Posted by Fred R. Shapiro, Editor of The Yale Book of Quotations:

I am often asked about who are the most-quoted authors in The Yale Book of Quotations.  The first two are, unsurprisingly:

• William Shakespeare . . . 455 quotations
• Bible . . . 400

The next two on the list are less conventional for quotation dictionaries:

• Mark Twain . . . 153
• Ambrose Bierce . . . 144

The high ranking of these two suggests the American and, perhaps, iconoclastic emphases of the book.

Where I diverged even further from the “most-quoted” rankings in the standard quotation dictionaries is in the representation of modern figures, such as the following:

• Winston Churchill . . . 55
• F. Scott Fitzgerald . . . 52
• Groucho Marx . . . 51
• George Orwell . . . 51
• Dorothy Parker . . . 49
• H. L. Mencken . . . 46
• W. H. Auden . . . 44
• Woody Allen . . . 43
• John F. Kennedy . . . 41
• John Lennon/Paul McCartney . . . 39
• Albert Einstein . . . 38
• Ernest Hemingway . . . 36
• Franklin D. Roosevelt . . . 35
• Ezra Pound . . . 30
• W. C. Fields . . . 29
• James Joyce . . . 29
• Bob Dylan . . . 27
• Oscar Hammerstein II . . . 27
• Robert Frost . . . 26
• Cole Porter . . . 26
• Mae West . . . 24
• Sigmund Freud . . . 24
• George W. Bush . . . 23
• Richard M. Nixon . . . 22
• Dylan Thomas . . . 22
• Martin Luther King, Jr. . . . 21
• Virginia Woolf . . . 21
• George H. W. Bush . . . 20
• e. e. cummings . . . 20
• Ronald W. Reagan . . . 20