The Yale book of quotations

1093 Pages·2006·6.66 MB·English

by  Fred R. Shapiro

T H E
Y A L E
B O O K
O F
Q U O T A T I O N S

T H E
Y A L E
B O O K
O Fi
uotatıons
Q

Edited by Fred R. Shapiro

Foreword by Joseph Epstein

Yale University Press

New Haven and London

Copyright © 2006 by Fred R. Shapiro. Foreword copyright
© 2006 by Joseph Epstein. All rights reserved. This book
may not be reproduced, in whole or in part, including
illustrations, in any form (beyond that copying permitted by
Sections 107 and 108 of the U.S. Copyright Law and except
by reviewers for the public press), without written
permission from the publishers.

Designed by Nancy Ovedovitz, and set in Scala, Didot, and
Syntax types by Tseng Information Systems, Inc. Printed in
the United States of America by R.R. Donnelley & Sons.

Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data
The Yale book of quotations / edited by Fred R. Shapiro ;
foreword by Joseph Epstein.
p. cm.
Includes index.
isbn-13: 978-0-300-10798-2 (hardcover : alk. paper)
isbn-10: 0-300-10798-6 (hardcover : alk. paper)
1. Quotations, English. I. Shapiro, Fred R.
pn6081.y35 2006
082—dc22
2006012317

A catalogue record for this book is available from the British
Library.

The paper in this book meets the guidelines for permanence
and durability of the Committee on Production Guidelines
for Book Longevity of the Council on Library Resources.

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1

To Murray Shapiro, who brought home a quotation dictionary

from the Strand bookstore more than forty years ago;

and

To Robert K. Merton, who stood on the shoulders of giants

and whose own shoulders were very broad indeed

C O N T E N T S

Foreword ix

by Joseph Epstein

Acknowledgments xiii

Introduction xvii

Q U O T A T I O N S 1

Special Sections

Advertising Slogans, 7

Anonymous, 20

Anonymous (Latin), 22

Ballads, 41

Film Lines, 258

Folk and Anonymous Songs, 276

Modern Proverbs, 526

Nursery Rhymes, 556

Political Slogans, 597

Proverbs, 607

Radio Catchphrases, 626

Sayings, 667

Television Catchphrases, 747

Keyword Index 853

Credits 1068

F O R E W O R D

The Art of Quotation

Joseph Epstein

Presented with a dictionary of quotations,
the first thing a writer of normal vanity—nor-
mal for a writer, please understand, insane
for anyone else—does is look to see whether
anything he or she has written has made it
into the work at hand. Having checked this
in The Yale Book of Quotations, and having
found that none of my mots has herein been
immortalized, I am of course dejected, but
as F. Scott Fitzgerald writes, I ‘‘beat on,’’ like
a boat ‘‘against the current.’’ (And I know
I’ve got that right because I verified it in this
book.)

A dictionary of quotations is a useful refer-

ence work that can also be, I won’t say a work
of literature, but one that, through its editor’s
selections, yields pleasure in its own right. It
can provide a guide of sorts to the spirit of the
time in which it was compiled and published.
Even a cursory reading of Fred R. Shapiro’s
Yale Book of Quotations shows a strong in-
crease over its two main rivaling volumes,
The Oxford Dictionary of Quotations and Bart-
lett’s Familiar Quotations, in material from
American literature and journalism, popular
culture, computer culture, and contemporary
proverbs.

Although I am normally conservative in

matters of culture, I think Mr. Shapiro is
correct to make these changes in emphasis.
Both Bartlett’s and Oxford have been weighted
heavily in favor of English literature, and it

may now be time for this to change. Even
though, as Henry James well said, ‘‘It takes a
great deal of history to produce even a little
literature,’’ cultural leadership usually follows
political power, and for the past fifty or so
years it has become apparent that the United
States has been playing with far and away the
largest stacks of chips before it.

Many moons ago dictionaries of quota-

tions may have been less needed than they
are today. In those good/bad old days, people
walked around with entire poems and all
the Shakespearean soliloquies in their heads.
Today, Harold Bloom can from memory quote
seven or eight yards of the Faerie Queen, but
this has come to seem an idiot-savantish act,
whose only possible use is to have him called
in to end dull parties by sending everyone
home with glazed eyeballs.

