Quote of the day/Complete list

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This page lists all "Quotes of the day" that have been chosen at Wikiquote. This can be very useful for avoiding repetition of past selections in making proposals.


2006 : January - February - March - April - May

2005 : January - February - March - April - May - June - July - August - September - October - November - December

2004 : January - February - March - April - May - June - July - August - September - October - November - December

2003 : July - August - September - October - November - December (Note: In the first six months of the Wikiquote project a new "Quote of the Day" was not always selected for each day, and sometimes several days would pass before a new one was chosen.)

See also: Quote of the Day archive - Quote of the Day proposals - Wikiquote:Quote of the day

Latest quotations are listed first:

[edit]

May 2006

  • "What I do know for certain is that what is regarded as success in a rational materialistic society only impresses superficial minds. It amounts to nothing and will not help us rout the destructive forces threatening us today. What may be our salvation is the discovery of the identity hidden deep in any one of us, and which may be found in even the most desperate individual, if he cares to search the spiritual womb which contains the embryo of what can be one's personal contribution to truth and life." ~ Patrick White
  • "Don't start an argument with somebody who has a microphone when you don't. They'll make you look like chopped liver." ~ Harlan Ellison
  • "When you get in situations where you cannot afford to make a mistake, it's very hard to do the right thing. So if you're trying to do the right thing, the right thing might be to eliminate the cost of making a mistake rather than try to guess what's right." ~ Ward Cunningham
  • They reckon ill who leave me out;
    When me they fly, I am the wings;
    I am the doubter and the doubt,
    And I the hymn the Brahmin sings.
    ~ Ralph Waldo Emerson ~
  • "Cynicism isn't smarter, it's only safer. There's nothing fluffy about optimism." ~ Jewel
  • A little Learning is a dang'rous Thing;
    Drink deep, or taste not the Pierian Spring:
    There shallow Draughts intoxicate the Brain,
    And drinking largely sobers us again.
    ~ Alexander Pope ~
  • "A man should never be ashamed to own he has been in the wrong, which is but saying, in other words, that he is wiser today than he was yesterday." ~ Alexander Pope
  • "Love is like some fresh spring, first a stream and then a river, changing its aspect and its nature as it flows to plunge itself in some boundless ocean, where restricted natures only find monotony, but where great souls are engulfed in endless contemplation." ~ Honoré de Balzac
  • "Faith is a continuum, and we each fall on that line where we may. By attempting to rigidly classify ethereal concepts like faith, we end up debating semantics to the point where we entirely miss the obvious — that is, that we are all trying to decipher life's big mysteries, and we're each following our own paths of enlightenment." ~ Dan Brown
  • A Book of Verses underneath the Bough,
    A Jug of Wine, a Loaf of Bread — and Thou
    Beside me singing in the Wilderness —
    Oh, Wilderness were Paradise enow!
    ~ Omar Khayyám ~
  • "There is no formula to it because writing every song, for me, is a little journey... It's everything. It's the walk you take in the morning, it's the night before, the meeting with people, landscapes, the chats, all of that evolves in some way into melody, but I'm not sure how it's going to happen. I'm dealing with the unknown all the time and that is exciting." ~ Enya
  • "I like quoting Einstein. Know why? Because nobody dares contradict you." ~ Studs Terkel
  • "The voice of the individual artist may seem perhaps of no more consequence than the whirring of a cricket in the grass, but the arts do live continuously, and they live literally by faith; their names and their shapes and their uses and their basic meanings survive unchanged in all that matters through times of interruption, diminishment, neglect; they outlive governments and creeds and the societies, even the very civilization that produced them. They cannot be destroyed altogether because they represent the substance of faith and the only reality. They are what we find again when the ruins are cleared away." ~ Katherine Anne Porter
  • "It is confidently expected that the period is at hand, when man, through ignorance, shall not much longer inflict unnecessary misery on man; because the mass of mankind will become enlightened, and will clearly discern that by so acting they will inevitably create misery to themselves." ~ Robert Owen
  • "'Fire' does not matter, 'earth' and 'air' and 'water' do not matter. 'I' do not matter. No word matters. But man forgets reality and remembers words." ~ Roger Zelazny in Lord of Light
  • "Duty, Honor, Country — those three hallowed words reverently dictate what you ought to be, what you can be, what you will be. They are your rallying point to build courage when courage seems to fail, to regain faith when there seems to be little cause for faith, to create hope when hope becomes forlorn." ~ Douglas MacArthur
  • "Positive vibrations man. That's what makes it work. That's reggae music. You can't look away because it's real. You listen to what I sing because I mean what I sing, there's no secret, no big deal. Just honesty, that's all." ~ Bob Marley
  • "The Truth lies not in the Yes and not in the No, but in the knowledge and the beginning from which the Yes and the No arise." ~ Karl Barth
  • "The time for the healing of the wounds has come. The moment to bridge the chasms that divide us has come. The time to build is upon us." ~ Nelson Mandela
  • "While in the physical sciences the investigator will be able to measure what, on the basis of a prima facie theory, he thinks important, in the social sciences often that is treated as important which happens to be accessible to measurement. This is sometimes carried to the point where it is demanded that our theories must be formulated in such terms that they refer only to measurable magnitudes." ~ Friedrich Hayek
  • "The meaning of the living words that come out of the experiences of great hearts can never be exhausted by any one system of logical interpretation. They have to be endlessly explained by the commentaries of individual lives, and they gain an added mystery in each new revelation." ~ Rabindranath Tagore
  • "Thinking is an experimental dealing with small quantities of energy, just as a general moves miniature figures over a map before setting his troops in action." ~ Sigmund Freud
  • "Sit down before fact as a little child, be prepared to give up every preconceived notion, follow humbly wherever and to whatever abysses nature leads, or you shall learn nothing. I have only begun to learn content and peace of mind since I have resolved at all risks to do this." ~ T. H. Huxley
  • "Education is what you get when you read the fine print; experience is what you get when you don't." ~ Pete Seeger
  • "We are near waking when we dream that we dream." ~ Novalis
  • "I react pragmatically. Where the market works, I'm for that. Where the government is necessary, I'm for that. I'm deeply suspicious of somebody who says, 'I'm in favor of privatization,' or, 'I'm deeply in favor of public ownership.' I'm in favor of whatever works in the particular case." ~ John Kenneth Galbraith
[edit]

