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language is clearness, and we know that nothing detracts so much from this as do
unfamiliar terms,’ said Galen, the Greek physician of the 2
nd
century AD. In 1665,
John Bunyan (alluding to the Authorized Version of the Bible) wrote that ‘Words
easy to be understood do often hit the mark; when high and learned ones do only
pierce the air.’ Anxieties about heavy taxes might be thought of as a more recent
concern, but it was the Roman Emperor Tiberius who pointed out to his provincial
governors that ‘It is the part of the good shepherd to shear his flock, not skin it.’
(Tiberius would presumably have agreed with the words attributed to Jean-Baptiste
Colbert, chief minister to Louis XIV of France, ‘The art of taxation consists in so
plucking the goose as to obtain the largest possible amount of feathers with the
smallest possible amount of hissing.’) The Machiavellian French cleric and
statesman of the 17
th
century, the Cardinal de Retz, held the view that ‘A man who
does not trust himself will never really trust anybody.’ Two centuries later we find in
Goethe’s
Faust
the line, ‘Just trust yourself and you’ll learn the art of living.’ In the
uncertain aftermath of the American Presidential election of 2000, when the exact
nature of the vote in Florida was still being discussed, Bill Clinton commented, ‘The
American people have spoken…but it’s going to take a little while to determine
exactly what they said.’ The remark would have been appreciated by the great 19
th
-
century Conservative statesman, Lord Salisbury, who after a by-election in 1877
said wryly, ‘One of the nuisances of the ballot is that when the oracle has spoken
you never know what it means.’
Sometimes it is the precise wording of a quotation which is reworked. In 1931,
Rudyard Kipling coined the phrase ‘Power without responsibility.’ In our own time,
the Chilean writer Ariel Dorfman offers the revision: ‘Responsibility without power,
the fate of the secretary through the ages.’
The advisability of taking thought before committing oneself to a course is often
pointed out. ‘The closer these practical probabilities drive war toward the
absolute…the more imperative the need not to take the first step without consider-
ing the last,’ warned the Prussian military theorist Karl von Clausewitz. An earlier
quotation, attributed to Edmund Burke, looks at the dangers of large-scale
undertakings:
Those who carry on great public schemes must be proof against the most
fatiguing delays, the most mortifying disappointments, the most shocking
Oxford Dictionary of Quotations
Introduction (abridged)
In this new sixth edition of the
Oxford Dictionary of Quotations
, the comprehensive
nature of its coverage has been extended and sustained. Since the fifth edition
appeared in 1999, the
Dictionary
, first published in 1941, has celebrated its
diamond jubilee. Earlier editions provided the foundations of the current edition, and
these foundations are constantly added to with new material from the reading
programme with which we monitor the language. Such new material includes not
only high-profile utterances of the last few years (from ‘axis of evil’ to ‘shock and
awe’), but also, and excitingly, quotations from an earlier time which have acquired
new resonance and currency.
A notable example of this occurred in the aftermath of ‘9/11’, the terrorist attacks of
11 September, 2001, which destroyed the World Trade Center. In the debate on a
possible invasion of Afghanistan, those opposed to intervention cited the words of
John Quincy Adams, sixth President of the United States, who in 1821 gave it as
his view that America ‘goes not abroad in search of monsters to destroy’. A later
President was also to be directly quoted. At an address in Washington National
Cathedral, on 14 September 2001, George W. Bush stated that ‘Today we feel what
Franklin Roosevelt called the warm courage of national unity’, reaching back to
Roosevelt’s first inaugural address of 4 March 1933.
At the end of the 20
th
century, events in the Balkans recalled Kipling’s 19
th
-century
war correspondent in
The Light that Failed
, who ‘always opened his conversation
with the news that there would be trouble in the Balkans in the spring.’ What
happened during the crumbling of the former Yugoslavia reminded us of the
dreadful nature of civil war, but one aspect of its cruelty was highlighted over three
centuries ago, when the Parliamentary General William Waller wrote to his Royalist
counterpart (and old comrade) Ralph Hopton, ‘With what a perfect hatred I detest
this war without an enemy.’ A few years later, another soldier of the time summed up
the possible dangers of military victory. The Royalist Sir Jacob Astley, captured after
a battle in 1646, said prophetically to his captors, ‘Gentlemen, ye may now sit and
play, for you have done all your work, if you fall not out among yourselves.’
It is fascinating to see similar ideas echoing across the centuries. ‘The chief merit of