The Pan Dictionary Of Contemporary Quotations [antikvár]

INTRODUCTION This is a collection of some seven thousand modern quotations, dating in the main from 1945 to the present day. They range over the widest possible areas of contemporary life, adding to the usually quoted worlds of politics, poetry, the theatre and writing those of science, television, film, rock 'n' roll, psychology and many more. The whole diversity, as far as possible, of modern life. It is, of course, a book more of'quotes', in the journalistic sense - celebrity opinions, snappy one-liners — than one of the traditional deathless 'quotation', embodied, and some might say entombed, in more venerable collections. Culled in great part from ephemeral journalism rather than the finely honed mots, the proverbial generalities and the popular favourites from the classics that are the staples of older dictionaries, these entries come freshly minted and as yet unsanctified by century-long use. While some of them certainly are, or will certainly grow to be quotations in the traditional sense, few so far will help addicts of The Times crossword. This is hardly surprising. In an age of mass media, of instant communication, the honing process has little chance; the flood of information is simply too vigorous, too unremitting to allow so gradual a development. Yet, paradoxically, it is this same flood of information, and the mass literacy to which it caters, that make a book of strictly modern quotations, ranging outside the traditional disciplines, both necessary and feasible. The traditional dictionaries of quotations were, and remain, rooted in the tastes of a small élite of the knowledgable, whose own libraries more often than not would contain many of the volumes from which the quotations were drawn. Today's public is so much larger and its interests are correspondingly more diverse. The line between scholarly and popular cultures persists, indeed the two may be far more distant, but now the less scholarly areas can claim their own validity. For better or for worse, more people want to hear from Mick Jagger than from Wittgenstein - and they are both available here. Thus mass culture has come to be the predominant culture and if its audience lacks the intellectual cachet of more rarified zones it