To quote copiously and well, requires taste, judgment, and erudition, a feeling for the beautiful, an appreciation of the noble, and a sense of the profound. – Christian Nestell Bovee, “Thought,” Institutions and Summaries of Thought, 1862

You could compile, I should think, the worst book in the world entirely out of selecting passages from the best writers in the world. – G.K. Chesterton, “On Writing Badly”

No claim is made here for scholarship, or for the earliest use of a quote or even, in some cases, the precise wording…. No matter: in my opinion, they are in this form graceful, compact and cogent. – R.I. Fitzhenry, preface to The David & Charles Book of Quotations, September 198

Perish the men who said our good things before us! – Aelius Donatus, quoted in Edge-Tools of Speech by Maturin M. Ballou, 1886