If you’re looking for something pithy to toss into your next dinner party, look not further than the over 40,000 quotes available at PoliticalQuotes (http://www.politicalquotes.org/), a collection of quotes by and about historians, politicians, and suchlike (over 12,000 people are quoted.)

The front page has both a simple search (bottom) and a field-based search (right.) I did a simple search for furious. I got 8 results showing part of the quote, who said it, and its popularity index and document number. Quotes in that search ranged from Queen Victoria to Henry Clay to Muammar Qaddafi. I was a bit confused because some of the results didn’t have my search word in them, but when I clicked on one of the results I saw why.

Each quote has a page of context that does with it. The Clay quote, for example, contained information about the context of the quote (in which my keyword was found) a place for related quotes (none in this case), a picture of Clay, very basic information about him, and major context and keywords. I would have liked to see just a little more hookups to information (external links to Wikipedia? Ask? Y!Q? Answers.com?) but I was impressed by this elegant context page. It also made it clearer why there was an advanced/fields search on every page (in case you really did want your keyword only in the quote itself, and not in the context.

The site is apparently in beta; I don’t know what that means for a quotes database but it’s well worth a look right now.