The Yale Book of Quotations

During the past 25-30 years, I have purchased and then made frequent use of dozens of anthologies of quotations (including revised and updated editions of Bartlett and Oxford) and consider The Yale Book of Quotations the most entertaining and enlightening of them all. As editor Fred R. Shapiro duly acknowledges, he had the substantial benefit of state-of-the-art research methods and resources that were not available to his earlier counterparts and thus was able to trace more thoroughly the origins of quotations he selected. Correct attribution is especially important to those who are, as Joseph Epstein characterizes them in the Foreword, "highly quotatious." Here several such corrections. "We are like dwarfs standing on the shoulders of giants"(Bernard Chartres, not Isaac Newton), "War is hell!" (Napoleon, not William Tecumseh Sherman), and "Murphy's Law" (George Orwell, not Edward A. Murphy, Jr.) Shapiro also includes a number quotations not found in previous anthologies. For example, "Whatever does not kill me makes me stronger"(Friedrich Nietzsche) and "Live Fast, die young, and leave a good looking corpse" (William Motley). The 12,000 quotations are arranged in alphabetical order by author, with source and date of origin cited. I especially appreciate Shapiro's provision of 200 memorable "Film Lines" (Pages 258-269) that include some of my personal favorites. For example: Adam Cook (Oscar Levant) in An American in Paris (1951):"[My face is not] a pretty face, I grant you, but underneath its flabby exterior is an enormous lack of character." General Buck Turgidson (George C. Scott) in Dr. Strangelove (1964): "Mr. President, I'm not saying we wouldn't get our hair mussed. But I do say no more than ten to twenty million people killed, tops, depending on the breaks." Captain (Strother Martin) in Cool Hand Luke (1967): "What we've got here is failure to communicate." Dr. Moreau (Charles Laughton) in Island of Lost Souls (1933): "[The natives] are restless tonight." Howard Beale (Peter Finch) in Network (1976): "I want you to get up now. I want all of you to get out of your chairs. I want you to get up right now and go to the window. Open it, and stick your head out, and yell `I'm mad as hell, and I'm not going to take this anymore!'" Harry Lime (Orson Welles) in The Third Man (1949): "In Italy for thirty years under the Borgias they had warfare, terror, murder, bloodshed - they produced Michelangelo, Leonardo da Vinci, and the Renaissance. In Switzerland they had brotherly love, five hundred years of democracy, and peace and what did that produce? The cuckoo clock." This is an anthology to be kept near at hand, perhaps on a coffee table, and will encourage and generously reward occasional browsing. Here are a few that recently caught my eye: "There may be said to be two classes of people in the world; those who constantly divide the people of the world into two classes, and those who do not." Robert Benchley (1921) A U.S. sailor salutin

"I really didn't say everything I said." Maybe not, but Yogi Berra really said that, and it's here in "The Yale Book of Quotations" with 11,999 other good ones, drawn from some 3200 spokespersons, statesmen, saints, and singers: Du Bois and Dickens and W. C. Fields, Dorothy Parker and Oscar and Sappho, Paine and Plato and Johnny Rotten, as well as that mother of invention, Anonymous. (See "Political Slogans.") The heroic Fred R. Shapiro, abetted by experts and volunteers, offers pinpoint citations for every variety of quote, from the erudite---"Correct English is the slang of prigs" (p. 233)---to the airhead: "[I]f you are killed, you have lost a very important part of your life" (p. 708). Again and again this freshly researched compendium reveals the earliest source and precise wording of many a modern catchphrase. Did Nietzsche actually assert that, "Whatever does not kill me makes me stronger"? If Voltaire didn't claim, "I disapprove of what you say, but I will defend to the death your right to say it"---and he didn't---who did? The ingenious Keyword Index enables you to find out. (See Tallentyre 1, p. 744.) To learn that "The devil can cite Scripture for his purpose" is not from Scripture, as some assume, but "The Merchant of Venice" took just three seconds. Yale has lavished this thousand-page project with superb design, stylish typefaces, and good paper; yet the book is not heavy for its size, and it lies flat wherever opened. Thumbnail photos gladden many entries (the one of Mae West will startle most readers), and a characteristically sparkish foreword by editor and essayist Joseph Epstein only adds to "value for money." In "Wuthering Heights" Merle Oberon cries, "Bring me back the world!" (See "Film Lines.") Ladies and gentlemen and others, here it is.

