About the Quote of the Day

The Quote of the Day is a service that provides a single literary quote for the day, every day including weekends.

The service that you see today originally started from a 1983 page-a-day calendar that was all quotes. I was the lone programmer at a small printing company and I decided to share the next day's quote with the rest of the users by manually typing it into the script the night before, which was displayed with the main menu at log-in time the next morning. I was quite surprised at how big a hit it became.

During my sojourn at Liz Claiborne I improved upon the calendar idea by entering them into a database instead of hard-coding them every day. I still had the original page-a-day calendars from my previous job along with a book of quotes I bought just for this project. Over a period of three years I entered five years worth of quotes from those sources.

This version of the quote-of-the-day became an even bigger hit, so much so that I got my picture in the company's internal newspaper. This was around 1991 before the World Wide Web took over the desktop, so the quotes were still displayed only on terminal screens.

It's jump to the web came in early 2005 when a buddy of mine told me that Liz had decided to shut down the quote-of-the-day. (It's too complicated to explain here.) The laments I heard from my old colleagues about this action spurned me to put it on the web. The only improvement I made was to add links to the attribution names sources so that users can get a short biography of each person who was quoted and where they were quoted.

I started including pictures with each quote in 2015, first on my Tumblr blog, and later on it came here. Now you can find it not only here and Tumblr, but also on my personal web site, Facebook, Twitter, Pinterest, Google+, Reddit, Flickr, Instagram, LinkedIn, Classmates, VK, and LiveJournal.

Many of the quotes are whimsical, some are educational, critical, ironic, or inspirational, but I wanted them all to be provocative. Not in the sense that they are controversial, but in the sense that they provoke the reader to think about them. (If you think a quote is insulting please step back and think about it some more because I never intended any of them to be taken that way.) I hope you enjoy them as much as I've enjoyed picking them out and entering them in.

Thanks, Father Joe