April 2006

  • "You know that I write slowly. This is chiefly because I am never satisfied until I have said as much as possible in a few words, and writing briefly takes far more time than writing at length." ~ Carl Friedrich Gauss
  • "Despite the best that has been done by everyone — the gallant fighting of the military and naval forces, the diligence and assiduity of Our servants of the State, and the devoted service of Our one hundred million people — the war situation has developed not necessarily to Japan's advantage, while the general trends of the world have all turned against her interest." ~ Hirohito
  • "War: first, one hopes to win; then one expects the enemy to lose; then, one is satisfied that he too is suffering; in the end, one is surprised that everyone has lost." ~ Karl Kraus
  • "The winds and waves are always on the side of the ablest navigators." ~ Edward Gibbon
  • "Search men's governing principles, and consider the wise, what they shun and what they cleave to." ~ Marcus Aurelius
  • "The speed of communications is wondrous to behold. It is also true that speed can multiply the distribution of information that we know to be untrue." ~ Edward R. Murrow
  • "The end of man is knowledge but there's one thing he can't know. He can't know whether knowledge will save him or kill him. He will be killed, all right, but he can't know whether he is killed because of the knowledge which he has got or because of the knowledge which he hasn't got and which if he had it would save him." ~ Robert Penn Warren
  • "I know more than I can express in words, and the little I can express would not have been expressed, had I not known more." ~ Vladimir Nabokov
  • "This grand show is eternal. It is always sunrise somewhere; the dew is never all dried at once; a shower is forever falling; vapor ever rising. Eternal sunrise, eternal sunset, eternal dawn and gloaming, on seas and continents and islands, each in its turn, as the round earth rolls." ~ John Muir
  • "Oh, the comfort — the inexpressible comfort of feeling safe with a person — having neither to weigh thoughts nor measure words, but pouring them all right out, just as they are, chaff and grain together; certain that a faithful hand will take and sift them, keep what is worth keeping, and then with the breath of kindness blow the rest away." ~ Dinah Craik
  • By the rude bridge that arched the flood,
    Their flag to April's breeze unfurled;
    Here once the embattled farmers stood;
    And fired the shot heard round the world.
    ~ Ralph Waldo Emerson ~
  • "I do not consider it an insult, but rather a compliment to be called an agnostic. I do not pretend to know where many ignorant men are sure — that is all that agnosticism means." ~ Clarence Darrow
  • "Where the storyteller is loyal, eternally and unswervingly loyal to the story, there, in the end, silence will speak. Where the story has been betrayed, silence is but emptiness. But we, the faithful, when we have spoken our last word, will hear the voice of silence." ~ Karen Blixen
  • "The kingdom of God cometh not with observation: Neither shall they say, Lo here! or, lo there! for, behold, the kingdom of God is within you." ~ Yeshua (Jesus Christ)
  • "Although to penetrate into the intimate mysteries of nature and thence to learn the true causes of phenomena is not allowed to us, nevertheless it can happen that a certain fictive hypothesis may suffice for explaining many phenomena." ~ Leonhard Euler
  • "Unto whomsoever much is given, of him shall be much required: and to whom men have committed much, of him they will ask the more." ~ Yeshua (Jesus Christ)
  • "I would rather be exposed to the inconveniences attending too much liberty than to those attending too small a degree of it." ~ Thomas Jefferson
  • "Man is a creature of hope and invention, both of which belie the idea that things cannot be changed." ~ Tom Clancy
  • "A writer writes not because he is educated but because he is driven by the need to communicate. Behind the need to communicate is the need to share. Behind the need to share is the need to be understood. The writer wants to be understood much more than he wants to be respected or praised or even loved. And that perhaps, is what makes him different from others." ~ Leo Rosten
  • "Any relations in a social order will endure if there is infused into them some of that spirit of human sympathy, which qualifies life for immortality." ~ George William Russell
  • "I'm sure we all agree that we ought to love one another, and I know there are people in the world who do not love their fellow human beings — and I hate people like that!" ~ Tom Lehrer
  • "Hatred does not cease by hatred, but only by love. This is the eternal rule." ~ Gautama Buddha
  • Thanks to the human heart by which we live,
    Thanks to its tenderness, its joys, and fears,
    To me the meanest flower that blows can give
    Thoughts that do often lie too deep for tears.
    ~ William Wordsworth ~
  • "Violence is the last refuge of the incompetent." ~ Isaac Asimov
  • "Do not that to another, which thou wouldest not have done to thy selfe." ~ Thomas Hobbes
  • "There must be a beginning of any great matter, but the continuing unto the end until it be thoroughly finished yields the true glory." ~ Sir Francis Drake
  • "There is a certain relief in change, even though it be from bad to worse; as I have found in travelling in a stage-coach, that it is often a comfort to shift one’s position and be bruised in a new place." ~ Washington Irving
  • "Whether it is happy or unhappy, a man's life is the only treasure he can ever possess." ~ Giacomo Casanova
  • "The first of April is the day we remember what we are the other 364 days of the year." ~ Mark Twain
[edit]

March 2006

  • "When we are really honest with ourselves we must admit that our lives are all that really belong to us. So, it is how we use our lives that determines what kind of men we are. It is my deepest belief that only by giving our lives do we find life." ~ Cesar Chavez
  • "Nothing can be surprising any more or impossible or miraculous, now that Zeus, father of the Olympians has made night out of noonday, hiding the bright sunlight, and . . . fear has come upon mankind. After this, men can believe anything, expect anything." ~ Archilochus
  • "Good books tell the truth, even when they're about things that never have been and never will be. They're truthful in a different way." ~ Stanisław Lem
  • "I'd like just to be remembered as a guy that came along and did his music, did his best and showed up on time, clean and ready to do the job, wrote a few songs, and had a hell of a time." ~ Buck Owens
  • "All knowledge is oriented toward some object and is influenced in its approach by the nature of the object with which it is pre-occupied. But the mode of approach to the object to be known is dependent upon the nature of the knower." ~ Karl Mannheim
  • He acts without contact,
    instructs without meeting,
    guides without pointing.
    Desires do not conflict with Him,
    thoughts do not mingle with Him:
    His essence is without qualification,
    His action without effort.
    ~ Mansur al-Hallaj ~
  • "A wiki works best where you're trying to answer a question that you can't easily pose, where there's not a natural structure that's known in advance to what you need to know." ~ Ward Cunningham
  • "With the arrogance of youth, I determined to do no less than to transform the world with Beauty. If I have succeeded in some small way, if only in one small corner of the world, amongst the men and women I love, then I shall count myself blessed, and blessed, and blessed, and the work goes on." ~ William Morris
  • "Is life so dear or peace so sweet as to be purchased at the price of chains and slavery? Forbid it, Almighty God! I know not what course others may take; but as for me, give me liberty or give me death!" ~ Patrick Henry
  • "As I understand it, laws, commands, rules and edicts are for those who have not the light which makes plain the pathway." ~ Anne Hutchinson
  • "The poet is a liar who always speaks the truth." ~ Jean Cocteau
  • "The spirit of truth and the spirit of freedom — these are the pillars of society." ~ Henrik Ibsen
  • Who save the madman dares to cry: "'Tis I am right, you all are wrong"?
    "You all are right, you all are wrong," we hear the careless Soofi say,
    "For each believes his glimm'ering lamp to be the gorgeous light of day."
    ~ Sir Richard Francis Burton ~
  • "The very essence of a free government consists in considering offices as public trusts, bestowed for the good of the country, and not for the benefit of an individual or a party." ~ John C. Calhoun
  • "Beneath this mask there is more than flesh. There is an idea, Mr. Creedy, and ideas are bulletproof." ~ "V" in V for Vendetta
  • "Down these mean streets a man must go who is not himself mean, who is neither tarnished nor afraid. The detective must be a complete man and a common man and yet an unusual man. He must be, to use a rather weathered phrase, a man of honor. He talks as the man of his age talks, that is, with rude wit, a lively sense of the grotesque, a disgust for sham, and a contempt for pettiness." ~ Raymond Chandler
  • "Fortune, which has a great deal of power in other matters but especially in war, can bring about great changes in a situation through very slight forces." ~ Julius Caesar
  • "Imagination is more important than knowledge. For knowledge is limited, whereas imagination embraces the entire world, stimulating progress, giving birth to evolution." ~ Albert Einstein
  • "Don't play for safety. It's the most dangerous thing in the world." ~ Hugh Walpole
  • "Good writers define reality; bad ones merely restate it. A good writer turns fact into truth; a bad writer will, more often than not, accomplish the opposite." ~ Edward Albee
  • "Let us think the unthinkable, let us do the undoable, let us prepare to grapple with the ineffable itself, and see if we may not eff it after all." ~ Douglas Adams
  • "All that separates, whether of race, class, creed, or sex, is inhuman, and must be overcome." ~ Kate Sheppard
  • "Some choices will choose you. How you face these choices, these turns in the road, with what kind of attitude, more than the choices themselves, is what will define the context of your life." ~ Dana Reeve
  • Burn all the statutes and their shelves:
    They stir us up against our kind;
    And worse, against ourselves.
    We have a passion — make a law,
    Too false to guide us or control!
    And for the law itself we fight
    In bitterness of soul.
    And, puzzled, blinded thus, we lose
    Distinctions that are plain and few:
    These find I graven on my heart:
    That tells me what to do.
    ~ William Wordsworth in "Rob Roy's Grave" ~
  • "Freedom only for the members of the government, only for the members of the Party — though they are quite numerous — is no freedom at all. Freedom is always the freedom of dissenters." ~ Rosa Luxemburg
  • There was a young fellow from Trinity,
    Who took the square root of infinity.
    But the number of digits, Gave him the fidgets;
    He dropped Math and took up Divinity.
    ~ George Gamow ~
  • "In mathematics the art of asking questions is more valuable than solving problems." ~ Georg Cantor
  • "Our dignity, our free institutions and the peace and welfare of this and coming generations of Americans will be secure only as we cling to the watchword of true patriotism: 'Our country — when right to be kept right; when wrong to be put right.'" ~ Carl Schurz
  • I dreamt the past was never past redeeming:
    But whether this was false or honest dreaming
    I beg death's pardon now. And mourn the dead.
    ~ Richard Wilbur ~
[edit]

