Customer Reviews

The Columbia Dictionary of Quotations

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THE COLUMBIA DICTIONARY OF QUOTATIONS. By Robert Andrews. 1092 pp. New York: Columbia University Press, 1993. ISBN: 0231071949 (hbk.)

This is a marvelous book that one can spend many happy hours with. It contains over 18,000 remarks, witticisms, judgments and observations on 1,500 alphabetically arranged subjects. Some people like to keep such books around for when they need a quotation for a specific purpose, writers and speakers for example. But a far better use for this one is to have it handy for occasional browsing. More than 11,000 of its quotations have never appeared before in a quotation book, and all have been chosen not for their familiarity but for their quality and relevance to the times. They range from the funny and memorable through to the profound, and Andrews has made such an excellent choice that one's greatest wish while reading this book is for a photographic memory. Passages will be found here from Shakespeare and Malcolm X, Lenin and Salman Rushdie, Emily Dickinson and Camille Paglia, Oscar Wilde and Frank Zappa, and a host of others. It's the perfect book for a certain kind of moment, and there's enough here to keep anyone intrigued and entertained for a very long time.

I throughly enjoy this book on a daily basis. It has extreme quotations from a wide variety of interesting and exciting people from the past and present.

I have learned that even though you might not agree with what everyone says, that people are entitled to their opinion, and that is why we as a people are so lucky to have freedom.

I highly recommend this book to people of all ages. It will keep you entertained and it is a wonderful way to get to know yourself in the process.