Today we also have new media from which

to glean our quotations. Some may look upon
the inclusion of quotations from movies in
The Yale Book of Quotations as a species of
dumbing down. I don’t happen to believe it
is. The thirty or forty genuinely fine Ameri-
can movies have produced many notable
lines. Sometimes a notable line or two is all
a movie really has to offer. Mr. Shapiro in-
cludes the famous sentences of the Mexican
banditos, now paraphrased in so many ways
in comic bits, in The Treasure of Sierra Madre:
‘‘Badges, to god-damned hell with badges!

x
f o r e w o r d

We have no badges. In fact, we don’t need
badges. I don’t have to show you any stinking
badges.’’ (The reader will note, however, that
this quotation is included under the writer’s
name, B. Traven, from his 1935 book rather
than the later 1948 movie.) He also includes
nine quotations from Casablanca, perhaps the
most quoted American movie of all. (Regret-
tably, Mr. Shapiro does not quote the line of
Humphrey Bogart’s—which I not long ago
quoted against a pretentious writer invoking
psychiatric jargon—when he takes away the
revolvers of Elisha Cook in The Maltese Fal-
con: ‘‘The cheaper the gunsel, the gaudier the
patter.’’ I quoted from memory—going back
thirty or so years—and hope I got it right.)

As contemporary writers go, I am highly

quotatious. I enjoy quoting other writers, and
the benefits of my doing so are manifold.
One of the things quoting does is allow me to
have fellows like Thucydides or Nietzsche or
Paul Valéry make or agree with or otherwise
reinforce such points as I myself attempt to
make. A number of magazines I have writ-
ten for pay by the word, not only my words
but also those I’ve used of La Rochefoucauld,
Henry James, and George Santayana. I’ve
not checked the tab, but I must owe all these
guys, and a great many others, thousands of
dollars. Try to collect. Now, those three words
sound as if they come from a Clint Eastwood
movie, but I don’t find them in The Yale Book
of Quotations, and if they aren’t there, they
aren’t likely to be elsewhere, for this work is
better on famous lines from movies than any
previous work of its kind.

A writer can get into a vast deal of trouble

through misquotation. If you ever want to
receive lots of mail, I recommend you get
a Shakespeare quote wrong in a magazine
or newspaper. I haven’t yet done so, but I

edited a magazine in which another writer
did, and—this was before e-mail—the U.S.
Postal Service cleaned up. The moral of this
story is to have a book like this one around
and to use it.

A small number of people are fortunate

in having witty sayings attributed to them
that they in fact never uttered. Some in this
exalted category include Oscar Wilde, Mark
Twain, Dorothy Parker, H. L. Mencken, and
Winston Churchill. The utterances in ques-
tion are usually so characteristically in the
style of these people that it seems they ought
to have said them even if in fact they didn’t.

A case perhaps half in point. I once quoted

Mark Twain to cap an opening paragraph in
an essay I wrote about Ambrose Bierce for
The New Yorker. The paragraph claimed that
there is going to be a special neighborhood in
hell for cynics, of whom Bierce of course was
one, and if you like conversation, it figured to
be a charming neighborhood indeed. I con-
cluded my paragraph by writing, ‘‘‘Heaven
for climate,’ as Mark Twain said, ‘hell for con-
versation.’’’ I never checked the quotation.
I hadn’t in fact even ever read it but had heard
it long before in Hal Holbrook’s famous im-
personation of Mark Twain. An earnest and
industrious fact-checker at The New Yorker
reported to me that he had looked up the quo-
tation in three different books of quotations
and finally found, in Bergen Evans’s Dictio-
nary of Quotations, a note to the effect that
this quotation is frequently misattributed to
Mark Twain but was first in a play written
by James M. Barrie (the Peter Pan man). The
actual quotation is not as I had it, but in fact is
‘‘Heaven for conversation. Hell for company.’’
I note that Mr. Shapiro gives it back to Twain,
citing, from the author’s Notebooks, the full
line: ‘‘Dying man couldn’t make up his mind

f o r e w o r d
x i

which place to go to—both have their advan-
tages, ‘heaven for climate, hell for company!’’’
It is too late to correct my fact-checker, but
I have great confidence that the editor of the
volume now in your hands has got it right.

