Pope has to be a contender. He gets 6 pages in the Oxford Dictionary Of Quotations. From whence comes this:
‘A little learning is a dang’rous thing;’
An Essay On Criticism (1711)
Personally (and there’s more people like me) I am forever quoting Oscar Wilde, but I have only read one novel and one play by him.
Then again, The Picture of Dorian Gray is almost consistently one quote after another, so I do not think Oscar would have minded too much. He kind of liked the oneliners.
One my faves (though there’s lots of good ones):
“Work is the curse of the drinking classes”
Mighty Maximino said
I’ve only met one person besides myself who heard of that book, let alone attempted to read it. I should find some smarter friends I guess.
I tried to read it in HS, but got bogged down in the Math about half way through.
I’ve been meaning to try again.
God.
I’d say the Bible, for starters. Lots of kids learn Bible quotes in Sunday school and have passages read to them during services, but I think few people really sit down and read the Bible from cover to cover and try to take it all in. When you do that you get a much more varied picture - rather than it feeling like “God’s Lucid and Clear Word From Above” you see the incredible history and variety of writers, thinkers, and poets over thousands of years.
At my university it was a running joke that the people who had not read the book were the ones who commented on it most during class discussions. Based on those years alone I’d say John Stuart Mill, Machiavelli, Thomas Hobbes, John Locke, and John Rawls are oft quoted but seldom read by political types.
I had to read On Liberty for 5 separate classes, write numerous papers on it, and 5 years later couldn’t tell you a damn quote though.
You’ll never know
Another love like mine.
What a voice!
He wrote a book?!
Err…John Rawls the political philospher.
He is famous for A Theory of Justice, of which Amazon.com says:
Yeah, but does he have his own website?
http://www.lourawls.com/final_frameset.html
(Gotta love the animated “thumbs up”!)
Dammit! And here I thought I had carte blanche to quote that… 
I’d also add Paradise Lost to the list (wonder how many people learned “Better to reign in hell than serve in heaven” from Star Trek? ;)), and perhaps Nietzsche and Ayn Rand.
Only tangentially related, because people do read Shakespeare : there’s Shakespeare’s famous “The first thing we do, let’s kill all the lawyers” (from Henry VI, Part II), so often quoted without knowing the context: the line is spoken by a would-be tyrant (well, the right-hand man of a would-be tyrant).
Context is our friend.
Common Sense and The Federalist Papers.
And, at least in my own case, the Principia Matematica.
You actually walk around referencing Principia Matematica? How exactly does that come up in conversation?
I know of very few people who have actually read their copies of The Tao of Physics and Zen and the Art of Motorcyle Maintenance.
Just like everyboy alive in the 60s was at Woodstock and nobody voted for Reagan in 1984, I would say that not nearly as many people read Jack Kerouac’s On the Road as claimed they did.
Oh, an my personal one is Herodotus’ The Histories. I wrote at least a half-dozen papers on that book in college and I’ve still never read more than two consecutive pages.
I think Karl Marx would probably win the world-wide most-cited/least-read contest for the last 100 years.
He probably won’t even make the top 50 in the next century, though.
[QUOTE]
*Originally posted by Katisha *
**
Which brings to mind:
“If music be the food of love, play on.”
often quoted as a joyful exhortation, when it’s actually Duke Orsino totally miserable about being rejected by Olivia, and the rest of it is:
“Give me excess of it, that surfeiting
the appitite may sicken and so die.”
Not exactly what you want on your Valentine anymore.
Quoth Mighty Maximino:
Then again, most of the folks who refer to it have read it. And yes, I have read the whole thing.
Shakespeare may be more often read than Pope or the other contenders, but he’s also cited far more often. I’d say that if we’re looking for a ratio of cites to reads (or viewings, to be fair), then Bill’s our man.
I read the whole thing. Hell, it got to be a real page-turner, at least for a rather geeky guy like me. I still do propositional calculus whenever I have a pen, some paper, and too much free time. By the way, where do you see it referenced? I think I might want to devour a couple of those publications and/or books. 
Who wrote that one? Was it (holy) ghost-written? I slay me. 
GEB: Does it count if I’ve read it, but don’t understand it?
First choice of a work cited more than it’s read would be Mein Kampf. Second would be Karl Marx’s works, but that’s been done.
Third, Goethe, Faust in particular.
On second thought, put me with the Shakespeare crowd, then the rest of what I had.
You could expand this thread to include people who are not necessarily authors in the literary sense (that is, producing fiction.)
In the US, Thomas Jefferson gets quoted by both sides in the “Was the US founded on Christian principles?” question, and they certainly did not read anything by the man, including the Declaration of Independence.