In your nonprofit annual reports, fundraising appeals, newsletters, and speeches, you can use apt quotations as powerful levers that move people to support your mission.

Other people’s words—quotations—sometimes work better than your own words can to:

• catch or focus attention
• inspire or educate
• explain a difficult concept
• provoke discussion on a controversial topic
• add credibility
• draw smiles or laughter

You’ve probably noticed that many people tend to believe statements made by a famous person. And a fittingly witty quotation makes people smile, which makes them relax, which makes them more open to your message.

In a typical nonprofit publication, it’s usually enough to identify the quotation’s source (who said it) and original context (such as the book or event).

For example, in an annual report for an advocacy organization, you might write: “In a 1958 address to the United Nations Commission on Human Rights, Eleanor Roosevelt said, ‘Where, after all, do universal human rights begin? In small places, close to home—so close and so small that they cannot be seen on any map of the world.’”

You don’t have to—but might want to—mention that this quote is in Respectfully Quoted: A Dictionary of Quotations Requested from the Congressional Research Service. Edited by Suzy Platt and published in 1989 by the Library of Congress, the book compiles the 2,100 citations most often requested by U.S. Congress members.

Now on to three, free fantastic online quotation sources…

Bartleby.com's  searchable database has complete bibliographic information on over 87,000 entries quoted in reference, verse, fiction, and nonfiction works.

Bartleby easily yields grist for opposing views. In Human Options, an autobiographical book on healing, Norman Cousins wrote, “Optimism doesn’t wait on facts. It deals in prospects.” But in Candide, the French philosopher Voltaire wrote, “Optimism is the madness of insisting that all is well when we are miserable.”

On Gospelcom.net—consistently ranked as the top Christian website—Bible Gateway lets you search keywords and passages in 16 English-language Bible versions and versions in 28 other languages.

Find headlines and news stories that mention your key concept on Google News. It continuously crawls over 4,500 international news sources for articles that appeared within the past 30 days.

Finally, to make sure your quotation use doesn’t plagiarize or violate copyrights, check out this overview on Stanford University Libraries’ comprehensive Copyright & Fair Use site.

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