These online sources can be used as a starting point to find a quotation, but you should still find and verify the original source. Narrow the focus of your quotation search by "scoping," or limiting the sources you are searching to a particular type or format.
Print materials not only may include the quotation you are researching, but these materials also often include citation information that may be helpful.
Several sources allow you to search the full text of books online:. Local libraries, historical societies, and archives also may provide access to local digitized newspapers. As examples, see:. Search the full text or listen to audio files of famous speeches to find quotations from the original source. Keep in mind, of course, that the person giving the speech may have borrowed language from another source. Search this Guide Search. Finding Quotations.
Researchers at work in the Main Reading Room of the Library of Congress, view towards reference book alcoves. When using an online search engine, we recommend that you: Use quotation marks. Enclosing a phrase in quotation marks will return results with the words you searched exactly how you typed them in order.
Break your quotation into smaller phrases. It's possible that the version of the quotation you start with, even if widely quoted, can include one incorrect or missing word; don't assume you have the quotation verbatim. Break up long quotations into shorter phrases to increase the likelihood of finding the correct quotation, and choose unique key words and phrases that best define what you're looking for.
Use a wildcard to specify unknown and variable words. If you are unsure of the entire phrase or are trying to find all forms of a quotation, using a wildcard will return variations e. Check the help section of the search engine or database to find the correct wildcard. Exclude words. If you are generating a lot of irrelevant results, you can use the minus sign - in many search engines to eliminate results with specific words e.
Limit your sources. And even when it is, there is little overall consensus even in one period let alone across the world or the ages as to just where the boundaries ultimately lie. The notions around quotation flow into many different directions, emphases and viewpoints — and that is only the terms in one language.
In others again it can be idiosyncratic family sayings, quips from television comedians or just tinges in everyday speaking. Genres may or may not be expected to make play with the obtrusive display of particular intersections of voices, quotation marks in diverse forms turned to variegated purposes, and repetitive formulaic expressions sometimes not only permitted but flaunted, while both now and over the centuries translation and parody have provoked conflicting assessments.
Just as what counts as reprehensible plagiarism, what as laudable imitation or originality, what as the mark of creative genius changes over the centuries, so too the objectivising of quoted words is hardly assessed in the same way by all parties even on one occasion let alone across differing settings.
But we cannot easily generalise from such accounts. And even within the relatively agreed conventions of one particular time and place the practice of quoting seems to elude our forays to capture it.
From this perspective quoting is not a clearly separated activity but a constant thread in our processes of communication more generally. All the words and phrases we use and hear were after all at some point learned from others; so too are our repetitions and manipulations of them.
Our debt to tradition through reading and conversation is so massive, our protest or private addition so rare and insignificant, — and this commonly on the ground of other reading or hearing, — that, in a large sense, one would say there is no pure originality.
All minds quote. Old and new make the warp and woof of every moment. There is no thread that is not a twist of these two strands. By necessity, by proclivity, and by delight, we all quote Emerson There is indeed no creation from nothing, or words and voices that start from nowhere.
But it is only part of the truth, and we do well not to follow such formulations too literally or comprehensively nor indeed did Emerson or Bakhtin. Certainly they sensibly jolt us out of narrow-minded perspectives on language and literature and turn our attention to the multiply-layered quality of human interaction. But conflating all human communication with quoting is too simple, if only because it extends the target so widely that its wonderfully variegated texture disappears.
Collapsing quoting into linguistic expression generally leaves unaddressed our awareness — faint and elusive as it often is — that not all words or voices are the same: that we do indeed, to one degree or another and in interestingly variable ways and amidst numerous twists and turns, actively manipulate the words and voices of others.
Ideas and practices shift around within this broad family without their being any one inevitable patterning, moulded as they are not only by current conditions but by legacies from the past, both overt and hidden. In some contexts unnoticed, in others highly exposed and sensitive, there are many paths along which voices and words are authorised, or banned, or selectively displayed, open to some users but not others, or battled over by contending claimants.
This is far from just a pursuit, as some have supposed, of intellectuals or acclaimed cultural elites. This rainbow of actions and ideologies emerges as a long-enduring set of practices that humans in some ways take for granted without really noticing, in others work at, delight in or struggle to control: a deeply-rooted potentiality of human life.
