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The Yale Book of Quotations
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.
1104 pages, Hardcover
First published October 1, 2006
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185 people want to read
About the author
Joseph Epstein
105 books114 followersJoseph Epstein is the author of, among other books, Snobbery, Friendship, and Fabulous Small Jews. He has been editor of American Scholar and has written for the New Yorker, the Atlantic, Commentary, Town and Country, and other magazines.
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Displaying 1 - 4 of 4 reviews
September 9, 2018
"Keep calm and carry on" is one quote missing from this compendium. Charles Schulz's bastardization of Theodore Roosevelt, "Walk softly and carry a beagle," is another. Believe me. I looked. And while Teddy's quote is rightly incorporated, how can an editor claim to meaningfully collect Martin Luther King, Jr.'s bon mot wisdom without including, "Never drive a man so low he has to hate you?" I cherish that one, and plan to use it as an epigrammatic preface to some larger work some day.
We do get, "Freedom is never voluntarily given by the oppressor; it must be demanded by the oppressed." However, the editors here have somehow neglected to draw a connection to Frederick Douglass prior utterance, "Power concedes nothing without a demand. It never did and it never will."
Huh. At least both quotes made the grade. The careful reader will spot plenty of other missing cross-references that didn't. So while we are treated to the sage advice of General Bernard Montgomery, "Rule 1, on page 1 of the Book of War, is: 'Do not March on Moscow'….[Rule 2] is: 'Do not go fighting with your land armies in China,'" we are deprived of William Goldman's clever appendix: "Third, and only slightly less well-known is 'Never bet against a Sicilian when death is on the line!" Shame this omission.(Offered by me here as a public service by way of "The Princess Bride," naturally.) Oh, and be sure to first build up a tolerance for iocane powder.
And while I'm busy taking smug notice of notably snubbed quips, whence Douglas Adams' bevy of Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy selections sans, "What's so bad about being drunk? Ask a glass of water." or even a fine "So long, and thanks for all the fish?" In lieu of these, we are granted, "Don't Panic," alongside six more and an additional five from other contexts.
To some extent, the editors suffer from bouts of lazy quoting. For example, Cole Porter is feted through multiple entries from "You're the Top," while "Do do that voodoo that you do so well" is forgotten.
Editorial idiosyncrasies abound: look up "want" in the index, and you'll find Arlo Guthrie's "You can get anything you want at Alice's Restaurant," but not the Rolling Stones' "You can't always get what you want, but if you try sometime you just might find you get what you need." The latter of these *is* nonetheless captured by Shapiro's team (thus proving the quote true), albeit not as an entry attributed to the Rolling Stones, but rather alphabetized under 'J,' for Mick Jagger and Keith Richards jointly. So, bring that knowledge with you. Also, for those keeping score at home: Yale rates Lennon/McCartney 26; Jagger/Richards 16; solo Lennon 13; solo Harrison, Jagger & Richards 1 apiece; and McCartney & Starkey -- collectively and individually -- 0. Speaking of Lennons (Lenins), Vladimir Ilyich Ulyanov rates 12, but grant Karl Marx 13 marks, plus another 8 when working on the side of the Engels. (See, e.g., Disraeli at quote 21.) Isn't this fun?
And while I'm waxing a bit socialist, I beg to wonder whither lies, "Help! I'm being oppressed!" This, despite duplicate Monty Python quotes 10 & 11: "Listen, strange women lyin' in ponds distributin' swords is no basis for a system of government!" and "You can't expect to wield supreme executive power just because some watery tart threw a sword at you," each from the mud eaters of "Holy Grail.") Still and all, it's entries like the footnote at Monty Python entry #7 (regarding Spam) that makes this a book worth reading. Oh, heck, why not quote it outright:plagiarist, er, allusionist. "A cold coming we had of it/Just the worst time of the year/For a journey, and such a long journey:/The ways deep and the weather sharp,/The very dead of winter," for example, originates in the prose of Lancelot Andrewes in 1622, and not Eliot's 1927 "Journey of the Magi" (quoted here as item 68 of 127 similar excerpts, of which at least 15% made their first appearance nearly verbatim elsewhere). So when Eliot in 1920 wrote, "Immature poets imitate; mature poets steal," he knew of whence he spoke.
Yet turnaround is fair play. Eliot's comment surely begot Blank's "Good composers do not imitate, they steal," for example, and I did not know to attribute that to T.S. until now. Incidentally, "Good composers…?" Not to be found here. And so now my ramblings have come full circle (Shakespeare entry #315 of 455 total -- 55 more than what the (King James only) Bible is afforded and 450 more than merit Comden and Green -- see King Lear, Act V, iii, line 172). In such a vein, could I go on and on.
Funny, they do have a lot of quotes here. This *is* a quote book, after all. So no worries. As my last allusion to Monty Python is meant to imply, the world's cabinet of quotable curiosities contains far more claptrap than any cultural compendium could conceivably encapsulate. You can't reasonably expect anyone's mental library to overlap entirely, nor would you want it to. At least, not quite.
Wait, who said that? Never mind.
Keep calm and carry on.
We do get, "Freedom is never voluntarily given by the oppressor; it must be demanded by the oppressed." However, the editors here have somehow neglected to draw a connection to Frederick Douglass prior utterance, "Power concedes nothing without a demand. It never did and it never will."
