We see them on the printed page, and hear them in speeches and late-night news commentaries. They can add spice to an argument and be persuasive. They can also be taken out of context to purposefully mislead or misrepresent, or twisted to support a different point of view from the original intent.
Quotations can be deucedly difficult to verify .
And yet there is, inevitably, the unanswerable query that confounds and frustrates the seeker. Reference librarians, sometimes known for their desire to answer a question past the patron's willingness to pursue it, can find quotations irritatingly elusive, and can often remember unanswered queries from months or even years before. Dartmouth's renown as being the alma mater of Daniel Webster, and the fact that it has housed the Webster Papers project, encourages people from across the country to phone the Library to ask for verification of quotations attributed to Webster. It really was Chauncey Goodrich in 1852 who recounted this memorable quotation in his portrayal of the accounts of that day back in 1818. Some quotations have been looked for extensively without ever being verified, and yet are requested time and again.