I personally cannot imagine an US court accepting these number as "fair use" and I cannot see any educational use of these quotations legitimating an exception from our policy.
I'm afraid I don't understand how we reconcile the principle that WMF is supposed to provide freely-licensed content, and the Wikiquote project is apparently chock-full of so-called fair use. This is far worse than simply incorporating fair use media (which is not permitted on many projects for principled reasons). I can understand a Wikiquote containing quotes which have fallen out of copyright and I think such a project would be wonderful. But using fair use to compile quotes seems to me to be a bad idea regardless of how many there are. So whether a court would accept a fair use defence is rather immaterial to me - I am more concerned with the principle of having an entire article/page of solely fair use content. For a WMF project, this seems nonsensical.
Mike