February 2006

  • "If you want to have good ideas you must have many ideas. Most of them will be wrong, and what you have to learn is which ones to throw away." ~ Linus Pauling
  • Tell me not, in mournful numbers,
    "Life is but an empty dream!"
    For the soul is dead that slumbers,
    And things are not what they seem.
    ~ Henry Wadsworth Longfellow ~
  • "Sure, ninety percent of science fiction is crud. That's because ninety percent of everything is crud." ~ Theodore Sturgeon
  • "That so many writers have been prepared to accept a kind of martyrdom is the best tribute that flesh can pay to the living spirit of man as expressed in his literature. One cannot doubt that the martyrdom will continue to be gladly embraced. To some of us, the wresting of beauty out of language is the only thing in the world that matters." ~ Anthony Burgess
  • "Our armament must be adequate to the needs, but our faith is not primarily in these machines of defense but in ourselves." ~ Chester Nimitz
  • "Man is always something more than what he knows of himself.  He is not what he is simply once and for all, but is a process..." ~ Karl Jaspers
  • "I hold the maxim no less applicable to public than to private affairs, that honesty is always the best policy." ~ George Washington
  • "When others asked the truth of me, I was convinced it was not the truth they wanted, but an illusion they could bear to live with." ~ Anaïs Nin
  • "We picked up everything we could get our hands on. Not that we needed all that for the trip, but once you get locked into a serious drug-collection, the tendency is to push it as far as you can.
    The only thing that really worried me was the ether. There is nothing in the world more helpless and irresponsible and depraved than a man in the depths of an ether binge. And I knew we'd get into that rotten stuff pretty soon." ~ Hunter S. Thompson
  • "External success has to do with people who may see me as a model, or an example, or a representative. As much as I may dislike or want to reject that responsibility, this is something that comes with public success. It's important to give others a sense of hope that it is possible and you can come from really different places in the world and find your own place in the world that's unique for yourself." ~ Amy Tan
  • "At some point in life the world's beauty becomes enough. You don't need to photograph, paint or even remember it. It is enough. No record of it needs to be kept and you don't need someone to share it with or tell it to. When that happens — that letting go — you let go because you can." ~ Toni Morrison
  • "Some people want it to happen, some wish it would happen, others make it happen." ~ Michael Jordan
  • "Politics, as a practice, whatever its professions, has always been the systematic organization of hatreds." ~ Henry Adams
  • "I do not feel obliged to believe that the same God who has endowed us with sense, reason, and intellect has intended us to forego their use." ~ Galileo Galilei
  • "Some things you don't need until they leave you; they're the things that you miss." ~ Rob Thomas
  • "Life is what it is, and you take what's handed, and you work as hard as you can, and hopefully you'll be successful, but I just don't spend too much time worrying about that." ~ Jerry Springer
  • "Let us have faith that right makes might, and in that faith, let us, to the end, dare to do our duty as we understand it." ~ Abraham Lincoln
  • "When writing about transcendental issues, be transcendentally clear." ~ René Descartes
  • "What for centuries raised man above the beast is not the cudgel but the irresistible power of unarmed truth." ~ Boris Pasternak
  • "Does it really matter what these affectionate people do — so long as they don’t do it in the streets and frighten the horses?" ~ Mrs Patrick Campbell
  • "There are, indeed, two forms of discontent: one laborious, the other indolent and complaining. We respect the man of laborious desire, but let us not suppose that his restlessness is peace, or his ambition meekness. It is because of the special connection of meekness with contentment that it is promised that the meek shall 'inherit the earth.' Neither covetous men, nor the grave, can inherit anything; they can but consume. Only contentment can possess." ~ John Ruskin
  • "He judged it not fit to determine anything rashly; and seemed to doubt whether those different forms of religion might not all come from God, who might inspire man in a different manner, and be pleased with this variety; he therefore thought it indecent and foolish for any man to threaten and terrify another to make him believe what did not appear to him to be true." ~ Thomas More
  • "You and I are told increasingly that we have to choose between a left or right, but I would like to suggest that there is no such thing as a left or right. There is only an up or down — up to a man's age-old dream; the ultimate in individual freedom consistent with law and order — or down to the ant heap totalitarianism, and regardless of their sincerity, their humanitarian motives, those who would trade our freedom for security have embarked on this downward course." ~ Ronald Reagan
  • "What counts now is not just what we are against, but what we are for. Who leads us is less important than what leads us—what convictions, what courage, what faith—win or lose." ~ Adlai Stevenson
  • "If one took no chances, one would not fly at all. Safety lies in the judgment of the chances one takes. That judgment, in turn, must rest upon one’s outlook on life. Any coward can sit in his home and criticize a pilot for flying into a mountain in fog. But I would rather, by far, die on a mountainside than in bed." ~ Charles Lindbergh
  • "An age is called Dark not because the light fails to shine, but because people refuse to see it." ~ James A. Michener
  • "There is a spirit and a need and a man at the beginning of every great human advance. Every one of these must be right for that particular moment of history, or nothing happens." ~ Coretta Scott King
  • I've known rivers:
    I've known rivers ancient as the world and older than the
    flow of human blood in human veins.
    My soul has grown deep like the rivers.
    ~ Langston Hughes ~
[edit]

