21st Century Dictionary of Quotations

by The Princeton Language Institute, Princeton Lang Inst, Barbara Ann Kipfer

At last, an easy to use, comprehensive dictionary of quotations that contains entries from the Bible, Shakespeare, and rock'n'roll. Inside you'll find exciting new quotations from contemporary figures... This description may be from another edition of this product.

• Format: Mass Market Paperback
• Language: English
• ISBN: 0440214475
• ISBN13: 9780440214472
• Release Date: May 1993
• Publisher: Dell
• Length: 624 Pages
• Weight: 0.66 lbs.
• Dimensions: 1.1" x 4.2" x 6.9"

Customer Reviews

A good reference

Given that this is a paperback, it's rather ridiculous and unfair for it to be denigrated for not being some scholarly in-depth all-encompassing encyclopedia. It's meant to be a handy guide to a lot of quotations, some long, some short, some well-known, some not so well-known, on 880 different categories. And if one doesn't find what s/he is looking for in any given category, it refers the reader to the numbers of similar concepts, such as "Contempt (also see concepts 327 [emotions], 689 [rudeness], 698 [sarcasm], 734 [shame])." I've gotten an incredible amount of use out of it for almost ten years now. The only complaints I do have about it are, first, that quite a few of the people listed in the index in the back have since passed on, and I'm not just talking about those who died after the publication year of 1993. I've had to write in their death years by hand. For example, Don Herold, who was born in 1889, has a blank space in the parenthesis, giving the impression he was still alive then, when he actually died in 1966! The editors really should have done a little more homework on that front. And while this is only a paperback reference book, I still wish the quotes had been given some context, like if they came from a song or the speech of a character in a book or movie instead of just something the person wrote or said in real time, or if the person were referring to something in particular and not just making some deep philosophical statement off the cuff. After all, we all know that if you take something out of context, you can interpret it to mean something that the writer or speaker never intended at all, such as the famous George Santayana line, "Those who cannot remember the past are condemned to repeat it," which was actually referring to the danger of repeating historical cycles, and not some kind of warning to learn from things like wars or genocides. But overall, those who are just looking for a good quote to use in a paper or speech or to add to a list of quotes or whatnot aren't going to care that this reference guide isn't as deep as a more encyclopedic reference.