# Good place to look up quotes?

**URL:** <https://boards.straightdope.com/t/good-place-to-look-up-quotes/130479>\
**Category:** Factual Questions\
**Created:** [October 2, 2002, 1:46am UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/good-place-to-look-up-quotes/130479 "2002-10-02T01:46:37Z")\
**Posts on this page:** 3\
**Page:** 1

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**Author:** ![caffeine\_overdose](https://avatars.discourse-cdn.com/v4/letter/c/85e7bf/32.png) [@caffeine\_overdose](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/caffeine_overdose)\
**Post date:** [October 2, 2002, 1:46am UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/good-place-to-look-up-quotes/130479/1 "2002-10-02T01:46:37Z")

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I am always finding interesting quotes without citations anyone have a good site for finding quotes? My current three are…

“I fear not ghosts, I fear them not!”-From Sports Night The Thespis episode.

"As sure as the sun sets in the west, as sure as there will always be an England……"Also from Sports Night

“Every morning in Africa, a gazelle wakes up. It knows it must run faster than the fastest lion or it will be killed…every morning a lion wakes up. It knows it must outrun the slowest gazelle or it will starve to death. It doesn’t matter whether you are a lion or a gazelle… when the sun comes up, you better be running.”

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**Author:** ![ZipperJJ](https://sea3.discourse-cdn.com/straightdope/user_avatar/boards.straightdope.com/zipperjj/32/211_2.png) [@ZipperJJ](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/ZipperJJ)\
**Post date:** [October 2, 2002, 2:35am UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/good-place-to-look-up-quotes/130479/2 "2002-10-02T02:35:14Z")

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The best way to find those quotes is to put a significant part of them (not the whole thing, I don’t think) into Google (with quotes around it) and see what it gets. That’ll help you search a wide number of quote pages at once.

The only references I saw for those Sports Night quotes are from sports night.

After much searching, I found [this site](http://run-down.com/quotes.php) with the last quote on it, and it has an attribute of “Maurice Greene (attributed to Roger Bannister shortly after running the first sub-4 mile)”

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**Author:** ![tomndebb](https://avatars.discourse-cdn.com/v4/letter/t/b9e5f3/32.png) [@tomndebb](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/tomndebb)\
**Post date:** [October 2, 2002, 2:45am UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/good-place-to-look-up-quotes/130479/3 "2002-10-02T02:45:23Z")

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Depends how you want to _find_ them.

If you know a quotation of unknown authorship or provenance, I find that [Google](http://www.google.com/) works the best at coming up with the source.

If you want to browse a site for quotations, then there are quite a few:

[http://www.quoteland.com/](http://www.quoteland.com/) provides links to other locations by area of interest.

Then [http://www.bartleby.com/](http://www.bartleby.com/) provides access to several lists of quotations including:

[Bartlett’s Familiar Quotations, 10th Edition, 1919 (They are up to the 16th edition, currently)](http://www.bartleby.com/100/)

[The Columbia World of Quotations, 1996](http://www.bartleby.com/66/)

[Simpson’s Contemporary Quotations The Most Notable Quotations: 1950–1988](http://www.bartleby.com/63/)

If you are looking for a particular author, entering “_author’s name_ quotations” into [Google](http://www.google.com/) will most likely provide a list of sites that handle it. (Most prolific authors have enough fans to find one to build a website to list their quotations. For example, entering “chesterton quotations” provides a swift response beginning with [http://www.chesterton.org/acs/quotes.htm](http://www.chesterton.org/acs/quotes.htm) and including at least three other sites with similar intent before the search hits become less useful.)