The Yale Book of Quotations

See Larger Image	List Price: $50.00 Our Price: $31.50 Your Save: $ 18.50 ( 37% ) Availability: Usually ships in 24 hours Manufacturer: Yale University Press Average Customer Rating:


Binding: Hardcover Dewey Decimal Number: 082 EAN: 9780300107982 ISBN: 0300107986 Label: Yale University Press Manufacturer: Yale University Press Number Of Items: 1 Number Of Pages: 1104 Publication Date: 2006-10-30 Publisher: Yale University Press Studio: Yale University Press
Related Items The Quote Verifier: Who Said What, Where, and When Funny You Should Say That: Amusing Remarks From Cicero to the Simpsons Bartlett's Familiar Quotations: A Collection of Passages, Phrases, and Proverbs Traced to Their Sources in Ancient and Modern Literature (17th Edition) Oxford Dictionary of Humorous Quotations (Oxford Paperback Reference) The Oxford Dictionary of Quotations
Editorial Reviews: This reader-friendly volume contains more than 12,000 famous quotations, arranged alphabetically by author. It is unique in its focus on American quotations and its inclusion of items not only from literary and historical sources but also from popular culture, sports, computers, science, politics, law, and the social sciences. Anonymously authored items appear in sections devoted to folk songs, advertising slogans, television catchphrases, proverbs, and others. For each quotation, a source and first date of use is cited. In many cases, new research for this book has uncovered an earlier date or a different author than had previously been understood. (It was Beatrice Kaufman, not Sophie Tucker, who exclaimed, “I’ve been poor and I’ve been rich. Rich is better!” William Tecumseh Sherman wasn’t the originator of “War is hell!” It was Napoleon.) Numerous entries are enhanced with annotations to clarify meaning or context for the reader. These interesting annotations, along with extensive cross-references that identify related quotations and a large keyword index, will satisfy both the reader who seeks specific information and the curious browser who appreciates an amble through entertaining pages.
Spotlight customer reviews: Customer Rating: Summary: Superb Comment: This is a wonderful collection, reflects a wide and discerning sensibility. Especially good are "film lines." Customer Rating: Summary: Well researched...but incomplete Comment: It is my strong belief that any person, in any profession, can benefit from a well placed quote or two. I purchased this book because good quotes are often overused and poorly sourced, and a good source of strong quotations can be invaluable. I was pretty disappointed with the book once I got it. The emphasis seems to be on determining the exact wording and true original source of the quote: Very important details indeed, but accurate boring quotes are still boring quotes. The Yale Book of Quotations seems to have missed the point. Often we want to motivate, prove a point, or illustrate an idea with the use of quotations, and this utility of quotes should have been the primary focus. I find the book to be only 1/2 as useful as I had hoped (deciding between 2 and 3 stars was tough). When I think of the hours spent by researchers and collaborators to find an original source, my mouse creeps toward the middle star. When I think about the full page dedicated to Mick Jagger and Keith Richards quotes, which are, in fact, all excerpts from original sources that are available today (you guessed it, Rolling Stones albums), my pointer jumps sharply to the left. Its not a bad book, just not what I expected. Not as useful, not as interesting. So don't make the mistake I did, and find out what this book offers before you make the purchase. Customer Rating: Summary: Terrifically entertaining and useful Comment: I have never owned a "quotations book," and I never had the desire to own one. But, getting ready to deliver a new speech, I now have the desire to pepper it with entertaining quotations, to illustrate my points. To do so, one can go off of one's memory, but, as Joseph Epstein points out in his witty introduction, one will miss the mark: the quote and the attribution will most likely be wrong. So much for illustrating one's point! Still, what I like most about this book is the sheer entertainment value. I keep it next to me on my desk, and, in a free moment, I would rather graze through it than surf the Internet. The quotes are obviously weighted towards American authors and pop culture icons of the last 50 years. It includes famous lines in films, advertising and music culture. The chances that your quotation will hit the mark with your audience are greater with this book. One note of caution: you shouldn't read this book looking for an author's most literate quote. The purpose of the book is to provide the most famous quote and nail down the attribution. Nevertheless, that shouldn't prevent you from deriving immense pleasure from just reading the book from page 1 to 851. 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. More Reviews