It is the little writer rather than the great writer who seems never to quote, and the reason is that he is never really doing anything else. – Havelock Ellis, The Dance of Life, 1923

A true quotation cannot be divorced from the character who uttered or scribbled it; it should say as much about the person quoted as about the particular subject referred to, and for this reason an anthology of quotations should be a kind of portrait gallery. – Robert Andrews, The Columbia Dictionary of Quotations, “Introduction”
The quotation-business is booming. No subdivision of the culture seems too narrow to have a quotation book of its own…. It would be an understatement to say that these books lean on one another. To compare them is to stroll through a glorious jungle of incestuous mutual plagiarism. – James Gleick, 1993
Random Quotes
Millions of [the indigenous peoples of India] have lived to an advanced age, without having tasted of any thing that ever possessed life, and been wholly free from a chain of maladies, which have scourged every civilized nation on the globe… – “Food,” The Medical Adviser, and Guide to Health and Long Life, edited by Alex.
