On the internet, we love quotations. We love them for their pith, their wit, and their general…quotability. We put them into photos and animated gifs. We cite them out of context, shorten them beyond recognition, misattribute them, or just as often don’t bother with any attributions at all.

Here on Sneak-Attack Philosophy, I prefer to do things more carefully and (more importantly) cited. But citations on the internet are hard. Correction: they’re not hard, they’re complicated. What is the best way to cite print media? Books? Ebooks? Video and film? I had thought about just using Normative Connections to curate my quotation collection, but annotations on Tumblr are mediocre. I thought about including CMS-formatted footnotes, but those are unwieldy even for a style-guide nut like me; also, CMS citations are mostly meant for print, and offline reading, web-based citations can be far more readable and useful. So I’ve decided to build my own quotation library here on SAP.

All quotations will be attributed in a way that you can find the original easily. If it is from the internet, I will link to the original source whenever possible; if not, I will link to the source I used, or the most reputable source I can find. If the source is a book, I will include the ISBN (when possible) with a Google search link. I will also include page numbers whenever I can.

You can read all the quotations in reverse chronological order of when I added them, or you can read them by source document (also in reverse chronological order), though I have not fully fleshed out the navigational interface for that.

Enjoy.

p.s. another reason I am keeping quotations here instead of elsewhere (and there are several interesting quotation collation services out there) is that this is part of my working library. I keep notes on these quotations to help organize my own thoughts that I may somehow make public later.