If you want to know whether P.T. Barnum really quipped that “there’s a sucker born every minute,” the Internet is notoriously unreliable and venerable tomes like Bartlett’s Familiar Quotations are rarely updated. But the recently published Yale Book of Quotations, edited by associate Yale law librarian Fred Shapiro, focuses on modern American thinkers. With the aid of digital text archives and thousands of reference librarians and researchers, it took Shapiro six years to compile the 12,500 quotes in the 1,104-page omnibus, including these famous remarks by Stanford alumni.
“If you think education is expensive, try ignorance.”
—Derek Bok, ’51
“Information wants to be free.”
—Stewart Brand, ’60
“Liberty finds no refuge in a jurisprudence of doubt.”
—Sandra Day O’Connor, ’50, JD ’52
“I find that the three major administrative problems on campus are sex for the students, athletics for the alumni, and parking for the faculty.”
—Clark Kerr, MA ’33
“Now, you’re either on the bus or off the bus.”
—Ken Kesey, Gr. ’59
“I know this—a man got to do what he got to do.”
—John Steinbeck, ’23
