Customer Reviews

The Yale Book of Quotations

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2 star:		(1)
1 star:		(1)

 

 

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.

A copy of this handsome new volume was given to me for my eighty-first birthday, so, at that age having so little time to waste, I immediately set about to test this YBQ against my much older Bartlett's (1968 edition).

YBQ is certainly more fun. Harry S. Truman appears, of course, in both books, but it is the YBQ that quotes Harry's letter to Paul Hume: "I have just read your lousy review [of my daughter's concert] .... You sound like a frustrated old man who never made a success, an eight-ulcer man on a four-ulcer job..." No, nothing like that in good old Bartlett's.

YBQ has the wit, and is obviously more up-to-date, but I must say that Bartlett's is better organized, and has more scholarship, at least scholarship of the kind that I appreciate.

I was happy to see that both books will give you one of my favorite lines of poetry, usually cited in the original French, from Villon: "Mais où sont les neiges d'antan ?" ('But where are the snows of yesteryear ?'). Both books have this line, in both French and English, but only Bartlett's will lead you to it if you look for the French 'neiges' in the index. To find the line in YBQ, you need to look in the index for 'snows,' not actually a word used, even in English, by those who love this line.

Speaking of indexes, well, the YBQ's is awful. It is radically shorter than Bartlett's. It will not lead you to a page number but only to the name of the writer-source of the quotation. And these sources are not always easy to find in the body of the YBQ because the page headings are organized in an eccentric way.

But my biggest problem with the YBQ arises from its quirky way of dealing with disputed attributions. Shapiro, the YBQ's editor, is good about signaling when there is a problem. But he feels called upon to come down on one side or another about whether a given quotation is genuine or spurious.

Here are some examples:

Concerning George Washington and that famous hatchet, Shapiro tells us "apocryphal" (p. 804) without bothering to tell us why he thinks so. Lenin's statement about "useful idiots," Shapiro says, "seems to be a myth" (p. 452). On the other hand, he comes down on the side of authenticity in the case of a statement made by the Nazi-era Pastor Niemöller (p. 551). To his credit, he seems neutral in the case of an alleged statement by Adolf Hitler (p. 361).

These questions of attribution are difficult, and absent a great deal of research, are difficult to make. I think that he is almost certainly wrong about Niemöller, but nobody will expect him to be an expert on everything. It would have been much wiser for him to simply state, in most if not all these cases, that there is doubt about authenticity, to give whatever sources are available, and to let it go at that.

YBQ has a total of 1067 pages. Not bad. But my old Bartlett's has 1750 pages, each one of which seems denser than those of YBQ. Much of the difference comes from the fact that Bartlett's has a magnificent, thorough index of quotations, taking up 593 pages. YBQ's index of 212 pages is no by means puny, but it doesn't compare. Fortunately I do have enough space for both of these works, and they now stand side by side, in uneasy companionship, on my long-suffering shelf.

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.

Amazon has it a bit wrong on this page, as Joseph Epstein wrote the foreword and not the book. This excellent work is edited by Fred R. Shapiro, who also wrote, The Oxford Dictionary of American Legal Quotations. Mr. Shapiro is an associate librarian and lecturer in legal research at the Yale Law School library.

Quotes can be elusive buggers with attributions mistakenly attached to numerous celebrity names and quote books have a reputation of not always being accurate or reporting sources (right or wrong). The Yale Book of Quotations seeks to change that by tracing quotes back to their original source. It took a number of years, a lot of digging through databases, paging through old books and newspapers, and contributions from a dedicated bunch of researchers to make this happen.

Fred R. Shapiro's The Yale Book of Quotations is highly accurate and very useful for people trying to find out who was the first to say what, so if you need to spice up that speech with a couple of useful quotes, or just impress your friends with your quote trivia ability, this book is for you.

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.

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. {Later research showed that Charles W. Dilke [1843-1911] used the saying in 1891; and it is attributed to Dilke by one who knew him.)
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.]

"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.

This is an outstanding collection of quotations, with a strong emphasis on today as well as yesteryear. The approach is fresh. While the book includes the familar standards (Churchill, Shakespeare, Kennedy...) it expands its scope to include pop-icons (e.g., memorable lines from television, theater, movies, even comic strip and cartoon characters). Quotes are arranged by author and, within, in chronological order. The back of the book provides an exhaustive "keyword index" for readers seeking quotes on a particular topic. The presentation is very clean, easily readable. A nice feature, each quote is in context (where and when said) and accompanied by citations to similar sayings (e.g., the phrase "iron curtain" is usually attributed to Winston Churchill in a speech at Fulton, MO in May 1945, but was uttered by Joseph Goebbels (of all people) in the same context the February before.) Unlike ponderous references so familiar, The Yale Book of Quotations is actually fun to read, a few "authors" at a time. Bartletts is going into the attic; this is now my "front line" reference for who said what, when, and why.

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.

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.