Election tops 2008's most memorable quotes list

NEW HAVEN, Conn. — Sarah Palin lost the election, but she's a winner to a connoisseur of quotations.

The former Republican vice-presidential candidate and her comedic doppelgänger, Tina Fey, took the top two spots in this year's list of most memorable quotes compiled by Fred Shapiro.

First place was "I can see Russia from my house!" to jokingly refer to Palin's foreign-policy credentials by Fey on "Saturday Night Live."

Palin's actual quote was: "They're our next-door neighbors and you can actually see Russia from land here in Alaska, from an island in Alaska."

Palin made the third annual list for her inability to name newspapers she reads. When questioned by CBS anchor Katie Couric, Palin said she reads "all of them, any of them that have been in front of me over all these years."

Palin's quotes were pivotal, said Shapiro, associate librarian and lecturer in legal research at the Yale Law School who compiles the list.

"This quote helped shape the election results," he said of the Russia quote. "As it sank in, the public realized this was someone really, really inexperienced and perhaps lacking in curiosity about the world."

Shapiro issued his Yale Book of Quotations, with about 13,000 entries, two years ago after six years of research. He expects to release the next edition in about five years but in the meantime plans to issue annual Top 10 lists.

Picking the best quotes this year was especially challenging because the presidential race and financial crisis provided so much material, Shapiro said.

Last year's list ranged from "Don't tase me, bro" — shouted by a Florida college student — to a quote from a Miss Teen USA contestant who gave a mangled response to a question about why one-fifth of Americans can't locate the United States on a map.

Shapiro said that when he began the list, he thought he would select the most profound, eloquent or witty quotes. But the celebrity culture and political discourse led him down a different path.

"What I have come to do is pick some quotes that really say something about our culture and they tend almost exclusively to be quotes that are notable for negative reasons rather than being admirable or eloquent," Shapiro said.

Palin's running mate, Sen. John McCain, also made the list twice, once for his "the fundamentals of America's economy are strong" comment in April and again for saying "maybe 100" when asked in January how many years U.S. troops could remain in Iraq.

Shapiro said the quotes may have been somewhat unfairly construed. "Nonetheless, these quotes cemented his image as someone who was out of touch with economic realities or indifferent to economic realities and being someone who was fanatical about prosecuting the war in Iraq," Shapiro said.