January 2006

  • "Everyone does magic all the time in different ways. 'Life' plus 'significance' = magic." ~ Grant Morrison
  • "The only thing we have to fear is fear itself — nameless, unreasoning, unjustified terror which paralyzes needed efforts to convert retreat into advance." ~ Franklin D. Roosevelt
  • "Dogs are our link to paradise. They don't know evil or jealousy or discontent. To sit with a dog on a hillside on a glorious afternoon is to be back in Eden, where doing nothing was not boring — it was peace." ~ Milan Kundera
  • "Sit down and put down everything that comes into your head and then you're a writer. But an author is one who can judge his own stuff's worth, without pity, and destroy most of it." ~ Colette
  • "If you drink much from a bottle marked 'poison' it is almost certain to disagree with you, sooner or later." ~ Lewis Carroll
  • "I know war as few other men now living know it, and nothing to me is more revolting. I have long advocated its complete abolition, as its very destructiveness on both friend and foe has rendered it useless as a means of settling international disputes... But once war is forced upon us, there is no other alternative than to apply every available means to bring it to a swift end." ~ Douglas MacArthur
  • "While fame impedes and constricts, obscurity wraps about a man like a mist; obscurity is dark, ample, and free; obscurity lets the mind take its way unimpeded. Over the obscure man is poured the merciful suffusion of darkness. None knows where he goes or comes. He may seek the truth and speak it; he alone is free; he alone is truthful, he alone is at peace." ~ Virginia Woolf in Orlando
  • Musick has Charms to sooth a savage Breast,
    To soften Rocks, or bend a knotted Oak.
    ~ William Congreve ~
  • "To minimize suffering and to maximize security were natural and proper ends of society and Caesar. But then they became the only ends, somehow, and the only basis of law — a perversion. Inevitably, then, in seeking only them, we found only their opposites: maximum suffering and minimum security." ~ Walter M. Miller, Jr.
  • "Civilized men are more discourteous than savages because they know they can be impolite without having their skulls split, as a general thing." ~ Robert E. Howard
  • "So far as prejudice, or prepossession of opinion prevails over our minds, in the same proportion, reason is excluded from our theory or practice. Therefore if we would acquire useful knowledge, we must first divest ourselves of those impediments and sincerely endeavor to search out the truth: and draw our conclusions from reason and just argument, which will never conform to our inclination, interest or fancy but we must conform to that if we would judge rightly." ~ Ethan Allen
  • "I don't understand politics. I don't understand the concept of two sides. And I think that probably there's good on both sides, bad on both sides, and there's a middle ground. But it never seems to come to the middle ground. And it's very frustrating watching it, and seemingly we're not moving forward." ~ David Lynch
  • "They who dream by day are cognizant of many things which escape those who dream only by night." ~ Edgar Allan Poe
  • "There is absolutely nothing that can be taken for granted in this world." ~ Robert Anton Wilson
  • "Human felicity is produc'd not so much by great pieces of good fortune that seldom happen, as by little advantages that occur every day." ~ Benjamin Franklin
  • "What is needed is a realization that power without love is reckless and abusive, and love without power is sentimental and anemic. Power at its best is love implementing the demands of justice, and justice at its best is power correcting everything that stands against love... I know that love is ultimately the only answer to mankind's problems. And I'm going to talk about it everywhere I go." ~ Martin Luther King, Jr.
  • "Imagine a world in which every single person on the planet is given free access to the sum of all human knowledge. That's what we're doing." ~ Jimmy Wales
  • "Not one of us knows what effect his life produces, and what he gives to others; that is hidden from us and must remain so, though we are often allowed to see some little fraction of it, so that we may not lose courage." ~ Albert Schweitzer
  • "I have but one passion: to enlighten those who have been kept in the dark, in the name of humanity which has suffered so much and is entitled to happiness. My fiery protest is simply the cry of my very soul." ~ Émile Zola
  • "Magnanimity in politics is not seldom the truest wisdom; and a great empire and little minds go ill together." ~ Edmund Burke
  • "The sacred rights of mankind are not to be rummaged for among old parchments or musty records. They are written, as with a sunbeam, in the whole volume of human nature, by the hand of the divinity itself; and can never be erased or obscured by mortal power." ~ Alexander Hamilton
  • Know that however ugly the parts appear
    the whole remains beautiful...
    ... the wholeness of life and things, the divine beauty
    of the universe. Love that, not man
    Apart from that, or else you will share man's pitiful confusions,
    or drown in despair when his days darken.
    ~ Robinson Jeffers ~
  • "Life will not perish! It will begin anew with love; it will start out naked and tiny; it will take root in the wilderness, and to it all that we did and built will mean nothing — our towns and factories, our art, our ideas will all mean nothing, and yet life will not perish! Only we have perished. Our houses and machines will be in ruins, our systems will collapse, and the names of our great will fall away like dry leaves. Only you, love, will blossom on this rubbish heap and commit the seed of life to the winds." ~ Karel Čapek
  • "For millions of years mankind lived just like the animals. Then something happened which unleashed the power of our imagination. We learned to talk." ~ Stephen Hawking
  • "There is no first world and third world. There is only one world, for all of us to live and delight in." ~ Gerald Durrell
  • "In the future days which we seek to make secure, we look forward to a world founded upon four essential human freedoms. The first is freedom of speech and expression — everywhere in the world. The second is freedom of every person to worship God in his own way — everywhere in the world. The third is freedom from want... everywhere in the world. The fourth is freedom from fear... anywhere in the world. That is no vision of a distant millennium. It is a definite basis for a kind of world attainable in our own time and generation. ~ Franklin Delano Roosevelt
  • "I do not know what I may appear to the world, but to myself I seem to have been only like a boy playing on the sea-shore, and diverting myself in now and then finding a smoother pebble or a prettier shell than ordinary, whilst the great ocean of truth lay all undiscovered before me." ~ Isaac Newton
  • "Not to know what happened before you were born is to be a child forever. For what is the time of a man, except it be interwoven with that memory of ancient things of a superior age?" ~ Cicero
  • "How often people speak of art and science as though they were two entirely different things, with no interconnection...That is all wrong. The true artist is quite rational as well as imaginative and knows what he is doing; if he does not, his art suffers. The true scientist is quite imaginative as well as rational, and sometimes leaps to solutions where reason can follow only slowly; if he does not, his science suffers." ~ Isaac Asimov
  • "Only connect! That was the whole of her sermon. Only connect the prose and the passion, and both will be exalted, and human love will be seen at its height. Live in fragments no longer. Only connect, and the beast and the monk, robbed of the isolation that is life to either, will die." ~ E. M. Forster
[edit]