Quotation is an art—a minor art, to be

sure, but a genuine one. The art is twofold.
The first has to do with knowing when to use
a quotation—at what precise point to drop
it into a paragraph or into one’s own conver-
sation. One must do so with authority, but
it must always seem an easy authority. So
I’m quoting Dionysius of Halicarnassus—
hey, baby, no big deal, really. Well-used, but
never exhibitionistic, quotation establishes
one’s bona fides as a person of reasonably
wide culture and reading. Getting a quota-
tion wrong—‘‘Those who ignore the past,’’ as
Henry Adams used to say, ‘‘are condemned
to relive it’’ (it is, of course, George Santayana
who said, ‘‘Those who cannot remember the
past are condemned to repeat it’’)—under-
mines one’s authority, after which all else
begins to crumble. A serious dictionary of
quotations, regularly used, prevents this from
happening.

The second fold of the art of quotation

is in the selection of whom to quote. One
ought to quote only people whose utterances
are unmistakably amusing, or subtle, or
learned, or profound. The world must also
have agreed that they are any or all of these
things. Furthermore, their words must not
have been done in by time: Erik Erikson,
who is included in this book for his coinage
of identity crisis, once seemed a highly quot-
able fellow, but the degradation of Freudian
psychoanalysis over the past three decades
has caused his intellectual stock to drop pre-
cipitously. (Freud, on the other hand, is still
selectively quotable, but never on the goofy

stuff: the Oedipus Complex, money is feces,
and all that rubbish.) It has been said that you
are what you eat; among writers and scholars,
you are, I believe, whom you quote.

Shakespeare and the Bible are always quot-

able, but, as someone once said, so many
clichés! What to do about both is a dreadful
challenge for any compiler of quotations. The
temptation must be to remove only the stage
directions from Shakespeare (except, perhaps,
for the one Mr. Shapiro includes from The
Winter’s Tale, ‘‘Exit, pursued by a bear’’) and
print his plays entire; and to do something
similar with the Bible, removing only the
begats. The Yale Book of Quotations provides
less from both than does The Oxford Dictio-
nary of Quotations, which does not seem to
me a grave subtraction, since the material in
question is readily available elsewhere.

Besides, I’d rather see the extra space used

for Mae West quotations. It’s interesting to
note (and Mr. Shapiro does so) that Miss
West’s famous line ‘‘Come up and see me
sometime’’ is a misquotation of the real line
in the movie She Done Him Wrong, ‘‘Why
don’t you come up sometime and see me?,’’
which is less successful rhythmically—a case
of misquotation marking an improvement.
The Yale Book also offers famous misattribu-
tions and questionable attributions, including,
in the case of Mae West, ‘‘You ought to get
out of those wet clothes and into a dry mar-
tini,’’ from West’s 1937 screenplay Every Day’s
a Holiday. Other sources attribute this quo-
tation to Robert Benchley, but Mr. Shapiro
happily returns it to Miss West.

The Yale Book of Quotations is less self-

censorious than its predecessor volumes, by
which I mean that it allows profanity. (Al-
though recent editions of Oxford are less than
prudish, too, for that volume gives, as does

x i i
f o r e w o r d

Yale, W. C. Fields’s reason for never drinking
water: ‘‘Fish fuck in it.’’) Allowing profane
remarks under the auspices of so esteemed
an institution as Yale University may well be
thought controversial, though certainly much
less so than twenty or fifty years ago. Dur-
ing the years 1974 to 1997 I edited the Phi
Beta Kappa quarterly The American Scholar
and allowed no rough language in its pages.
I used to tell contributors whom I wouldn’t
permit to use it that they ought to consider
themselves rare and privileged creatures to
have been censored so late in the twentieth
century. I use profanity in my own speech—
and have since the age of eight, when I was
sent away to a boys’ summer camp—and find
some of it highly amusing, but I felt that it
was a good slice or two below the level of dig-
nity permitted in a magazine published by Phi
Beta Kappa.

