Back in 1993, in the pre‐internet days, I reviewed the 16th edition of Bartlett’s Familiar Quotations for Liberty magazine. I’ve just gotten around to tracking down that article and getting it posted. One of my complaints then was that
The dozen years since the fifteenth edition have been marked by a worldwide turn toward markets, from Reagan and Thatcher to the New Zealand Labor Party’s free‐market reforms to the fall of Soviet communism. This historical trend seems to have escaped editor [Justin] Kaplan, of Cambridge, Mass., who has given us more quotations from Karl Marx, Vladimir Lenin, and Robert Heilbroner, while virtually eliminating F. A. Hayek and Milton Friedman, the intellectual gurus of the free‐market revolution. A bust of Hayek now sits in the Kremlin, but Cambridge is holding out against the tide.…
One might assume that these curiosities don’t represent any conscious bias on Kaplan’s part, just a blindness to the political and economic changes going on in the world. Dictionaries of quotations are perforce behind the times; they represent the distilled wisdom, or at least memorabilia, of centuries. As market liberalism sweeps the world in the 21st century, its architects will get their due. Still, it’s disappointing to see a 1992 edition offering fewer selections from thinkers such as Friedman and Hayek.
As I went over the old article, I decided to check my prediction. Results were mixed. Reagan now gets 10 citations instead of 3, including at least two of the three quotations I suggested. And instead of my “ant heap of totalitarianism” from his 1964 speech, they used “leave Marxism‐Leninism on the ash heap of history” from 1982. Thatcher is up from 3 to 4. Barry Goldwater has now been included, with three of his best‐known lines:
“A government that is big enough to give you all you want is big enough to take it all away.” [as I recommended]
“Extremism in the defense of liberty is no vice. And … moderation in the pursuit of justice is no virtue.”
“You don’t need to be ‘straight’ to fight and die for your country. You just need to shoot straight.”
But John F. Kennedy leads recent presidents with 26 citations, down from 28. Bill and Hillary Clinton have appeared, with 12 quotations between them, few of them the sorts of lines they dreamed of being remembered for. Sadly, they omitted both “basket of deplorables” and “open borders.” Barack Obama has 12 all by himself, most of them long paragraphs unlike the great majority of pithy lines in the book. One wonders if the editors felt they needed to include him, even though he didn’t actually say anything memorable, and his most memorable line was probably the unfortunate “cling to guns and religion.” No Trump yet–maybe in the next edition.
Hayek is still at 2, Friedman still at 3. Ludwig von Mises is up from 2 to 4, Ayn Rand from 3 to 5. William F. Buckley, Jr., omitted in the 16th edition, is now represented with possibly his two most famous quotations. And yet, as Marxism is left behind in, well, “the ash heap of history,” Karl Marx (with Friedrich Engels) is up from 18 to 20.
Among the youngest contributors in the book are J. K. Rowling, Sarah Palin, Todd Beamer of “Let’s roll,” and the very last chronological entry, Justin Timberlake.
It does seem, though, that Cambridge/Boston, the home of the publisher, and Manhattan, the home of the new editor, are still holding out against those ideas that changed the world in the 1980s and beyond.