December 2005

  • If you can keep your head when all about you
    Are losing theirs and blaming it on you,
    If you can trust yourself when all men doubt you,
    But make allowance for their doubting too;
    If you can wait and not be tired by waiting,
    Or being lied about, don't deal in lies,
    Or being hated, don't give way to hating,
    And yet don't look too good, nor talk too wise . . .
    If you can fill the unforgiving minute
    With sixty seconds' worth of distance run,
    Yours is the Earth and everything that's in it,
    And — which is more — you'll be a Man, my son!
    ~ Rudyard Kipling ~
  • "If I am shot at, I want no man to be in the way of the bullet." ~ Andrew Johnson
  • "No nation is fit to sit in judgement upon any other nation." ~ Woodrow Wilson
  • "Except for the people who were there that one day they discovered the polio vaccine, being part of history is rarely a good idea. History is one war after another with a bunch of murders and natural disasters in between." ~ Sarah Vowell
  • "It is not the facts which guide the conduct of men, but their opinions about facts; which may be entirely wrong. We can only make them right by discussion." ~ Norman Angell
  • "My idea of Christmas, whether old-fashioned or modern, is very simple: loving others. Come to think of it, why do we have to wait for Christmas to do that?" ~ Bob Hope
  • 'Twas the night before Christmas, when all through the house
    Not a creature was stirring, not even a mouse;
    The stockings were hung by the chimney with care,
    In hopes that St. Nicholas soon would be there.
    ~ "A Visit from St. Nicholas" ~
  • "Many Christmases ago, I went to buy a doll for my son. I reached for the last one they had, but so did another man. As I rained blows upon him, I realized there had to be another way . . . out of that a new holiday was born . . . a Festivus for the rest of us!" ~ Jerry Stiller as "Frank Costanza" in Seinfeld, on the origins of Festivus.
  • "My own experience and development deepen every day my conviction that our moral progress may be measured by the degree in which we sympathize with individual suffering and individual joy." ~ George Eliot
  • "I don't measure a man's success by how high he climbs but how high he bounces when he hits bottom." ~ George S. Patton
  • "For most of human history we have searched for our place in the cosmos. Who are we? What are we? We find that we inhabit an insignificant planet of a hum-drum star lost in a galaxy tucked away in some forgotten corner of a universe in which there are far more galaxies than people. We make our world significant by the courage of our questions, and by the depth of our answers." ~ Carl Sagan
  • "The tyrant grinds down his slaves and they don't turn against him, they crush those beneath them." ~ Emily Brontë
  • "It is better to die for an idea that will live, than to live for an idea that will die." ~ Steve Biko
  • "I will live in the Past, the Present, and the Future. The Spirits of all Three shall strive within me. I will not shut out the lessons that they teach." ~ Charles Dickens
  • "Fear can make you do more wrong than hate or jealousy. If you're afraid you don't commit yourself to life completely; fear makes you always, always hold something back." ~ Philip K. Dick
  • "Trouble arises when either science or religion claims universal jurisdiction, when either religious dogma or scientific dogma claims to be infallible. Religious creationists and scientific materialists are equally dogmatic and insensitive. By their arrogance they bring both science and religion into disrepute." ~ Freeman Dyson
  • "My creed is that public service must be more than doing a job efficiently and honestly. It must be a complete dedication to the people and to the nation with full recognition that every human being is entitled to courtesy and consideration, that constructive criticism is not only to be expected but sought, that smears are not only to be expected but fought, that honor is to be earned but not bought." ~ Margaret Chase Smith
  • The maple tree that night
    Without a wind or rain
    Let go its leaves
    Because its time had come.
    ~ Eugene McCarthy ~
  • "I had some great things and I had some bad things. The best and the worst... In other words, I had a life." ~ Richard Pryor
  • "Woe to that nation whose literature is cut short by the intrusion of force. This is not merely interference with freedom of the press but the sealing up of a nation's heart, the excision of its memory." ~ Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn
  • Tell all the Truth but tell it slant —
    Success in Circuit lies
    Too bright for our infirm Delight
    The Truth's superb surprise
    As Lightning to the Children eased
    With explanation kind
    The Truth must dazzle gradually
    Or every man be blind —
    ~ Emily Dickinson ~
  • "We take men for what they are worth — and that is why we hate the government of man by man, and that we work with all our might — perhaps not strong enough — to put an end to it." ~ Peter Kropotkin
  • "It is better to ask some of the questions than to know all the answers." ~ James Thurber
  • "That is happiness; to be dissolved into something complete and great." ~ Willa Cather
  • Love is made out of ecstasy and wonder;
    Love is a poignant and accustomed pain.
    It is a burst of Heaven-shaking thunder;
    It is a linnet's fluting after rain.
    ~ Joyce Kilmer ~
  • "If you can dream it, you can do it. Always remember that this whole thing was started with a dream and a mouse." ~ Walt Disney
  • "Make your ego porous. Will is of little importance, complaining is nothing, fame is nothing. Openness, patience, receptivity, solitude is everything." ~ Rainer Maria Rilke
  • "All idealisation makes life poorer. To beautify it is to take away its character of complexity — it is to destroy it." ~ Joseph Conrad
  • "I do not believe that friendship today can flower out — can come out — of political life. I do believe that if there is something like a political life-to-be — to remain for us, in this world of technology — then it begins with friendship." ~ Ivan Illich
  • "The important thing, I think, is not to be bitter... if it turns about that there is a God, I don't think that he is evil. I think that the worst thing you could say is that he is, basically, an under-achiever." ~ Woody Allen
[edit]

