Life & Wisdom Quote by Cliff Fadiman

Fadiman’s line is a quiet rebuke to the schoolroom superstition that quotation is either name-dropping or cheating. He frames quoting as a matter of taste and utility, not permission: do it “whenever we feel” the echo adds something. That first-person plural is doing work. It turns a personal habit into a civic one, inviting readers into a shared commons of reference where language is communal property, not private genius.

The triad “interesting or helpful or amusing” is a miniature manifesto for humane intelligence. Not “authoritative,” not “impressive,” not “correct.” He’s sidestepping the hierarchy that treats citations as social armor. Instead, he legitimizes the quote as a tool of connection: it can clarify an idea, sharpen it through comparison, or simply delight. “Allusion” matters here, too: Fadiman isn’t talking about copying whole arguments, but about the wink of recognition, the pleasure of a mind finding another mind across time.

Contextually, this fits a mid-century literary culture where magazines, radio, and book criticism trained audiences to relish the well-placed reference. Fadiman, a public intellectual before the term curdled, believed in making reading sociable. The subtext is democratic: the point of being well-read isn’t to win; it’s to enrich conversation. Quotation becomes less a flex than a form of hospitality, opening the door for others to join the thought.