About Charlie Fink and Quote-O-Rama

The Quote of the Week began in the spring of 1996 as a weekly e-mail ritual with a few colleagues, for whom it was a humorous and occasionally edifying in-joke. But as often happens with e-mail, The Quotes were forwarded from user to user, and soon took on a life of their own: by the spring of 2000, there were over fifteen thousand subscribers to the weekly Quotes email. I think this is because The Quotes capture the essence of what works on the Internet: a fun, functional, free (!) service that is easy to use and, by its very nature, viral, easy to spread via email from user to user.

The success of the Quotes email led me to believe that people want to receive more content via email - where they spend the vast majority of their online time. So I founded a company in the fall of 1999, eAgents, to deliver quotes, cartoons, news and entertainment in a single daily email. Weekly Quotes subscribers were transitioned to this daily service when it went live in May 2000. Soon thereafter, eAgents was acquired by AmericanGreetings.com, which helped to acquire millions of eAgents subscribers before the daily email service was shut down in 2001 because of financial and technical limitations imposed by prudent management in a declining economy. Despite the demise of eAgents, Quote of the Week lived on as part of a weekly newsletter for AmericanGreetings' viral entertainment site, PassItAround.com. Sadly, PassItAround, too, was shut down in the fall of 2002. Afterward, I resolved to resurrect the Quotes in its original form. It's taken a few months and some real expense and effort but I am happy to say... we're back!

Since I started this hobby in 1996, I've tried collecting the best, short, entertaining and thought provoking quotes I can find. Sources have varied from reference books, to web sites, to submissions from subscribers. I've shied away from anonymous sayings, song lyrics, and aphorisms in favor of famous quotes from famous people. However, I must confess there has been no attempt to verify the accuracy of the quotes or attributions.

Finally, I want to thank the many people over the last ten years who have encouraged my hobby: first, my friends and former colleagues at AOL, Miguel Monteverde, Tom Hardart, Danny Krifcher, Ted Leonsis, John Merz, Emil Rensing, Joy Every, Mike Moore, Steve Long, Nina Wood, and Laura Melbourne, who helped build the first site in 1996; second, the visionary venture capitalists who funded eAgents: Steve Salzinger, John Backus, Kevin Burns, and Chip Austin; third, AmericanGreetings.com's fearless CEO Josef Mandlebaum; my present company, Ben Spriggs, Tagore Smith, Ted Kroll, and Susie Acheson; most of all, I want to thank my loving and supportive wife, Jane, without whom none of this would be possible.

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