Most of the classical citations you shall hear or read in the current journals or speeches were not drawn from the originals, but from previous quotations in English books… – Ralph Waldo Emerson, “Quotation and Originality,” Letters and Social Aims, 1876

The mind will quote whether the tongue does or not. – Attributed to Emerson in Edge-Tools of Speech by Maturin M. Ballou, 1886

Mr. [Thomas] Gray the poet has often observed to me that if a man were to form a Book of what he had seen and heard himself it must in whatever hands prove a most useful and entertaining one. – Horace Walpole, quoted in Walpoliana, 1800

Children seldom misquote. In fact, they usually repeat word for word what you shouldnt have said. – Anon.