Rightly or wrongly, I now feel that the cul-

ture has changed such that to exclude brilliant
remarks or remarks on what used to be called
‘‘blue’’ or ‘‘off-color’’ subjects would constitute
genuine prudery. And thus readers of this
book are no longer sheltered, for instance,
from the wit of Groucho Marx when he said
‘‘I’ve been around so long, I knew Doris Day
before she was a virgin.’’ (Although they still

won’t find herein a remark attributed to that
unruly wit Oscar Levant having to do with
Arthur Miller, Marilyn Monroe’s conversion
to Judaism, kosher food, and oral sex that I
believe I shall let readers assemble for them-
selves.)

Mr. Shapiro includes many of the famous

deathbed quotations, from Goethe’s ‘‘More
light!’’ to Robert E. Lee’s ‘‘Strike the tent.’’
Some of these are still in the fluttering flux of
controversy—were they really the last words?
Reading the Bible in bed near the time of his
death, W. C. Fields is supposed to have said,
‘‘Looking for loopholes.’’ I myself prefer a
longer Fieldsian deathbed quotation that has
the old boy in a hospital room in wintry New
York, when he hears newsboys hawking their
papers in the street below. ‘‘Something’s got
to be done about them,’’ Fields says. ‘‘Poor
little urchins, no doubt ill-clad, improperly
nourished, something’s got to be done,’’ and
then closes his eyes. Twenty seconds later, he
opens his eyes and says, ‘‘On second thought,
screw ’em.’’

Not on second thought, however, but on

first, I recommend that you often consult
and anticipate being charmed by the splendid
work of painstaking research and wide culture
that is The Yale Book of Quotations.

A C K N O W L E D G M E N T S

Staff at Yale University Press were instrumen-
tal in the creation of this book. Rob Flynn, my
acquiring editor, was willing to push for an
ambitious vision of a new compilation of quo-
tations, and he more than anyone else helped
me with the initial shaping of the work. John
Ryden, former director of the press, provided
crucial support for the book’s acceptance, and
this support has been generously continued
by his successor, John Donatich. Lauren
Shapiro, former associate editor for reference,
coordinated the book’s march to completion
and provided exemplary energy and attention
to quality. Other key individuals at the press
have included Mary Jane Peluso, publisher
for languages; Jessie Dolch, copyeditor; John
Colucci, who set up the database for the book;
Marc Benigni, database analyst; Jonathan
Brent, editorial director; Steve Colca, edito-
rial assistant; Heidi Downey, former senior
manuscript editor; Nancy Ovedovitz, design
manager; Jeffrey Schier, senior manuscript
editor; Timothy Shea, electronic promotion
manager; Tina Weiner, associate director
and publishing director; and Jenya Weinreb,
managing editor.

Seven senior research editors and five

research editors were indispensable to the
compilation of The Yale Book of Quotations.
The senior research editors verified many
of the quotations and related information
and answered numerous queries, often sug-

gesting improvements along the way. They
are all extremely talented reference librari-
ans or researchers (including a tax lawyer, a
metalcraftsman, and a genealogist) who con-
tributed great skill and wide-ranging knowl-
edge: Reed C. Bowman, Thomas Fuller, Jane
Garry, John R. Henderson, Denise L. Mont-
gomery, Ted Nesbitt, and Suzanne Watkins.
The research editors are all crack reference
librarians or researchers, as well, and an-
swered queries splendidly, primarily through
the Stumpers Internet mailing list described
in the introduction below: Daphne Drewello,
Jeffrey C. Graf, David Kresh, Dennis Lien,
and Barry Popik. Barry Popik brilliantly used
print and online methods to improve the his-
torical record of many important sayings and
phrases.

