Oxford University Press has produced a dictionary of quotations which departs from traditional collation by author and era, instead grouping entries around subjects.

The Oxford Dictionary of Thematic Quotations offers more than 600 easy-to-browse contemporary themes, ranging from acting to weather.

"This is a book to which people will turn in order to listen to contemporary discussion on a wide range of topics," said Elizabeth Knowles, managing editor of OUP's quotations dictionaries.

"The thematic divisions focus on issues of today. We have still included remarks from some classic authors, but the topics chosen are those that reflect modern concerns."

She said contrasting comments under each heading would provide readers with food for thought.

The entry for politics, for example, gives Harold Wilson's words on the 1964 sterling crisis: "A week is a long time in politics." But the then backbencher Ken Livingstone said in 1997: "Politics is a marathon, not a sprint." Both observations, it seems, have weathered well.

Under the heading quotations, a remark from Winston Churchill reads: "It is a good thing for an uneducated man to read books of quotations." Yet on the same page the American essayist Ralph Emerson suggests that parroting other people's words limits true thought: "I hate quotation. Tell me what you know."

Ms Knowles said the dictionary incorporated comments from more than 1,000 wits, including contemporary figures such as Joan Collins, Jeremy Paxman and the rap artist Ice Cube.

Noel Gallagher's profane boast as to the crowd pulling power of his band, Oasis - "has God played Knebworth?" - makes it into the dictionary, though it may not prove as resonant as Friedrich Nietzsche's 1882 assault on the almighty: "God is dead: but ... there will perhaps be caves, for ages yet, in which his shadow will be shown."

Ms Knowles identified a recent drift towards the shorter, sometimes more glib soundbite, but cautioned against accusing modern commentators of failing to match up.

"I don't believe the standard has fallen," she said. "What gets overlooked is that the past is represented by the few quotations that have lasted and the many remarks we remember from the last couple of years will not all stand the test of time."

The dictionary includes entries from the few politicians fighting the trend towards verbless soundbites.

Modern topics under discussion include personal computers, which, according to Timothy Leary in 1996, were "the LSD of the 90s", heralding an era in which the US historian Francis Fukuyama last year claimed: "Silicon Valley is the Florence of the late 20th century."

Other contemporary commentators are recorded battling over the role of science in society.

"We ought not to permit a cottage industry in the God business," the US Republican John Marchi said three years ago on hearing that British scientists had cloned a sheep.

But, argues Stephen Jay Gould, science is "an integral part of culture. It's not this for eign thing, done by an arcane priesthood. It is one of the glories of human intellectual tradition."

A number of injudicious remarks are also dredged up. The weather forecaster Michael Fish is quoted on the eve of the October 1987 hurricane as telling his viewers: "A woman rang to say she heard there was a hurricane on the way. Well, don't worry, there isn't."

Jonathan Aitken's comments on "the cancer of bent and twisted journalism" in 1995 are also uncharitably revisited.

• The Oxford Dictionary of Thematic Quotations, edited by Susan Ratcliffe; £14.99.