sentence "There is no simple way to say this."”

Michael Joyce (1945) American academic and writer

The same is true of any attempt to describe the way in which the collectible object participates in (I use this word as a felicitous shorthand for the complex of ideas involved in what I called "representing and preserving the meaning-making quotidian" above) the library as living archive. An interview with Michael Joyce and review of Liam’s Going at Trace Online Writing Centre Archive (2 December 2002) http://tracearchive.ntu.ac.uk/review/index.cfm?article=33

Life, World, Fear, Beauty

“The cognitive behavior of Western intellectuals faced with the accomplishments of their own society, on the one hand, and with the socialist ideal and then the socialist reality, on the other, takes one's breath away. In the midst of unparalleled social mobility in the West, they cry "caste." In a society of munificent goods and services, they cry either "poverty" or "consumerism." In a society of ever richer, more varied, more productive, more self-defined, and more satisfying lives, they cry "alienation." In a society that has liberated women, racial minorities, religious minorities, and gays and lesbians to an extent that no one could have dreamed possible just fifty years ago, they cry "oppression." In a society of boundless private charity, they cry "avarice." In a society in which hundreds of millions have been free riders upon the risk, knowledge, and capital of others, they decry the "exploitation" of the free riders. In a society that broke, on behalf of merit, the seemingly eternal chains of station by birth, they cry "injustice." In the names of fantasy worlds and mystical perfections, they have closed themselves to the Western, liberal miracle of individual rights, individual responsibility, merit, and human satisfaction. Like Marx, they put words like "liberty" in quotation marks when these refer to the West.”

Alan Charles Kors (1943) American academic

2000s, Can There Be an "After Socialism"? (2003)

Women, World, Dreams, Behavior

“The wisdom of the wise, and the experience of ages, may be preserved by quotation.”

Isaac D'Israeli (1766–1848) British writer

Quotation; since at least 1986 a paraphrased form misattributed to his son Benjamin Disraeli has often been quoted: "The wisdom of the wise and the experience of the ages are perpetuated by quotations."
Curiosities of Literature (1791–1834)

Wisdom, Age

“A notable quotation is when Qasim asked his Uncle Hussain, if his name would be amongst the names of those who would be blessed with martyrdom in the battle for Islam at Karbala. His Uncle replied asking, "How do you find death Qasim? Qasim replied, Oh my Uncle; I do not fear death. Death for Islam will be sweeter for me than honey.”

Qasim ibn Hasan (667–680) Early Muslim martyr

The Journey of Tears, by Mullah Bashir Hassanali Rahim p.39

Death, Fear

“Of all the many and (thanks to a free press) the ever-multiplying blessings attendant upon the "glorious constitution" of literature, not the least precious and profitable to a modern cultivator of systems and syllables, in pamphlets, magazines, and folios, is the right of Quotation.”

Samuel Laman Blanchard (1804–1845) British author and journalist

"Quotations".
Sketches from Life (1846)

Literature

“There is no real republicanism except that of literature. If I find a human face light up at some quotation which everyone ought to know, that man, be he duke or dustman, is my brother. That is the bond of literature. Study it, the glorious literature of the first country in the world—your own.”

Stanley Baldwin (1867–1947) Former Prime Minister of the United Kingdom

Speech at Birkbeck College (20 March 1924), quoted in On England, and Other Addresses (1926), p. 146.
1924

World, Literature, Study, Light

“My toils in the quotation field have led me to formulate two or three laws about the way people use and abuse quotations. My first law is: When in doubt, ascribe all quotations to Bernard Shaw – which I don't mean to be taken literally, but as a general observation of the habit people have of attaching remarks to the nearest obvious speaker. Churchill, Wilde, Orson Welles and Alexander Woollcott are other useful figures upon whom to father remarks when you don't know who really said them.”

Nigel Rees (1944) British writer and broadcaster

Sayings of the Century (London: Allen & Unwin, 1987), p. iv.

People, Law, Way

“No one in the history of the written word, not even William MacGonagall, or Spike Milligan or D. H. Lawrence, is so wide open to damaging quotation. Try this, more or less at random: 'A murderer in the moment of his murder could feel a sense of beauty and perfection as complete as the transport of a saint.' Or this: Film is a phenomenon whose resemblance to death has been ignored for too long. His italics.
On every page Mailer will come up with a formulation both grandiose and crass. This is expected of him. It is also expected of the reviewer to introduce a lingering 'yet' or 'however' at some point, and say that 'somehow' Mailer's 'fearless honesty' redeems his notorious excesses. He isn't frightened of sounding outrageous; he isn't frightened of making a fool of himself; and, above all, he isn't frightened of being boring. Well, fear has its uses. Perhaps he ought to be a little less frightened of being frightened.”

Martin Amis (1949) Welsh novelist

Review of The Essential Mailer by Norman Mailer, p. 267
The War Against Cliché: Essays and Reviews 1971-2000 (2001)

Death, Fear, Beauty, Fools

““My destiny is accomplished and I die content.” How often she made such quotations as these, said or felt or was them! For just as many Americans want art to be Life, so this American novelist wanted life to be Art, not seeing that many of the values—though not, perhaps, the final ones—of life and art are irreconcilable; so that her life looked coldly into the mirror that it held up to itself, and saw that it was full of quotations, of data and analysis and epigrams, of naked and shameful truths, of facts: it saw that it was a novel by Gertrude Johnson.”

Randall Jarrell book Pictures from an Institution

Source: Pictures from an Institution (1954) [novel], Chapter 5: “Gertrude and Sidney”, p. 214

Life, Truth, Art

“In the dime stores and bus stations,
People talk of situations,
Read books repeat quotations,
Draw conclusions on the wall.”