Huh. At least both quotes made the grade. The careful reader will spot plenty of other missing cross-references that didn't. So while we are treated to the sage advice of General Bernard Montgomery, "Rule 1, on page 1 of the Book of War, is: 'Do not March on Moscow'….[Rule 2] is: 'Do not go fighting with your land armies in China,'" we are deprived of William Goldman's clever appendix: "Third, and only slightly less well-known is 'Never bet against a Sicilian when death is on the line!" Shame this omission.(Offered by me here as a public service by way of "The Princess Bride," naturally.) Oh, and be sure to first build up a tolerance for iocane powder.
And while I'm busy taking smug notice of notably snubbed quips, whence Douglas Adams' bevy of Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy selections sans, "What's so bad about being drunk? Ask a glass of water." or even a fine "So long, and thanks for all the fish?" In lieu of these, we are granted, "Don't Panic," alongside six more and an additional five from other contexts.
To some extent, the editors suffer from bouts of lazy quoting. For example, Cole Porter is feted through multiple entries from "You're the Top," while "Do do that voodoo that you do so well" is forgotten.
Editorial idiosyncrasies abound: look up "want" in the index, and you'll find Arlo Guthrie's "You can get anything you want at Alice's Restaurant," but not the Rolling Stones' "You can't always get what you want, but if you try sometime you just might find you get what you need." The latter of these *is* nonetheless captured by Shapiro's team (thus proving the quote true), albeit not as an entry attributed to the Rolling Stones, but rather alphabetized under 'J,' for Mick Jagger and Keith Richards jointly. So, bring that knowledge with you. Also, for those keeping score at home: Yale rates Lennon/McCartney 26; Jagger/Richards 16; solo Lennon 13; solo Harrison, Jagger & Richards 1 apiece; and McCartney & Starkey -- collectively and individually -- 0. Speaking of Lennons (Lenins), Vladimir Ilyich Ulyanov rates 12, but grant Karl Marx 13 marks, plus another 8 when working on the side of the Engels. (See, e.g., Disraeli at quote 21.) Isn't this fun?
And while I'm waxing a bit socialist, I beg to wonder whither lies, "Help! I'm being oppressed!" This, despite duplicate Monty Python quotes 10 & 11: "Listen, strange women lyin' in ponds distributin' swords is no basis for a system of government!" and "You can't expect to wield supreme executive power just because some watery tart threw a sword at you," each from the mud eaters of "Holy Grail.") Still and all, it's entries like the footnote at Monty Python entry #7 (regarding Spam) that makes this a book worth reading. Oh, heck, why not quote it outright:
Monty Python's Flying Circus (television series) episode 25 (1970). Spam is a trademark of Hormel Foods for a brand of canned spiced ham. In this skit, the words are chanted by Vikings sitting in a restaurant. The skit is often said to be the source for the term spam referring to unsolicited bulk e-mail. This theory is probably erroneous, however, because the earliest documented uses of spam in this sense seem to derive from the tendency of spam to splatter messily when hurled, but Python probably influenced the development of this meaning.What else can a reader of this work pick up? O, that T.S. Eliot was quite the
Yet turnaround is fair play. Eliot's comment surely begot Blank's "Good composers do not imitate, they steal," for example, and I did not know to attribute that to T.S. until now. Incidentally, "Good composers…?" Not to be found here. And so now my ramblings have come full circle (Shakespeare entry #315 of 455 total -- 55 more than what the (King James only) Bible is afforded and 450 more than merit Comden and Green -- see King Lear, Act V, iii, line 172). In such a vein, could I go on and on.
Funny, they do have a lot of quotes here. This *is* a quote book, after all. So no worries. As my last allusion to Monty Python is meant to imply, the world's cabinet of quotable curiosities contains far more claptrap than any cultural compendium could conceivably encapsulate. You can't reasonably expect anyone's mental library to overlap entirely, nor would you want it to. At least, not quite.
Wait, who said that? Never mind.
Keep calm and carry on.
August 23, 2008
probably one of the best investments i have ever made. thousands of quotes from many different people throughout all of history. I am currently going front to back. i'm in the mid e's. a great coffee table book and i recommend marking the ones you like with a pen.
June 28, 2015
I wrote a substantial review of this book for the Yale Daily News Magazine.
Brief summary:
This is an enormous book with something interesting on every page. I mean, it's literally an attempt to take the 10,000 most interesting things ever spoken or written and put them into a single book. And it is a surprisingly successful attempt: Fred Shapiro is a fantastic editor.
You shouldn't attempt to read this in one setting, or even two, but you should read the preview text. If you like the first few pages, you'll like the rest, even if it takes you a few months to get through all of them. (Plus, think how smart you'll sound at parties after you've memorized a few versatile quotations!)
Brief summary:
This is an enormous book with something interesting on every page. I mean, it's literally an attempt to take the 10,000 most interesting things ever spoken or written and put them into a single book. And it is a surprisingly successful attempt: Fred Shapiro is a fantastic editor.
You shouldn't attempt to read this in one setting, or even two, but you should read the preview text. If you like the first few pages, you'll like the rest, even if it takes you a few months to get through all of them. (Plus, think how smart you'll sound at parties after you've memorized a few versatile quotations!)
April 1, 2009
They don't have the best quotations, and I wonder why they included many that they did, also the layout is not the best. Prefer quotations books laid out with topics, etc.
Most quotations are unusable, for example movie titles etc. Indeed the book moves away from the staples of English literature and into american pop culture. Not necessarily a good move.
Most quotations are unusable, for example movie titles etc. Indeed the book moves away from the staples of English literature and into american pop culture. Not necessarily a good move.
Displaying 1 - 4 of 4 reviews