Dorothy Sayers, Gaudy Night, 1935:
A facility for quotation covers the absence of original thought.
I think there is a distinction to be made here between noticing a striking thing that some other person has written and then copying and pasting it into your own website, and on the other hand memorising something that another person is often frequently quoted by others as having said and declaiming that quotation in conversation, because you can think of nothing else pertinent to say. It sounds to me like Sayers was thinking of the latter. If so, I think she had a point. But only a point, because the trick often fails to work and merely irritates, especially if the same quotations are recycled again and again.
I try to avoid “popular” quotes that have been frequently used, but I do confess that I’m not much of an original thinker, too.