November 2005

  • "Of all tyrannies, a tyranny sincerely exercised for the good of its victims may be the most oppressive. It would be better to live under robber barons than under omnipotent moral busybodies. The robber baron's cruelty may sometimes sleep, his cupidity may at some point be satiated; but those who torment us for our own good will torment us without end for they do so with the approval of their own conscience." ~ C.S. Lewis
  • "A fool sees not the same tree that a wise man sees." ~ William Blake
  • "Put every great teacher together in a room, and they'd agree about everything; put their disciples in there and they'd argue about everything." ~ Bruce Lee
  • "If I were to be given the opportunity to present a gift to the next generation, it would be the ability for each individual to learn to laugh at himself." ~ Charles M. Schulz
  • "Only by not forgetting the past can we be the master of the future." ~ Ba Jin
  • "There is grandeur in this view of life, with its several powers, having been originally breathed by the Creator into a few forms or into one; and that, whilst this planet has gone cycling on according to the fixed law of gravity, from so simple a beginning endless forms most beautiful and most wonderful have been, and are being, evolved." ~ Charles Darwin
  • "As good almost kill a man as kill a good book. Who kills a man kills a reasonable creature, God's image; but he who destroys a good book, kills reason itself, kills the image of God, as it were in the eye." ~ John Milton in Areopagitica
  • "O may I join the choir invisible of those immortal dead who live again in minds made better by their presence; live in pulses stirred to generosity, in deeds of daring rectitude, in scorn for miserable aims that end with self, in thoughts sublime that pierce the night like stars, and with their mild persistence urge men's search to vaster issues." ~ George Eliot
  • "The truth isn't always beauty, but the hunger for it is." ~ Nadine Gordimer
  • "In a larger sense, we can not dedicate — we can not consecrate — we can not hallow — this ground. The brave men, living and dead, who struggled here, have consecrated it, far above our poor power to add or detract. The world will little note, nor long remember what we say here, but it can never forget what they did here. It is for us the living, rather, to be dedicated here to the unfinished work which they who fought here have thus far so nobly advanced." ~ Abraham Lincoln
  • "We’re all puppets, Laurie. I’m just a puppet who can see the strings." ~ Alan Moore in Watchmen
  • "It seems to me that any sensible person must see that violence does not change the world and if it does, then only temporarily." ~ Martin Scorsese
  • "From each as they choose, to each as they are chosen." ~ Robert Nozick
  • Variety's the very spice of life,
    That gives it all its flavour.
    ~ William Cowper ~
  • "The ambition of the greatest men of our generation has been to wipe every tear from every eye. That may be beyond us, but so long as there are tears and suffering, so long our work will not be over." ~ Jawaharlal Nehru
  • "Once for all, then, a short precept is given thee: Love, and do what thou wilt: whether thou hold thy peace, through love hold thy peace; whether thou cry out, through love cry out; whether thou correct, through love correct; whether thou spare, through love do thou spare: let the root of love be within, of this root can nothing spring but what is good." ~ Augustine of Hippo
  • "Every age hath its own problem, and every soul its particular aspiration. The remedy the world needeth in its present-day afflictions can never be the same as that which a subsequent age may require. Be anxiously concerned with the needs of the age ye live in, and centre your deliberations on its exigencies and requirements." ~ Bahá'u'lláh
  • "Wars may be fought with weapons, but they are won by men. It is the spirit of the men who follow and of the man who leads that gains that victory." ~ George S. Patton
  • "We are always living in the final days. What have you got? A hundred years or much, much less until the end of your world." ~ Neil Gaiman
  • "If you wish to make an apple pie from scratch, you must first create the universe." ~ Carl Sagan
  • "Mankind must put an end to war or war will put an end to mankind." ~ John F. Kennedy
  • I found a book on how to be invisible —
    On the edge of the labyrinth —
    Under a veil you must never lift —
    Pages you must never turn —
    In the labyrinth.
    ~ Kate Bush ~
  • "An eye for an eye will only make the whole world blind." ~ Mohandas Gandhi
  • "I feel for all faiths the warm sympathy of one who has come to learn that even the trust in reason is a precarious faith, and that we are all fragments of darkness groping for the sun." ~ Will Durant
  • "After looking at mothers-in-law and seeing sons-in-law — I always felt that the jokes were on the wrong ones. No sir, you can look through everything I ever did write or say, and you never did hear me tell a joke about any mother-in-law — or any creed, color or religion, either." ~ Will Rogers
  • Somewhere, over the rainbow, way up high,
    There's a land that I heard of once in a lullaby.
    Somewhere, over the rainbow, skies are blue,
    And the dreams that you dare to dream
    Really do come true.
    ~ Judy Garland as "Dorothy Gale" in The Wizard of Oz ~
  • "Courage! I have shown it for years; think you I shall lose it at the moment when my sufferings are to end?" ~ Marie Antoinette
  • I am everything —
    Tonight I'll be your mother — I will
    Do such things to ease your pain —
    Free your mind and you won't feel ashamed.
    ~ Sophie B. Hawkins ~
[edit]

October 2005

  • I can see lights in the distance trembling in the dark cloak of night
    Candles and lanterns are dancing, dancing a waltz on All Souls Night.
    ~ Loreena McKennitt ~
  • "There is danger from all men. The only maxim of a free government ought to be to trust no man living with power to endanger the public liberty." ~ John Adams
  • "All those who listen to me shall pass on my words to others and those to others again; and may the last ones understand my words better than those who listen to me directly." ~ Muhammad
  • "Life is an error-making and an error-correcting process, and nature in marking man's papers will grade him for wisdom as measured both by survival and by the quality of life of those who survive." ~ Jonas Salk
  • "It is not the critic who counts, not the man who points out how the strong man stumbled, or where the doer of deeds could have done better. The credit belongs to the man who is actually in the arena; whose face is marred by the dust and sweat and blood; who strives valiantly; who errs and comes short again and again; who knows the great enthusiasms, the great devotions and spends himself in a worthy cause; who at the best, knows in the end the triumph of high achievement, and who, at worst, if he fails, at least fails while daring greatly; so that his place shall never be with those cold and timid souls who know neither victory or defeat." ~ Theodore Roosevelt
  • "I know that it will hurt, I know that it will break your heart, the way things are, and the way they've been. Don't spread the discontent, don't spread the lies, don't make the same mistakes with your own life." ~ Natalie Merchant
  • "Few men during their lifetime come anywhere near exhausting the resources dwelling within them. There are deep wells of strength that are never used." ~ Richard E. Byrd
  • "The world is a comedy to those that think, a tragedy to those who feel." ~ Horace Walpole
  • "Reality is always greater — much greater — than what we know, than whatever we can say about it." ~ Michael Crichton
  • "I am 100 percent in favor of the intelligent use of drugs, and 1,000 percent against the thoughtless use of them, whether caffeine or LSD. And drugs are not central to my life." ~ Timothy Leary
  • "Genius is one per cent inspiration, ninety-nine per cent perspiration." ~ Thomas Alva Edison
  • "I think for it to be unhip to be idealistic is weird, you know? I mean, even all the best rebels to me had some sense of hope in them." ~ Tom Petty
  • "Traditionalists are pessimists about the future and optimists about the past." ~ Lewis Mumford
  • "We take the position that there is no place for the state in the bedrooms of the nation." ~ Pierre Trudeau
  • "Live as one of them, Kal-El, to discover where your strength and your power are needed. Always hold in your heart the pride of your special heritage. They can be a great people, Kal-El — they wish to be. They only lack the light to show the way." ~ Marlon Brando as "Jor-El" in Superman: The Movie
  • "We are all in the gutter, but some of us are looking at the stars." ~ Oscar Wilde
  • "Behold the believers of all beliefs! Whom do they hate most? Him who breaketh up their tables of values, the breaker, the law-breaker — he, however, is the creator. Companions, the creator seeketh, not corpses — and not herds or believers either. Fellow-creators the creator seeketh — those who grave new values on new tables." ~ Friedrich Nietzsche
  • "Forgive us the breach of positive commands and negative commands, whether or not they involve an act, whether or not they are known to us." ~ Liturgy for Yom Kippur
  • "Tragedy blows through your life like a tornado, uprooting everything, creating chaos. You wait for the dust to settle, and then you choose. You can live in the wreckage and pretend it's still the mansion you remember. Or you can crawl from the rubble and slowly rebuild." ~ Kristen Bell, as "Veronica Mars"
  • "You always fall when you’re training, that’s sort of part of the process. If you’re not falling, you’re not training hard enough." ~ Michelle Trachtenberg
  • "The truth is that there is only one terminal dignity — love. And the story of a love is not important — what is important is that one is capable of love. It is perhaps the only glimpse we are permitted of eternity." ~ Helen Hayes
  • "I think the ultimate sense of security will be when we come to recognize that we are all part of one human race. Our primary allegiance is to the human race and not to one particular color or border." ~ Mohamed ElBaradei
  • "Much that was called religion has carried an unconscious attitude of hostility toward life. True religion must teach that life is filled with joys pleasing to the eye of God, that knowledge without action is empty. All men must see that the teaching of religion by rules and rote is largely a hoax. The proper teaching is recognized with ease. You can know it without fail because it awakens within you that sensation which tells you this is something you've always known." ~ Frank Herbert in Dune
  • "The opposite of a correct statement is a false statement. But the opposite of a profound truth may well be another profound truth." ~ Niels Bohr
  • Old age hath yet his honor and his toil.
    Death closes all; but something ere the end,
    Some work of noble note, may yet be done,
    Not unbecoming men that strove with gods.
    ~ Alfred, Lord Tennyson ~
  • "Politicians at international forums may reiterate a thousand times that the basis of the new world order must be universal respect for human rights, but it will mean nothing as long as this imperative does not derive from the respect of the miracle of Being, the miracle of the universe, the miracle of nature, the miracle of our own existence." ~ Václav Havel
  • "If we do discover a complete theory, it should in time be understandable in broad principle by everyone, not just a few scientists. Then we shall all, philosophers, scientists, and just ordinary people, be able to take part in the discussion of the question of why it is that we and the universe exist. If we find the answer to that, it would be the ultimate triumph of human reason — for then we would know the mind of God." ~ Stephen Hawking
  • "Everyone seems to be playing well within the boundaries of his usual rule set. I have yet to hear anyone say something that seemed likely to mitigate the idiocy of this age." ~ John Perry Barlow
  • "There is a fifth dimension beyond that which is known to man. It is a dimension as vast as space and as timeless as infinity. It is the middle ground between light and shadow, between science and superstition, and it lies between the pit of man's fears and the summit of his knowledge. This is the dimension of imagination. It is an area which we call the Twilight Zone." ~ Rod Serling in The Twilight Zone
  • "War may sometimes be a necessary evil. But no matter how necessary, it is always an evil, never a good. We will not learn how to live together in peace by killing each other's children." ~ Jimmy Carter
[edit]

