The internet is taking the joy out of quotations

‘Quotation (n.) — The act of repeating erroneously the words of another.’ Ambrose Bierce said that, or at least wrote it in the Devil’s Dictionary. That was in 1906, and those are words for the ages. In his Rhetoric, centuries before the birth of Christ, Aristotle identified one of the most common and effective ways of making an argument seem stronger. In his section on ‘proofs’ he talked about what he called ‘ancient witnesses’. By this he meant not only the testimony of witnesses such as you might call in court — but the witness borne by proverbs and quotations.

Any speaker or writer can get an extra fillip of authority by quoting a revered forbear. Don’t just take my word for it, we say: Shakespeare or Montaigne put it best. A snappy quotation — quite against the obvious rules of logic — has a way of presenting an argument as settled. As Auden wrote, introducing an anthology of aphorisms: ‘An aphorism… must convince every reader that it is either universally true or true of every member of the class to which it refers, irrespective of the reader’s convictions.’

That instinct is still strong with us. From Instagram #inspo — an image macro, say, with the words ‘an eye for an eye will make the whole world blind’ superimposed on a thoughtful photo of the underpants model David Gandy — to political speeches in the high style, we love a quotation. We wrap ourselves in them, as Rudyard Kipling nearly said, as a beggar would enfold himself in the purple of emperors. And we love a quotable figure: orphaned witticisms and loose-end aphorisms flock to figures such as Winston Churchill, Oscar Wilde, Mark Twain and Dorothy Parker. The fabled wit of the authority and the evident wit of the quote reinforce each other pleasingly.