I came across this online resource while looking for the citation to a quotation from Kipling: "Words are, of course, the most powerful drug used by mankind." Rudyard Kipling is just one of the classic writers whose works are included at this site; writers from Aesop and Hans Chritian Andersen to Oscar Wilde and Virginia Woolf are represented. A short biography of each author accompanies the e-texts, which include both short and long works; writers of fiction and non-fiction (such as Aristotle, Abraham Lincoln, and John Kennedy) are included. Additionally, a selection of famous quotations and additional resources accompany each listing. Textual searches, both within the entire library, and within a selected e-text can by made. Perhaps some evaluators might be critical about who is included in this e-library and who is missing, but I'm grateful to find such a readily available free library. The site is maintained by Farlex Inc., "an independent, privately held company based in Huntingdon Valley, PA, offering online reference products. Our flagship properties TheFreeDictionary.com and TheFreeLibrary.com are accessed by over 9 million unique visitors each month." ____JH
[By the way, the Kipling quotation was first seen, by me, in the blog.photoblogs.org. I did a quick Google search and found, ironically, that many people repeat the Kipling quote, but none provide the citation. Although the quotation was new to me, apparently many find it in their quotation dictionaries. A quick Google search brought up multiple uses of the quotation, but no complete citations (at least in the first 30 sites that I examined). I did a search within Kipling's writings using the search engine in the Free Library, but nothing appeared, which led me to believe that the original remarks had most likely appeared in a speech by Kipling. Sure enough when I looked in my old hard cover copy of H. L. Mencken's A New Dictionary of Quotations, Knopf, 1976, the quotation appeared on p. 1328 in the "Word" section; the citation was to a Speech in London given on Feb. 14, 1923. ]
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