Bob Dylan (1941) American singer-songwriter, musician, author, and artist

Song lyrics, Bringing It All Back Home (1965), Love Minus Zero/No Limit

People, Books, Reading, Drawing

“A foreign visitor to the Berlin Stock Exchange would easily be deceived. There are announcements of daily quotations and price changes as though a free Stock Exchanged still existed, but nowhere would he find the former ‘public’— private buyers and sellers—as represented by independent brokers, bankers and ‘visitors.”

Günter Reimann (1904–2005) German economist

Source: The Vampire Economy: Doing Business Under Fascism, 2014, p. 178

Change

“My quotations from Newton suggest the motive which induced him to take a stand against the use of hypotheses, namely, the danger of becoming involved in disagreeable controversies. …Newton could no more dispense with hypotheses in his own cogitations than an eagle can dispense with flight. Nor did Newton succeed in avoiding controversy.”

Florian Cajori (1859–1930) American mathematician

Explanatory Appendix, Sir Isaac Newton's Mathematical Principles of Natural Philosophy and His System of the World (1934) Tr. Andrew Motte, p. 674

Motivation

“You know what my favourite quotation is? […] It’s from Chaucer […] Criseyde says it, "I am myne owene woman, wel at ese."”

Mary McCarthy (1912–1989) American writer

First published in Partisan Review (July-August 1941)
Source: The Company She Keeps (1942), Ch. 3 "The Man in the Brooks Brothers Shirt", p. 70.

“Weisinger, a couple of years ago, made up the following story: "Isaac Asimov was asked how Superman could fly faster than the speed of light, which was supposed to be an absolute limit. To this Asimov replied, 'That the speed of light is a limit is a theory; that Superman can travel faster than light is a fact.'"
I assure you it never happened and I never said it, but it will be repeated, I am quite certain, indefinitely, and it will probably be found in Bartlett's quotations a century from now, attributed to me, after all my writings have been forgotten.”

Isaac Asimov (1920–1992) American writer and professor of biochemistry at Boston University, known for his works of science fiction …

"Science Fiction, 1938" Nebula Winners 14 (1980) edited by Frederick J. Pohl, p. 97
General sources

Travel, Light, Speed, Flying

“Take any aspect of the Western inheritance of which our ancestors were proud, and you will find university courses devoted to deconstructing it. Take any positive feature of our political and cultural inheritance, and you will find concerted efforts in both the media and the academy to place it in quotation marks, and make it look like an imposture or a deceit.”

Roger Scruton book How to Be a Conservative

Source: How to Be a Conservative (2014), p. 40

Effort, Universe

“I was never in the army - I never had a uniform - I was never a soldier. I detest uniforms because they make one unfree. There is an old quotation that goes something like this: 'Your mind will be trained well, but confined to Spanish boots.' That quotation is very apt. It signifies how narrow the military mind becomes.”

Hjalmar Schacht (1877–1970) German politician

To Leon Goldensohn (18 May 1946). Quoted in "The Nuremberg Interviews" - by Leon Goldensohn, Robert Gellately - History - 2004.

Training

“Your lesson plan is excellent — except for the Emily Dickinson line: "There is no frigate like a book." The sentiment is lovely, the quotation is apt — only trouble is the word "frigate." Just try to say it in class — and your lesson is over.”

Bel Kaufmanová book Up the Down Staircase

Part III, ch. 18 (Bea Schacter)
Up the Down Staircase (1965)

Love, Books

“Books are published with an expectation, if not a desire, that they will be criticised in reviews, and if deemed valuable that parts of them will be used as affording illustrations by way of quotation, or the like, and if the quantity taken be neither substantial nor material, if, as it has been expressed by some Judges, "a fair use" only be made of the publication, no wrong is done and no action can be brought.”

William Wood, 1st Baron Hatherley (1801–1881) Lord Chancellor of Great Britain

Chatterton v. Cave (1877), L. R. 3 App. Cas. 492.

Books, Way, Parting

“English text; as cited in A Dictionary of Thoughts: Being a Cyclopedia of Laconic Quotations from the Best Authors of the World, both Ancient and Modern (1908) by Tryon Edwards, p. 131.; second part, transl. by F. Heijnsbroek”

Rembrandt van Rijn (1606–1669) Dutch 17th century painter and etcher

Quote of Rembrandt, recorded by his pupil Samuel van Hoogstraten, 1678 http://remdoc.huygens.knaw.nl/#/document/remdoc/e14113; as cited by W.Gs Hellinga, Rembrandt fecit 1642: de Nachtwacht, Gysbrecht van Aemstel', J.M. Meulenhoff, Amsterdam 1956, p. 4 (translation from the original Dutch: Anne Porcelijn) Rembrandt is teaching his student Samuel van Hoogstraten (c. 1642), http://www.dbnl.org/tekst/hell014remb01_01/ according to W. Gs. Hellinga 1640 - 1670

World, Parting

“The investor has the benefit of the stock market's daily and changing appraisal of his holdings, for whatever that appraisal may be worth, and, second, that the investor is able to increase or decrease his investment at the market's daily figure—if he chooses. Thus the existence of a quoted market gives the investor certain options which he does not have if his security is unquoted. But it does not impose the current quotation on an investor who prefers to take his idea of value from some other source.”

Benjamin Graham (1894–1976) American investor

Source: The Intelligent Investor: The Classic Text on Value Investing (1949), Chapter II, The Investor and Stock-Market Fluctuations, p. 41

Quotes, Idea, Change