I doubt whether Cromwell or Milton could have rivaled [William Lloyd] Garrison in this field of quotation; and the power of quotation is as dreadful a weapon as any which the human intellect can forge. – John Jay Chapman

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

Patch grief with proverbs; make misfortune drunk… – William Shakespeare, Much Ado About Nothing, c.1598

In literary composition a well-chosen quotation lights up the page like a fine engraving… – William Francis Henry King, “Introduction,” Classical and Foreign Quotations, 18