Oxford Dictionary of Modern Quotations Review

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(More customer reviews)This is an attractive book and a lot of fun to read. Just open it anywhere and start reading. You will be amused. There are bon mots from sports stars and politicos, from singers and actors, and from just about anybody famous or halfway so, most of them English speaking with a smattering of Europeans thrown in for a bit of haute culture.
There are "Special Categories" such as Advertising Slogans, Cartoons (just the tag lines, not the drawings, including one of my favorites by Peter Steiner showing a dog at the keyboard of a computer who says to another dog, "On the Internet nobody knows you're a dog." Oh boy, how true that is!), Film Titles, Misquotations, Opening Lines (of novels mostly) including George Orwell's "It was a bright cold day in April, and the clocks were striking thirteen." (This, from 1984, is given again under George Orwell.) There's a Thematic Index, "Computers," "Fashion," "Love," etc., and a Keyword Index.
Edited by Elizabeth Knowles, who also edits the traditional The Oxford Dictionary of Quotations 5th Ed. (2001), this book might be viewed as a companion to that larger tome. The layout and the organization are similar, but this book is set in a slightly larger type so it is easier to read, but with fewer words per page. The significant difference is that Modern Quotations begins in the twentieth century whereas the larger book knows no time constraints. Consequently, no Karl Marx here, no Charles Darwin, but there is singer Dean Martin who famously observed, "You're not drunk if you can lie on the floor without holding on."
To be fair, I should note that scientists are also quoted, and a lot of them. Richard Dawkins, Albert Einstein, Edward O. Wilson, Stephen Hawking, Richard Feynman, etc. made the grade. And philosophers: Bertrand Russell, Eric Hoffer, Gilbert Ryle, W.V.O. Quine, Yogi Berra, etc. as well, although Thomas Kuhn did not.
Some people are here but not at their best (at least in my opinion). For example Satchel Paige reminds us not to look back, "Something might be gaining on you," which is good, but I would prefer to hear again his advice on the social ramble not being restful. Or in the case of biologist Edward O. Wilson there is just one entry in which he corrects the old idea that the human brain begins as a tabula rasa, and that is only attributed to him by Tom Wolfe; however I would have preferred something like, "It is exquisitely human to make spiritual commitments that are absolute to the very moment they are broken" or "When the gods are served, the Darwinian fitness of the members of the tribe is the ultimate if unrecognized beneficiary"--both from On Human Nature (1978).
There is of course a noticeable Brit bias to the selections, especially in the sense that minor British politicians appear but we are spared those of the American sort. In truth, the publishers have a good eye for the English language marketplace and include a number of quotes from Canadians, Indians and Australians.
The question arises, if you have the larger, more general Oxford Dictionary of Quotations, should you buy this book? To answer this I compared the number of 20th-century quotations from the larger book with those in this book and found that not only are there a lot more, many of the people quoted are given additional space and sometimes different expressions. In only one case did I find a 20th-century person that appeared in the larger book left out in this one (actress Michelle Pfeiffer who wasn't saying much anyway). On the other hand, Sylvia Plath was cut from ten to eight quotations. But then again Norman Mailer went from four to six.
Sometimes there is an improvement in clarity in this volume. Gilbert Ryle is quoting as writing "The dogma of the Ghost in the Machine." In the larger book this is tagged with the words, "on the mental-conduct concepts of Descartes." With no Descartes to cross-reference here, we find the very sensible, "the mind viewed as distinct from the body."
Although Editor Elizabeth Knowles does not say so in so many words in her brief Introduction, the criteria for inclusion is not just having said something pithy and striking or funny and penetrating, or even something at all witty. Instead what really counts is that you are or have been famous for at least fifteen minutes (Andy Warhol). So the way to look at a book like this is to take it as a soundbite history of modern times.
Bottom line: buy this because it really is an interesting way to view the modern era, and besides the quotables from the likes of, e.g., Johnny Rotten ("We're so pretty, oh so pretty, we're vacant") and the Spice Girls ("tell me what you really, really want") are not likely to make the next edition, and because it is what people say, in what context, while being who they are, in reference to some event, that really spells out what it was like to be alive in the twentieth century.

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