Skip to main content

Respectfully Quoted

March 2023
1min read

A Dictionary of Quotations Requested from the Congressional Research Service

edited by Suzy Platt; Library of Congress; 520 pages.

Sooner or later almost everyone in Congress wants to remind almost everyone else that eternal vigilance is the price of liberty. And if they want to make sure they get the quote right, they check first with the Congressional Research Service of the Library of Congress, which will tell them that although everyone thinks Jefferson said it, the closest the CRS can come is “The condition upon which God hath given liberty to man is eternal vigilance,” from John Philpot Curran’s “Election of Lord Mayor of Dublin” speech before the Privy Council, July 10, 1790. The CRS will turn that citation up quickly, too, because the operation has had a lot of experience finding such things; for three-quarters of a century now, the CRS has been verifying quotations that members of Congress want to use in public debate.

“Through the years,” writes Charles A. Goodrum in the introduction to this useful and highly diverting reference work, “this matter of quotation verification became big business.” Most of the questions about quotations—and in time there came to be thousands every year—were fielded by a unit called the Congressional Reading Room, whose “staff began to detect three kinds of citations that seemed to stand apart from the routine traffic: the hard ones, the repetitive ones, and the impossible ones.” Fifty years ago the increasingly hard-pressed researchers created the CRR Quote File.

The simple fact that certain quotes found their way into the file is intriguing: “Remember, democracy never lasts long,” John Adams said. “It soon wastes, exhausts, and murders itself. There never was a democracy yet that did not commit suicide.” Goodrum writes, “You wonder what was happening to the Member that he needed that John Adams quote—and indeed, what happened to Adams the day he said it!”

The file also contains statements whose authors have never been established. The one Mark Twain quote that everyone knows—“When I was a boy of 14, my father was so ignorant I could hardly stand to have the old man around. But when I got to be 21, I was astonished at how much the old man had learned in seven years”—apparently had its genesis in the September 1937 issue of the Reader’s Digest . And “Politics is the art of the possible” was said not by Mr. Dooley but by an equally clear-eyed if somewhat sterner political theoretician, Otto von Bismarck.

The twenty-one hundred quotes that make up this book have all been culled from the CRR Quote File, and although the entries are cross-indexed as they are in any other such volume, this is a different sort of quotation book. Most books of quotations, says Goodrum with satisfaction, “are compiled by learned literateurs who sit in silent rooms reading the words of wise people and asking, ‘I wonder if that thought might be useful to somebody?’ These quotations have already answered that question. They have already been used by somebody, and others have already heard them, have already decided they want to use them again. …”

We hope you enjoy our work.

Please support this 72-year tradition of trusted historical writing and the volunteers that sustain it with a donation to American Heritage.

Donate

Stories published from "November 1989"

Authored by: Ken Heyman

Occupational tintypes are about as cheap today as when they were made, but they offer a valuable look at working-class America during and just after the Civil War

Authored by: Roger J. Spiller

Walt Whitman said, “The real war will never get in the books.” The critic and writer Paul Fussell feels that the same sanitizing of history that went on after the 1860s has erased the national memory of what World War II was really like.

Authored by: Alexander O. Boulton

The medieval look that swept America a hundred and fifty years ago wasn’t just a matter of nostalgia for pointed archways and crenellated towers; it was also the very model of a modern architectural style

Authored by: The Editors

A Dictionary of Quotations Requested from the Congressional Research Service

Authored by: The Editors

A Life of Wilbur and Orville Wright

Authored by: The Editors

The History of Animation

Authored by: The Editors

Recollections by Men and Women of World War II Aviation

Authored by: The Editors

Brick Wall Signs in America

Authored by: Bruce Curtis

A year ago we were in the midst of a presidential campaign most memorable for charges by both sides that the opponent was not hard enough, tough enough, masculine enough. That he was, in fact, a sissy. Both sides also admitted this sort of rhetoric was deplorable. But it’s been going on since the beginning of the Republic.

Authored by: Richard M. Ketchum

The bombs that fell that Sunday didn’t just knock out some battleships; they roused America into a new age. Here is how the long, unforgettable day unfolded.

Featured Articles

Famous writers including Emerson, Thoreau, Hawthorne, and the Alcotts turned Sleepy Hollow Cemetery into our country’s first conservation project.

Native American peoples and the lands they possessed loomed large for Washington, from his first trips westward as a surveyor to his years as President.

In his Second Inaugural Address, Abraham Lincoln embodied leading in a time of polarization, political disagreement, and differing understandings of reality.

A hundred years ago, America was rocked by riots, repression, and racial violence.

During Pres. Washington’s first term, an epidemic killed one tenth of all the inhabitants of Philadelphia, then the capital of the young United States.

Now a popular state park, the unassuming geological feature along the Illinois River has served as the site of centuries of human habitation and discovery.  

The recent discovery of the hull of the battleship Nevada recalls her dramatic action at Pearl Harbor and ultimate revenge on D-Day as the first ship to fire on the Nazis.

Our research reveals that 19 artworks in the U.S. Capitol honor men who were Confederate officers or officials. What many of them said, and did, is truly despicable.

Here is probably the most wide-ranging look at Presidential misbehavior ever published in a magazine.

When Germany unleashed its blitzkreig in 1939, the U.S. Army was only the 17th largest in the world. FDR and Marshall had to build a fighting force able to take on the Nazis, against the wishes of many in Congress.

Roast pig, boiled rockfish, and apple pie were among the dishes George and Martha enjoyed during the holiday in 1797. Here are some actual recipes.

Born during Jim Crow, Belle da Costa Greene perfected the art of "passing" while working for one of the most powerful men in America.