Who Said What
By Jacob A. Stein
I was making an argument before Judge Gasch, a patient judge. My opponent was exploiting the judge’s patience by constantly interrupting me. He was pompous and pretentious. I decided to put him in his place.
I said, “You are a sophistical rhetorician, inebriated with the exuberance of your own verbosity, and you are gifted with an egoistical imagination that can at all times command an interminable and inconsistent series of arguments to malign an opponent and to glorify yourself.”
Well, let me say here that I wish I had said that. But I was not up to it. Benjamin Disraeli was up to it. If you turn to page 207 of The Yale Book of Quotations, you will see that Disraeli said exactly that about William E. Gladstone.
The Yale Book, edited by Fred R. Shapiro, recently appeared in the bookstores. It was six years in the making, and the editor used all the resources of the Internet to gather and verify the quotes. It claims precedence over Bartlett’s Familiar Quotations and The Oxford Dictionary of Quotations.
Yale is unique in two ways. First, it is relentless, implacable, merciless, inflexible, and adamant in its pursuit of the source of each quotation. For instance, there is Senator Everett M. Dirksen’s remark, “A billion here, a billion there, pretty soon it begins to add up to real money.” Yale notes that nowhere in any of Senator Dirksen’s papers or speeches is this statement to be found. There is no credible evidence that Senator Dirksen ever said it. But even if he did not, he certainly must have thought it as he flipped through the pages of the yearly budgets.
Second, Yale reports on the usual suspects: Shakespeare, Jefferson, Churchill, Tennyson, Longfellow, Emerson, and Oliver Wendell Holmes Sr. and Jr. Yale also adds quotes from the movies, popular songs old and new, and product advertisements.
Yale has pages devoted to old and new proverbs. Back in the 1950s I collected proverbs, and when in New York I roamed the used-book stores looking for proverb books to add to my collection. I was told in each store that Colonel Ginzburg had been there two weeks before and had bought all the proverb books.
Who was Colonel Ginzburg? I found out who he was when an article in the New York Times said he was connected with the United Nations and he had published a book of worldwide proverbial wisdom. I got his book, and I was pleased to see that all Ginzburg’s proverbs were already in the books I had. There was, however, a Turkish proverb: “The explanation is worse than the blunder.” It was followed by this Turkish delight:
