MUMBAI: Will it be a quote from Mahatma Gandhi or William Shakespeare, Saint Luke's Gospel or Lao Tzu? Voting has started for BBC World Service's Moving Words online campaign to find the world's favourite quotation.
Voting ends on 12 April 2006 and the results will be announced on 13 April.
Last month, people around the world were invited to nominate their most loved quotations via the Moving Words website. Their selections could come from a wide range of sources - novels, short stories, poems, plays, speeches, religious texts and songs from anywhere in the world and from any era.
Famous people taking part included the Dalai Lama who chose an extract from Shantideva, an eighth century Buddhist monk. Crime writer PD James selected lines from Hamlet and Dr Michio Kaku, a physicist and inventor of String Field theory, was inspired by Albert Einstein.
Asian writer Hari Kunzru found parallels to today's infringement of personal and public space in the rhyme: "The law locks up the man or woman/ who steals the goose from off the common/ but lets the greater villain loose/ who steals the common from the goose." (Anon).
Nominations flooded in from people in more than 100 countries. Their selections have now been whittled down to a shortlist of ten.
The shortlist is:
Woody Allen "To you I'm an atheist; to God, I'm the Loyal Opposition".
Dalai Lama "You can't shake hands with a clenched fist".
Sir Isaac Newton "If I have seen further, it is by standing on the shoulders of Giants.".
Saint Augustine "It's better to have loved and lost than never to have loved at all."
Gospel of Luke -"And as ye would that men should do to you, do ye also to them likewise."
Lao Tzu "A journey of a thousand miles begins with a single step."
The US Declaration of Independence: "We hold these truths to be self-evident, that all men are created equal, that they are endowed by their Creator with certain unalienable Rights, that among these are Life, Liberty and the pursuit of Happiness."
William Shakespeare who wrote in the play As You Like It "All the world's a stage, And, all the men and women merely players. They have their exits and their entrances, and one man in his time plays many parts."
Nelson Mandela - "If you talk to a man in a language he understands, that goes to his head. If you talk to him in his language, that goes to his heart."
Mahatma Gandhi "An eye for an eye only ends up making the whole world blind."
