Quotations have always been supremely effective rhetorical devices, instruments of one-upmanship, ways of supporting any position under the sun with borrowed or stolen authority.

There ought to be something about computers and artificial intelligence [in Bartlett's Familiar Quotations]. Surely somebody somewhere said something memorable.

Quotations have always been supremely effective rhetorical devices, instruments of one-upmanship, ways of supporting any position under the sun with borrowed or stolen authority.

Television, despite its enormous presence, turns out to have added pitifully few lines to the communal memory.