A Few Good Quotes Turned Into 1,060: The Story Behind John Robert Adair’s Just Saying

One notebook, decades of collecting, and an unexpected museum visit helped turn a personal habit into a book

 John Robert Adair started with a small collection of quotations. Then the collection got ideas of its own. What began as a habit of saving memorable words gradually spread across notebooks, emails, books, conversations, historical research, films, and everyday encounters. A line would catch Adair’s attention and get written down. Then another would join it, followed by another, until what had once been a personal collection had become something much bigger.

Today, that habit has become Just Saying: 1060 Utterly Fantastic Quotes, a wide-ranging collection that moves comfortably from poets and presidents to military commanders, artists, athletes, philosophers, entertainers, spiritual teachers, business minds, and plenty of unexpected voices in between. It is the kind of mix that can take a reader from a serious reflection on courage to something wonderfully funny only a few pages later.

The moment that pushed the collection toward becoming an actual book arrived somewhere Adair was not expecting it. During a visit with his daughter Camille in Colorado Springs, he toured the U.S. Olympic & Paralympic Museum. The museum was filled with stories of remarkable athletes, but Adair found himself equally fascinated by the words displayed alongside them. He came away with several more quotations for his growing collection, and while rearranging the new additions, a simple question suddenly seemed impossible to ignore: why not make this a book?

That question launched a project involving years of collecting, sorting, researching, checking, reconsidering, and occasionally discovering that the internet had confidently credited the wrong person with the right words. Adair wanted Just Saying to do more than repeat familiar lines with famous names underneath them. He wanted readers to know something about the people, moments, and stories behind the quotations.

Many entries therefore include annotations that provide historical background, explain an unusual statement, add personal observations, or reveal the circumstances in which a particular line was spoken. Sometimes the context is serious, sometimes surprising, and sometimes the best part of a quote is finding out what happened just before somebody said it.

The book also ventures into subjects that rarely occupy the same table of contents. Readers will find material on character, courage, leadership, love, friendship, faith, education, health, humor, art, chess, military history, science, sports, success, patriotism, spirituality, the Wild West, and personal growth. That eclectic mix reflects the person who assembled it. Adair has spent much of his life moving between different worlds, including business and writing, chess and travel, community service and history, serious research and a genuine appreciation for a good joke.

Just Saying carries that same curiosity onto the page. It works as a reference book, a conversation starter, a source of inspiration, an occasional history lesson, and a book readers can open at random and remain inside much longer than they intended. Some may come looking for a clever line for a speech or presentation, while others may want perspective, encouragement, humor, or simply something worth thinking about.

Every now and then, though, someone may open the book and find a sentence written decades or even centuries ago that somehow feels as if it had been waiting for them. That is the peculiar magic of a great quotation. The words may be old, but the moment they reach the right reader, they become new again.