Given its variegated manifestations it should by now be no surprise that quoting can be put to multiple uses, deployed for just about any purpose under the sun. Here too is near-unending diversity. As speech act, quoting can accomplish a multitude of things, from asserting or subverting or manipulating tradition to uplifting in sermon or imposing rigours on the young.
Quotation collections can be exploited as mines or as symbols, prized by some, resented or ignored by others. Short quotes like proverbs or verses from sacred writings can resonate in the memory, interrupt an otherwise smooth text, stir up activism, exert pressure, settle disputes, or persuade others.
Or it can be for self-mockery, parody, satire. A passage can be set up as object for commentary or debate, a voice enact the persona and wisdom of others beyond our current sphere. Typified words and voices can be sounded — not what someone actually said but a subtle note of comment or universality through some notional attribution. As Erasmus, again, has it. Recognising words as coming from elsewhere can endow them with special authority and beauty or, equally, be a means to rejecting or disclaiming them, or of seemingly avoiding personal responsibility even as we bring them forward for notice.
It can be used to avoid taking the credit — but at the same time perhaps gain it indirectly through association with some tradition or figure beyond oneself. This displaying is turned to many purposes: recognised as art, as the object of exegesis or contemplation, as something to be ridiculed or attacked.
The literary device of allusiveness can link in subtle indirect ways to other people, places, times, ideas — even to other dimensions of oneself. Multiple purposes and effects can go along together, or work out differently not only in differing times and places but for differing participants in the same moment. Within this bundle of usages there are near-infinite purposes to which the human activities of quoting can be turned. This is what I have alluded to as the far and near of quoting , its paradoxical duality.
In quoting we simultaneously enact past and present, enstage both ourselves and others. But quoting is pre-eminently so. It deploys words and voices from the past. Even a report of the most recent of conversations rehearses a prior event, while other wordings go back in actuality or perception for years or centuries. Quotations connect to the personages of the past, not just within our families and intimates, but to iconic individuals and symbols of history. Using their words is to associate yourself with an evocative figure of the past.
Dead fish, dead seals, and historically dead beavers. The statement under examination was semantically contained within this prolix remark. An exact match for the shorter statement occurred several years later. Canada was built on dead beavers. Margaret Atwood, Canadian poet. Sarvepalli Radhakrishnan? Desmond MacCarthy? Sissela Bok? Joseph Wood Krutch?
Norman L. Marvin Lowenthal? Henry Hazlitt? Richard Dawkins? Dear Quote Investigator: A system that forces people to embrace absurd beliefs causes damage to their processes of rational thought. These impaired people are more likely to act illogically and destructively.
With encouragement they may act barbarously. Here are three instances from a family of related sayings:. Would you please explore the provenance of these sayings? Quote Investigator: Researchers have been unable to find an exact match for any of these statements in the works of Voltaire. Here is the original French statement followed by three possible translations: 1. Translation Certainly, whoever has the right to make you absurd has the right to make you unjust. Translation Truly, whoever can make you look absurd can make you act unjustly.
Translation Certainly anyone who has the power to make you believe absurdities has the power to make you commit injustices. A larger excerpt appears further below. Voltaire usually received credit for these sayings, and they form a natural family although the precise phrasings and meanings vary. The following overview with dates shows the evolution:.
Translation of Voltaire by Norman L. Would you please help me to identify this author and find a citation? Within the introduction he referred to his difficulties controlling his consumption of alcohol. I have had a wonderful time as a freelance writer, and at one stage of my career was on my way to becoming rich, but I nipped that in the bud. There is no other job for which I was so fitted psychologically and temperamentally, and no other career which would have interfered less with my drinking.
Benjamin Franklin? George S. Gertrude Nelson Andrews? Nicholas Murray Butler? George Lawton? Peter McWilliams? Here are two versions of a humorous and melancholy comment often credited to U. I am skeptical of this attribution because I have been unable to find a solid citation. Would you please help? The phrasing is highly variable, and the two numbers specified fluctuate; hence, this family of sayings is quite difficult to trace.
The earliest match located by QI appeared in April within a St. Louis, Missouri newspaper report about popular orator G.
Marchand who told a large audience that personality was the key to success. Marchand employed a version of the saying based on the years 25 and 1. Niels Bohr?
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