It is probably to Talleyrand, that Receiver-General of waif wit and estray epigram, that more sayings have been wrongly attributed than to any other modern. – William Mathews, “Quotation and Misquotation,” in North American Review, January

Only the use of footnotes enables historians to make their texts not monologues but conversations, in which modern scholars, their predecessors, and their subjects all take part. – Anthony Grafton (b.1950), The Footnote: A Curious History, “Epilogue: Some Concl

After all, all he did was string together a lot of old, well-known quotations. – H.L. Mencken, about Shakespeare