September 2005

  • "Your task is not to seek for love, but merely to seek and find all the barriers within yourself that you have built against it." ~ Jalal al-Din Muhammad Rumi
  • "There are two possible outcomes: if the result confirms the hypothesis, then you've made a measurement. If the result is contrary to the hypothesis, then you've made a discovery." ~ Enrico Fermi
  • In the season of white wild roses
    We two went hand in hand:
    But now in the ruddy autumn
    Together already we stand.
    ~ Francis Turner Palgrave ~
  • Could you see the storm rising? 
    Could you see the guy who was driving?
    Could you climb higher and higher? 
    Could you climb right over the top?
    ~ Kate Bush ~
  • The awful daring of a moment's surrender
    Which an age of prudence can never retract
    By this, and this only, we have existed.
    ~ T. S. Eliot ~
  • "I wait... wait for the mists and for the blacker rain— heavier winds that stir the veil of fate, happier winds that pile her hair; Again they tear me, teach me, strew the heavy air upon me, winds that I know, and storm." ~ F. Scott Fitzgerald
  • There's something happening somewhere — baby I just know that there is.
    You can't start a fire — you can't start a fire without a spark.
    This gun's for hire — even if we're just dancing in the dark.
    ~ Bruce Springsteen ~
  • "Delicious autumn! My very soul is wedded to it, and if I were a bird I would fly about the earth seeking the successive autumns." ~ George Eliot
  • "There is a fountain of youth: it is your mind, your talents, the creativity you bring to your life and the lives of the people you love. When you learn to tap this source, you will have truly defeated age." ~ Sophia Loren
  • "There comes a point when a dream becomes reality and reality becomes a dream." ~ Frances Farmer
  • "Pleasure is very seldom found where it is sought; our brightest blazes of gladness are commonly kindled by unexpected sparks." ~ Samuel Johnson
  • "I've never seen anybody really find the answer — they think they have, so they stop thinking. But the job is to seek mystery, evoke mystery, plant a garden in which strange plants grow and mysteries bloom. The need for mystery is greater than the need for an answer." ~ Ken Kesey
  • "Crime is terribly revealing. Try and vary your methods as you will, your tastes, your habits, your attitude of mind, and your soul is revealed by your actions." ~ Agatha Christie
  • "I've had enough of breakdowns and diagrams— judging from picture books, apparently Heaven is a partly cloudy place." ~ Jenny Lewis
  • "Miss Manners does not mind explaining the finer points of gracious living, but she feels that anyone without the sense to pick up a potato chip and stuff it in their face should probably not be running around loose on the streets." ~ Judith Martin, widely known as "Miss Manners"
  • "The world always makes the assumption that the exposure of an error is identical with the discovery of the truth — that error and truth are simply opposite. They are nothing of the sort. What the world turns to, when it has been cured of one error, is usually simply another error, and maybe one worse than the first one." ~ H. L. Mencken
  • "September 11 was, and remains, above all an immense human tragedy. But September 11 also posed a momentous and deliberate challenge not just to America but to the world at large. The target of the terrorists was not only New York and Washington but the very values of freedom, tolerance and decency which underpin our way of life." ~ Tony Blair
  • "I strongly reject any conceptual scheme that places our options on a line, and holds that the only alternative to a pair of extreme positions lies somewhere between them. More fruitful perspectives often require that we step off the line to a site outside the dichotomy." ~ Stephen Jay Gould
  • "Love is life. All, everything that I understand, I understand only because I love." ~ Leo Tolstoy
  • "Freedom of choice is more to be treasured than any possession earth can give." ~ David O. McKay
  • "I am patient with stupidity but not with those who are proud of it." ~ Edith Sitwell
  • "No one is fanatically shouting that the sun is going to rise tomorrow. They know it's going to rise tomorrow. When people are fanatically dedicated to political or religious faiths or any other kinds of dogmas or goals, it's always because these dogmas or goals are in doubt." ~ Robert M. Pirsig
  • "The role of the Supreme Court is to uphold those claims of individual liberty that it finds are well-founded in the Constitution, and to reject other claims against the government that it concludes are not well-founded. Its role is no more to exclusively uphold the claims of the individual than it is to exclusively uphold the claims of the government: It must hold the constitutional balance true between these claims." ~ William Rehnquist
  • "I think television has betrayed the meaning of democratic speech, adding visual chaos to the confusion of voices. What role does silence have in all this noise?" ~ Federico Fellini
  • "I prefer to be true to myself, even at the hazard of incurring the ridicule of others, rather than to be false, and to incur my own abhorrence." ~ Frederick Douglass
  • "It takes a real storm in the average person's life to make him realize how much worrying he has done over the squalls." ~ Bruce Fairchild Barton
[edit]

