Oxford Dictionary of Modern Quotations

This exciting new edition offers both a vivid picture both of the world today, and an enduring record of the landmark events and key voices leading to it, captured in thousands of memorable quotations. From Scott's Antarctic Expedition in 1912 to the attack on the World Trade Center in 2001, charting watersheds such as the two World Wars as well as the ebbs and flows of popular culture, the quotations gathered here evoke a fascinating picture of the social, political, cultural, and scientific highlights of modern times.
Containing more than 5,000 quotations from authors as diverse as Bertolt Brecht, George W. Bush, Homer Simpson, Carl Sagan, William Shatner, and Desmond Tutu, the dictionary is organized alphabetically by author, with generous cross-referencing and keyword and thematic indexes. This new edition features more than 500 new quotations and 187 new authors. Gathered here are literary figures such as Italo Calvino, J. M. Coetzee, and Toni Morrison; politicians ranging from Franklin D. Roosevelt and Winston Churchill to Rudy Giuliani and Bill Clinton; entertainers such as Halle Berry and Jerry Seinfeld; and star athletes such as David Beckham and Serena Williams. The book includes special sections featuring quotations from cartoons, films, political slogans, famous last words, misquotations, official advice, newspaper headlines and more. Finally, this edition boasts a new and unique selection process, using the largest ongoing language research program in the world, Oxford English Corpus, to ensure that all the most popular and widely-used quotations are here.
Informative and entertaining, stretching from the deeply serious to the frivolous and surreal, The Oxford Dictionary of Modern Quotations, Third Edition, will be a vital part of anyone's reference shelf, perfectly designed to answer the questions, "Who said what...and when...and why?"

New York Times Sunday Magazine

'Well stolen is half written,'' noted the composer Arnold Schoenberg. In quoting this, Daniel Boorstin, the emeritus librarian of Congress, writes: ''Most of us . . . cannot afford a spokesman. But we can all afford a quotation, which gives us many of the same advantages. Then we too can deny that we said it, or if we prefer we can claim credit for choosing so graceful a way of saying it.''

Ah, but what about famous misquotations -- sayings we all accept as part of our language but were never said by the person quoted? A nice bunch of those are collected, as a kind of oddity, in the Oxford Dictionary of Modern Quotations, coming next month.