Quotations on the Wall

• Writing
• Quotations
• Knowledge, attitudes, practice

My sixth-grade teacher, Miss Mary, loved quotations and encouraged me to collect and learn from them. As I grew older, I discovered a disturbing divergence of opinion among great thinkers about the value of quotations.

Winston Churchill wrote the following sentences about quotations. Although he favored reading them, his first sentence is a bit disconcerting. “It is a good thing for an uneducated man to read books of quotations. Bartlett's Familiar Quotations is an admirable work, and I studied it intently. The quotations when engraved upon the memory give you good thoughts. They also make you anxious to read the authors and look for more” (1).

Churchill's view was countered by that of E.M. Cioran, who wrote: “Beware of thinkers whose minds function only when they are fueled by a quotation” (2).

The very quotable Ralph Waldo Emerson wrote the following aphorism that rescued me from the criticism of the preceding pundit: “We are as much informed of a writer's genius by what he selects as by what he originates” (3).

In 1957, I was sitting in the small faculty dining room of Grady Memorial Hospital in Atlanta, Georgia. I was beginning my 30-year tenure as professor and chairman of the department of medicine of Emory University School of Medicine. I noticed a framed document on the wall that stated something like this: “A great deal of what you hear in this room is not true.” The statement, created during an era when faculty members argued about biological principles rather than managed care, was probably placed there during Dr. Eugene Stead's chairmanship and had remained throughout the chairmanships of Drs. Paul Beeson and Eugene Ferris.

In 1996, I placed the following framed document on the wall of the Hurst Cardiology Teaching Conference Room at Emory University Hospital: …