Pedant

Prefer anything but quotes to be verified be left on my user page at wikipedia, thanks.

"if X were/was a thing money could buy.."

I'm looking for the FIRST occasion of this quote "If life was a thing that money could buy, the rich would live and the poor would die" Terry Teene, on Curse of the Hearse

Try this: https://archive.org/stream/aberdeenjournaln02unse#page/n45/mode/2up

Its actually a bit better in the original I think ;-)

also bahamian as: " if religion were a thing..." and various others quoted as saying substantially the same quote. any input is welcome

Welcome to Wikiquote! One of the best ways to find evidence of who said a quote is to put a portion of a phrase that you believe to be accurate within quotation marks and search the internet with Google or another major search engine. Thus a search for "they have no holidays" (within quotation marks, so that the search is for an exact phrase) yielded many hits indicating Henny Youngman: "I once wanted to become an Atheist, but I gave up. They have no holidays." ~ Henny Youngman. Sometimes there is more than one person to whom a quotation is attributed, and then it becomes a matter of sifting through the indications and evidence that is available. I hope you find this an interesting place to find quotations and contribute them ~ Kalki 18:32, 10 Aug 2004 (UTC)

Thanks, funny, I was just on YOUR talk page...Pedant 03:04, 11 Aug 2004 (UTC)

Thanks for creating the page for Nancy Joyce Peters; it was something I had meant to do after finding out a bit more information about her, but had lost track of in recent weeks. I don't think it is a good idea to make any more quotations into titles of pages as it would needlessly over-burden user ability to keep track of additions (and of what is actually on the pages) as well as the database itself. So far as I am aware, the one that you made into a redirect was a singular fluke which I hope will remain that. I had intended to delete it, after placing the quote it contained somewhere else, and I still might do that rather than retain it as a redirect. I have been been a bit less active on Wikiquote the last few weeks than I normally like to be, but hope that after this week I will have time to work on some long-stalled or delayed contributions, and take care of a few maintenance tasks I have let slide for a while, such as this one that you've reminded me about. ~ Kalki 19:30, 11 Aug 2004 (UTC)