Thanks also to the following individuals

and institutions who responded to quota-
tion queries on Stumpers or through other
avenues: Dale Ahlquist, Charles R. Ander-
son, Douglas A. Anderson, Ronald Aron-
son, John M. Baker, Howard Berlin, Peter E.
Blau, Lincoln P. Bloomfield, M. Edward
Borasky, John S. Bowman, Buzz Brown,
Donna Burton, Sam Clements, Charles Cody,
Bonnie Collier, Christopher Collier, Andrew
Derby, John P. Dyson, Charles Early, Even
Flood, John Franklin, Ruth Frear, Lois Fun-
dis, Gandhi Institute for Nonviolence, Jon
George, Imran Ghory, Nina Gilbert, Jonathon

x i v
a c k n o w l e d g m e n t s

Green, Shari Haber, Donna Halper, Katherine
Harper, Charles S. Harris, Hartford Public
Library, Brian Hartigan, Anne Herbert, John
Hollander, Laurence Horn, IBM Archives,
Sue Kamm, Ralph Keyes, Allen Koenigsberg,
James A. Landau, Judith Legman, Jonathan E.
Lighter, Jim Long, Michael J. ‘‘Orange Mike’’
Lowrey, Kee Malesky, Paul Mariani, Mark
Twain Papers, Scott Matheson, Jennifer E.
McCarty, Paul Metz, Craig Miller, Sylvia
Milne, Carol L. Moberg, Bill Mullins, John
Nann, Kent Olson, The Oxford English Dictio-
nary, Mark Petty, Tsviya Polani, Stan Price,
Nigel Rees, Laura Reiner, Graeme Rymill,
Alan N. Shapiro, Andy Shapiro, James Shapiro,
Jesse Sheidlower, Carole Shmurak, J. Shore,
Jules Siegel, Josh Silverstein, Stuart Y. Silver-
stein, Andrew Szanton, Bonnie Taylor-Blake,
George Thompson, Sal Towse, United Media,
Ivan Van Laningham, William C. Waterhouse,
Kerry A. Webb, Mary Lou White, Don Wigal,
Marilyn Wilkerson, Douglas C. Wilson, Peter
Wimbrow, Kevin W. Woodruff, Keith Wright,
Frank Young, Benjamin Zimmer, and Leonard
Zwilling. Special mention should be made of
five experts who advised on particular areas:
Charles Doyle (modern proverbs), Rosalie
Maggio (women’s quotations), Wolfgang Mie-
der (proverbs and German quotations), Suzy
Platt (political quotations), and Gary Westfahl
(science fiction quotations).

I thank my colleagues at the Yale Law

Library, who were unfailingly supportive of
my obsession with quotations over more than
half a decade, in particular Blair Kauffman,
the director of the library, who granted me
a one-month research leave and was other-
wise a paragon of support. Barbara Amato
and Lauren King obtained countless books
through interlibrary loan for the project.
Others who provided notable encouragement

included Bonnie Collier, Martha Clark, John
Nann, and Scott Matheson. My wife, Jane
Garry, and children, Andy and James, were
even more patient in dealing with a husband
and father once again ‘‘caught in the web of
quotations.’’

Generous financial support for this project

was provided by grants from the Andrew W.
Mellon Foundation. Harriet Zuckerman,
senior vice president of the foundation, was
the sponsor of the grants, which focused on
exploring the usefulness of the JSTOR data-
base for research into quotation and word
origins. Ms. Zuckerman’s sponsorship re-
flected her own interest in the sociology of
knowledge and also the strong interest of her
late husband, the great sociologist Robert K.
Merton, in quotations. Merton coedited a vol-
ume of Social Science Quotations and wrote
a book devoted to a single quotation, On the
Shoulders of Giants: A Shandean Postscript. The
spirit of these two books, at the intersection
of literature, history, and sociological issues
of innovation and diffusion, has been a major
inspiration for The Yale Book of Quotations.
Additional financial support was provided by
William C. McCoy of Chagrin Falls, Ohio.

All quotation dictionaries stand on the

shoulders of their predecessors, which must
be consulted as part of the effort to make sure
that no famous quotations are missed. The
debt to the compilers of earlier works starts
with the indispensable Oxford Dictionary of
Quotations and Bartlett’s Familiar Quotations.
In particular, the sources given for literary
and historical quotations in The Oxford Dic-
tionary of Quotations are marvelously pre-
cise, and many of its pre-1800 citations were
silently accepted for this book. (This is com-
parable to the practice of The Oxford English
Dictionary in silently accepting citations from