Quotation Quotations

The Bible... provides no guide to reading the Bible. In fact, it is full of such inconsistencies, contradictions, lacunae, obscurities, baffling tales, and poetic imagery that to quote it at all is to select from conflicting alternative passages. Every quotation is therefore necessarily an interpretation.

I have not always in my dealings with General de Gaulle found quotations from Trafalgar and Waterloo necessarily productive, and he has been very tactful about the Battle of Hastings.

You know what my favourite quotation is?...It's from Chaucer... Criseyde says it, "I am myne owene woman, wel at ese.

Beware the writer who always encloses the word *reality* in quotation marks: He's trying to slip something over on you. Or into you.

Next to the semi-colon, quotation marks seem to be the chief butts of reformatory ardor.

Most anthologists... of quotations are like those who eat cherries... first picking the best ones and winding up by eating everything.

I surround myself with inspirational quotations.

Selective Biblical quotation is a favorite of leftists who interpret the Bible the same way they do the Constitution: as a Chinese menu designed to allow picking and choosing. That's because when many Democrats take the Bible as a whole, they realize how much they despise it.

Books of quotations are an elemental model of how culture is perpetuated, the wisdom of the trite passed on to posterity, to be added to, edited, and modified by subsequent generations.

The difference between my quotations and those of the next man is that I leave out the inverted commas.