Genealogy Books - The Yale Book of Quotations

Spotlight customer reviews:
Customer Rating:

Summary: Fantastic!
Comment: I won't give a detailed review, plenty great ones here which I agree with! Besides more
contemporary, it still has classic people and many of it. Shakespeare, the Bible, Socrates,
Voltaire. But definitely more of a focus on American people.

It has many many quotes
from my favorite writers, speakers, thinkers, poets. Compared with that of Oxford's, (my favorites)
it kills it. Twain has pages devoted to him as he rightly should here, whereas Oxford gives him a
barely measly page.

Besides being fun and more modern, it traces back the origin it's
really cool. It's smaller than some of the other quotation books (like Oxford's) but imo has a lot
more to offer certainly in terms of American writers/etc. (Yet this has more quotes from Churchill
than Oxford's... so... who knows hehe =)

Customer Rating:

Summary: Entertaining as well as Enlightening
Comment:
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 saluting a new flag hoisted on his ship: "I name thee Old Glory." William Driver
(1821)

"The most important aspect of our [Israel's] policy must be our ever-present,
manifest desire to institute complete equality for the Arab citizens living in our midst.... The
attitude we adopt toward the Arab minority will provide the real test of our moral standards as a
people." Albert Einstein (1955)

"You know the world is going crazy when the best rapper
is a white guy, the best golfer is a black guy, the tallest guy in the NBA is Chinese, the Swiss
hold the America's Cup, France is accusing the U.S. of arrogance, and Germany doesn't want to go to
war." Chris Rock (quoted in Calgary Sun in 2003)

"Nowadays people know the price of
everything and the value of nothing." Oscar Wilde, The Picture of Dorian Gray (1891)
/>Using meticulous research to trace quotations to their original sources, Fred R. Shapiro was able
to determine the validity of a claim such as Yogi Berra's, "I really didn't say everything I said."
He probably didn't make all the statements attributed to him but he did make that claim, Shapiro
confirms, during an interview by Sports Illustrated in 1986. Shapiro will gratefully welcome
corrections of information provided in this volume as well as suggestions of new quotations for
future editions. Submit them to fred.shapiro@yale.edu or www.quotationdictionary.com.

Customer Rating:

Summary: It is what it is
Comment: This is a great reference book. A good read for those seeking trivia. Glad I have it.

Customer Rating:

Summary: Catches up with English usage
Comment: I really appreciate the more contemporary quotations in this book, including the ads. This is the
language we speak today, and we all make reference to these expressions, so it's good to know where
they came from--keeps us from being total dodos!

Customer Rating:

Summary: The best which has been thought and said - updated
Comment: What is a 'quotation'?
It is something which someone has said which has been repeated so often
so as to in effect become part of the collective consciousness. It is a 'saying' which has become
'immortal' at least for the foreseeable future.
The YBQ seems to understand however that the
foreseeable future is not forever and so reduces the space it gives to pre- modern quotations and
adds more from contemporary American life. It includes less matter than its ertswhile predecessor
the 'Oxford Dictionary of Quotations' but provides more spice and story. It too uses the most modern
of electronic means in hunting down the ' true source' of its quotations. It for instance will not
rest content with attributing Henry Kissinger the well- known quotation 'Academic politics is so
bitter, because the stakes are so low' but traces it back to a Columbia University political -
scientist Wallace S. Sayre who reportedly repeatedly said this in the early 1950's. Editor Shapiro
seems to take special interest in providing carefully researched attributions for the quotations.

All in all works like this are an unending source of 'dipping in' reading. Like the Talmudic
sea there is no end to them and one can begin anywhere get lost in the middle and remain there for
an unreasonable period of time.
There is no end to the next interesting thing which may come
up anywhere.
One of course will always find no matter how comprehensive a 'missed quotation'
from an author one especially favors.
I would only say that with the rise of the 'Internet
Culture' and with so many millions of people making their gems of wisdom available to the worldwide
readership that perhaps a corollary to Warhol's famous five minutes of fame for everyone should be
instituted in the next great quotation work. That one should be one in which each human being is
given a chance to contribute their own favorite gem to the world.
A signature- sentence or
sound- bite for each 'MySpace' sounder- off.
In the meantime however the 'Yale Book of
Quotations' is a tremendous treasure of memorable sayings which no doubt will be much mulled, and
highly enjoyed by its readers.

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