This is an interesting book that has quotes from people in various disciplines that who are statistical experts or have used statistical information. The text includes the famous quote of Benjamin Disraeli and the modification by Mark Twain.

There are quotes from Shakespeare, Thomas Jefferson and even some famous statisticians like John Tukey, R. A. Fisher, Stephen Stigler and George Box. The quotes are arranged by topics that are listed in alphabetical order. The author and source are given. Sometimes the author is known but the source is unknown.

It appears to be well researched but I did find one error. Peter A. (Tony) Lachenbruch is listed as Peter Luchenbruch.

A nice and important feature of the book is the author index in the back. Each author has a list of topics for which he or she has quotes. The page numbers for theses quotes are given.

There is also an index of topics that lists each author and the page number of their quote under the topic. Ordering is alphabetical throughout.

Also, some cute and sometimes funny cartoons are interspersed throughout the book.

"If I have seen further it is by standing on ye shoulders of Giants. God does not play dice. All science is either physics or stamp collecting." And so on. If you are a physicist, you can probably cite from the top of your head a dozen more witty quotations attributed to some celebrity physicist. Albert Einstein, Niels Bohr, Richard Feynman and Stephen Hawking, for instance, seem to have been especially prolific in this area. But while there seems to be no shortage of resources scattered in books, journals and across the Internet, there is a surprising shortage of books containing collected quotations on physics. I might have missed some, but this is exactly the only one I know. There exist, however, more general dictionaries of scientific quotations like Mackay's.

Around 1800 quotations (estimated) - contributed not only by physicists, but also by several poets - are sorted by subject (black holes, chaos, experiment, neutrino, quantum theory etc.). Apart from this, two indices are provided: a subject by author index and an author by subject index. Apart from few quotations listed as "Unknown", they are usually provided with the source, including page number, and a generous list of over 800 references is included.

Strangely enough - or perhaps not for a pioneering work, as the compilers claim it to be - you will probably easily find several well-known quotations missing in the book. From the three I have started with, Newton's and Einstein's quotations are missing, and Rutherford's is misquoted. This, of course, cannot serve to diminish the meticulous work Mr. and Mrs. Gaither - none of them a physicist - had accomplished. I am wondering though if consulting some physicist might improve the end result. They are somewhat suspiciously missing in the acknowledgment.