Oxford Dictionary of Modern Quotations

Book Overview

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, this 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...

• Format: Paperback
• Language: English
• ISBN: 0199547467
• ISBN13: 9780199547463
• Release Date: October 2008
• Publisher: Oxford University Press, USA
• Length: 496 Pages
• Weight: 1.10 lbs.
• Dimensions: 1.2" x 7.7" x 5.1"

Customer Reviews

Works as a history of modern times in soundbites

This is an attractive book and a lot of fun to read. Just open it anywhere and start reading. You will be amused. There are bon mots from sports stars and politicos, from singers and actors, and from just about anybody famous or halfway so, most of them English speaking with a smattering of Europeans thrown in for a bit of haute culture.There are "Special Categories" such as Advertising Slogans, Cartoons (just the tag lines, not the drawings, including one of my favorites by Peter Steiner showing a dog at the keyboard of a computer who says to another dog, "On the Internet nobody knows you're a dog." Oh boy, how true that is!), Film Titles, Misquotations, Opening Lines (of novels mostly) including George Orwell's "It was a bright cold day in April, and the clocks were striking thirteen." (This, from 1984, is given again under George Orwell.) There's a Thematic Index, "Computers," "Fashion," "Love," etc., and a Keyword Index.Edited by Elizabeth Knowles, who also edits the traditional The Oxford Dictionary of Quotations 5th Ed. (2001), this book might be viewed as a companion to that larger tome. The layout and the organization are similar, but this book is set in a slightly larger type so it is easier to read, but with fewer words per page. The significant difference is that Modern Quotations begins in the twentieth century whereas the larger book knows no time constraints. Consequently, no Karl Marx here, no Charles Darwin, but there is singer Dean Martin who famously observed, "You're not drunk if you can lie on the floor without holding on."To be fair, I should note that scientists are also quoted, and a lot of them. Richard Dawkins, Albert Einstein, Edward O. Wilson, Stephen Hawking, Richard Feynman, etc. made the grade. And philosophers: Bertrand Russell, Eric Hoffer, Gilbert Ryle, W.V.O. Quine, Yogi Berra, etc. as well, although Thomas Kuhn did not.Some people are here but not at their best (at least in my opinion). For example Satchel Paige reminds us not to look back, "Something might be gaining on you," which is good, but I would prefer to hear again his advice on the social ramble not being restful. Or in the case of biologist Edward O. Wilson there is just one entry in which he corrects the old idea that the human brain begins as a tabula rasa, and that is only attributed to him by Tom Wolfe; however I would have preferred something like, "It is exquisitely human to make spiritual commitments that are absolute to the very moment they are broken" or "When the gods are served, the Darwinian fitness of the members of the tribe is the ultimate if unrecognized beneficiary"--both from On Human Nature (1978).There is of course a noticeable Brit bias to the selections, especially in the sense that minor British politicians appear but we are spared those of the American sort. In truth, the publishers have a good eye for the English language marketplace and include a number of quotes from Canadians, Indians and Australians. The que

A wonderful collection of memorable quotes...

This is a great book. I love to just sit and page through it, reading quotes by modern day authors, poets, and artists. I turn to it to look something up and wind up reading through it for an hour or more. Funny quotes, sad quotes, quotes that epitomize life in the 20th century.The format is pretty standard for books of this type. Artists are listed alphabetically, by the names they are known, (Maya Angelou, rather than Maya Johnson, for example). The index uses the standard format of listing the significant words from each quotation, these keywords also listed alphabetically. Then the first few letters of the author's name are shown, along with the page number and the item number of the quote itself. I didn't find any problems with pagination, as did another reviewer, every quote I looked up had an accurate page and item number (perhaps he is dealing with an older edition than I am). All in all a wonderful book, and an excellent addition to any reference library. Don't hesitate, buy it!

A browser's delight

Not just a reference book, this volume provides hours of innocent pleasure to the reader who wants to thumb through it reading what strikes his eye. It assembles quotations, mostly 20th century, from literature, politics, and art, more heavily leaning on British and European sources. A foreign language quotation is given in the original and also in translation. The author has worked to get the true author, e.g., when Groucho Marx said, "I'd horsewhip you, if I had a horse," the author is given not as Groucho but as the screenwriter.Quotations are given in context. Thus instead of simply telling you that Churchill said, "Blood, toil, tears, and sweat," you are given several paragraphs of the speech as Churchill gave it in the House of Commons. This allows you to appreciate the way the speech rhythms develop and flow.One slight problem is that the pagination in the paperback edition was not changed from the hardback and thus is incorrect; however, it is easy enough to figure out the correct page.