A good quotations collection will give the definitive wording of quotations, provide information as to the quotations' sources and eliminate spurious sources, and be interesting enough to read or browse in its own right, even when no particular quotation is sought. The Yale Book of Quotations does all of these things, and it does them better than its nearest competitors (Bartlett's Familiar Quotations and The Oxford Dictionary of Quotations). The Yale Book of Quotations is the first new comprehensive collection in many years, and it has benefited from a rethinking of the quotations selected, the use of modern databases to track quotations back to their origins, and comparison with those original sources to assure accuracy. The immediately noticeable difference is a selection that is more likely to appeal to a modern American audience. Bartlett's has pages of quotations from Dryden, most of which inspire neither recollection nor pleasant surprise. Yale has 12 quotations from Dryden, which is enough to include all the genuinely familiar Dryden quotations. On the other hand, Yale has 23 quotations from George W. Bush, many uttered after Bartlett's was last updated. Yale includes extensive selections of proverbs and sayings, political slogans, television catchphrases, and other familiar lines. In general, although Yale's use of literary quotations is comprehensive (there are, for example, 455 quotations from Shakespeare), the quotation selection tends to be relatively less literary and more inclined toward quotations of contemporary interest, particularly to Americans. It may be for this reason that, frankly, Yale is just a lot more fun to browse. Less dramatic, but perhaps ultimately a better indicator of usefulness, is the impressive level of research that went into compiling the Yale Book. Have you ever wondered who said "There ain't no such thing as a free lunch"? Yale cites to several authors who used versions of this line, the earliest of which ("such a thing as a 'free' lunch never existed") was in the Reno Evening Gazette on January 22, 1942. It is unlikely that such an obscure source could have been located without modern databases. It was indeed Horace Greeley who said "Go West, young man"; Yale spends a quarter of a page discussing this quotation, which it notes is one of the great examples of the prevalence of misinformation about famous quotations (both Bartlett's and Oxford get it wrong). The Yale Book of Quotations offers a level of scholarship and reliability that is simply not otherwise available.

I am not finished reading--it's hard to know what finished would be--but I am sure this work deserves the full five stars. I started reading it straight through, but kept getting delightfully sidetracked, remembering another quotation, like an old acquaintance. The editors have done a tremendous amount of research, especially in tracking down many early attestations, especially for modern American texts. This is such a solid reference book that it can't hurt to note that there is no Platonic ideal collection. Though what's included is massive and well-selected, part of the fun is to see what is absent too. Sure, I recall Jimmy Durante saying "I got a million of 'em" (included), but I found his "Everybody wants to get into the act" (not included*) at least as quotable.[*Correction: The quotation _is_ included, though not under Durante but under Radio Catchphrases; I could have found it in the keyword index--which could be improved--but assumed it would appear under Durante; and I heard it on TV; in any case, a cross-reference at Durante would have been helpful.] Though the front matter clearly delineates the format, one could question omitting known political speech writers credit in political quotations, for example, in Agnew's unhappy phrase "nattering nabobs of negativism." William Safire will be not amused. Oh well. Was the single Loyola quote representative? The evidence for attributing "damned lies, and statistics" to Disraeli, rather than Courtney or another, seems to me rather questionable. For example, YBQ cites a 1895 statement of a letter writer who thought Disraeli said it; but in a 1894 book Price Collier attributed the saying to Walter Bagehot. Absent: "the whole nine yards." This appeared in Vietnam GI slang in 1966. By then "Montagnards" were slangily called "'yards." In 1966 Navy Chaplain and anthropologist R. Mole published a book on Nine Tribes of Montagnards in I Corps area (the north of South Vietnam). To get all of them as allies, perhaps, gave rise to the phrase for the full compliment, the whole nine yards. But there is admittedly no consensus on this yet. [Update July, 2007: In 1942 Admiral Land used the words "the whole nine yards" in testimony at a Senate Defense hearing on a rapid increase in shipbuilding at nine new shipyards; that may be the literal origin of the later, metaphoric phrase.] As Saul Lieberman reportedly said in introducing G. Scholem's lectures on Kabbalah, "Nonsense is nonsense, but the study of nonsense is scholarship." (Though other tradents report that he said "history," not "study.") In any case, this is a fine reference work. [An example of the flawed index: "Murphy's Law," "Anything that can go wrong..." (and variants, listed in "Modern Proverbs" on p. 529) is not indexed either under "Murphy" or "wrong."--something went wrong.]