Quotations
All About Quotations
Who is Quoted?
When compiling a dictionary of quotations, the first aim is to include material
about which a question is likely to be asked. This means that we pay particular
attention to quotations which we know from our monitoring of the language to
be in the public mind.
Who, when, where...?
Quotations can come from any source, from the Bible and Shakespeare, to Bart
Simpson. ('I always have a quotation for everything - it saves original thinking'
- Dorothy L. Sayers). Famous quotations are sometimes deliberately alluded to:
at the Democratic Convention in 2000, Caroline Kennedy Schlossberg evoked the
memory of her father John F. Kennedy in her assertion that it was her generation's
turn to prove that 'the New Frontier was not a place in time but a timeless
call'.
Other quotations, less immediately familiar, may be encountered in a high-profile
source. In 1997, when the American Judge Hiller Zobel reduced the conviction
of the British teenager Louise Woodward from murder to manslaughter, he referred
to the assertion of the 18th-century American statesman and lawyer John Adams
that the law must be 'deaf as an adder to the clamours of the populace'. In
a less serious context, during the London Mayoral election of May 2000, the
official Labour candidate Frank Dobson greeted the news of Ken Livingstone's
candidature with the words 'The ego has landed'.
Sometimes a news story will highlight words from the past: in 1999 the discovery
on Everest of the body of the climber George Mallory, lost on the mountain in
1924, reminded the world of Mallory's declared reason for climbing Everest,
'Because it's there'.
On other occasions, public interest in a quotation may be signalled by a letter
to a newspaper, a reference in a broadcast, or simply by an enquiry to Oxford
for one of our readers.
A single instance of use is interesting, but we are aware that everyone has
their own personal stock of quotations. In the last few years, the existence
of the Internet has allowed us to test the currency of a quotation. It is not
uncommon to find that a quotation which is not yet included in a dictionary
has already found a place on a number of personal websites.
Voices from past and present
Choosing material from so wide a range is what gives our books their diverse
and entertaining range - and lends support to Winston Churchill's comment in
his autobiographical My Early Life, 'It is a good thing for an uneducated
man to read books of quotations'.
How do I find the quotations I'm after?
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