August 2005

  • "Seek goodness everywhere, and when it is found, bring it out of its hiding-place and let it be free and unashamed. Place in matter and in flesh the least of the values, for these are things that hold death and must pass away. Discover in all things that which shines and is beyond corruption. Encourage virtue in whatever heart it may have been driven into secrecy and sorrow by the shame and terror of the world." ~ William Saroyan
  • "No one can conceive the variety of feelings which bore me onwards, like a hurricane, in the first enthusiasm of success. Life and death appeared to me ideal bounds, which I should first break through, and pour a torrent of light into our dark world." ~ Mary Shelley
  • "I find that the great thing in this world is not so much where we stand as in what direction we are moving: To reach the port of heaven, we must sail sometimes with the wind and sometimes against it— but we must sail, and not drift, nor lie at anchor." ~ Oliver Wendell Holmes, Sr.
  • "I have a dream that one day on the red hills of Georgia the sons of former slaves and the sons of former slave owners will be able to sit down together at the table of brotherhood... I have a dream that my four little children will one day live in a nation where they will not be judged by the color of their skin but by the content of their character. I have a dream today..." ~ Martin Luther King, Jr.
  • "The superior man, when resting in safety, does not forget that danger may come. When in a state of security he does not forget the possibility of ruin. When all is orderly, he does not forget that disorder may come. Thus his person is not endangered, and his States and all their clans are preserved." ~ Confucius
  • "You think that a wall as solid as the earth separates civilization from barbarism. I tell you the division is a thread, a sheet of glass. A touch here, a push there, and you bring back the reign of Saturn." ~ John Buchan
  • "We have met the enemy and he is us." ~ Walt Kelly
  • "Time is the substance from which I am made. Time is a river which carries me along, but I am the river; it is a tiger that devours me, but I am the tiger; it is a fire that consumes me, but I am the fire." ~ Jorge Luis Borges
  • "I could not be a traitor to Edward, for I was never his subject." ~ William Wallace
  • "By a free country, I mean a country where people are allowed, so long as they do not hurt their neighbours, to do as they like. I do not mean a country where six men may make five men do exactly as they like." ~ Robert Gascoyne-Cecil, Lord Salisbury
  • If you want the world to know
    We won't let hatred grow
    Put a little love in your heart.
    ~ Jackie DeShannon ~
  • "The Government of the State of Israel and the Palestinian team representing the Palestinian people agree that it is time to put an end to decades of confrontation and conflict, recognize their mutual legitimate and political rights, and strive to live in peaceful coexistence and mutual dignity and security to achieve a just, lasting and comprehensive peace settlement and historic reconciliation through the agreed political process." ~ The Oslo Accords
  • "Truth has such a face and such a mien as to be lov'd needs only to be seen." ~ John Dryden
  • "It’s a new generation. If you continue to hate, you are entering into the same philosophy that began the war. You have to look forward at people and new times." ~ Roman Polański
  • "Be sure that you are right, and then go ahead." ~ Davy Crockett
  • "All men dream, but not equally. Those who dream by night in the dusty recesses of their minds wake in the day to find that it was vanity: but the dreamers of the day are dangerous men, for they may act their dream with open eyes, to make it possible." ~ T. E. Lawrence
  • "To listen to some devout people, one would imagine that God never laughs." ~ Sri Aurobindo
  • "There is a road from the eye to the heart that does not go through the intellect." ~ G. K. Chesterton
  • "I think, with never-ending gratitude, that the young women of today do not and can never know at what price their right to free speech and to speak at all in public has been earned." ~ Lucy Stone
  • "Once we realize that imperfect understanding is the human condition there is no shame in being wrong, only in failing to correct our mistakes." ~ George Soros
  • "I do not believe that the tendency is to make men and women brave and glorious when you tell them that there are certain ideas upon certain subjects that they must never express; that they must go through life with a pretence as a shield; that their neighbors will think much more of them if they will only keep still; and that above all is a God who despises one who honestly expresses what he believes." ~ Robert G. Ingersoll
  • "There's a whole industry of conservatives saying, 'Ah, it's those damn liberals,' and a whole group of liberals saying, 'It's all those damn conservatives.'..." ~ Peter Jennings
  • "TCP implementations will follow a general principle of robustness: be conservative in what you do, be liberal in what you accept from others." ~ Jon Postel
  • "It seems that if one is working from the point of view of getting beauty in one's equations, and if one has really a sound insight, one is on a sure line of progress." ~ Paul Dirac
  • "Intelligence is like four-wheel drive. It only allows you to get stuck in more remote places." ~ Garrison Keillor
  • "The Japanese were ready to surrender, and it wasn't necessary to hit them with that awful thing." ~ Dwight D. Eisenhower
  • "Live as if you were to die tomorrow. Learn as if you were to live forever." ~ Mohandas Gandhi
  • "My name is Ozymandias, king of kings:
    Look on my works, ye mighty, and despair!"
    Nothing beside remains: round the decay
    Of that colossal wreck, boundless and bare,
    The lone and level sands stretch far away.
    ~ Percy Bysshe Shelley ~
  • "When I talk of the purpose of life, I am thinking not only of human life, but of all life on Earth and of the life which must exist upon other planets throughout the universe. It is only of life on Earth, however, that one can speak with any certainty. It seems to me that all life on Earth, the sum total of life upon the Earth, has purpose." ~ Clifford D. Simak
  • "When are you people going to learn? It's not about who's right or wrong. No denomination's nailed it yet, and they never will because they're all too self-righteous to realize that it doesn't matter what you have faith in, just that you have faith. Your hearts are in the right place, but your brains need to wake up. I have issues with anyone who treats faith as a burden instead of a blessing. You people don't celebrate your faith; you mourn it." ~ "Serendipity" in Dogma, by Kevin Smith
  • "From without, no wonderful effect is wrought within ourselves, unless some interior, responding wonder meets it. That the starry vault shall surcharge the heart with all rapturous marvelings, is only because we ourselves are greater miracles, and superber trophies than all the stars in universal space." ~ Herman Melville
[edit]

July 2005

  • "I think I'd most like to spend a day with Harry. I'd take him out for a meal and apologise for everything I've put him through." ~ J. K. Rowling
  • No coward soul is mine,
    No trembler in the world's storm-troubled sphere:
    I see Heaven's glories shine,
    And Faith shines equal, arming me from Fear.
    ~ Emily Brontë ~
  • "All parts should go together without forcing. You must remember that the parts you are reassembling were disassembled by you. Therefore, if you can't get them together again, there must be a reason. By all means, do not use a hammer." ~ IBM maintenance manual (1925)
  • "Whenever a theory appears to you as the only possible one, take this as a sign that you have neither understood the theory nor the problem which it was intended to solve." ~ Karl Popper
  • "From quiet homes and first beginning, Out to the undiscovered ends, There's nothing worth the wear of winning, But laughter and the love of friends." ~ Hilaire Belloc
  • "Art is a kind of innate drive that seizes a human being and makes him its instrument. The artist is not a person endowed with free will who seeks his own ends, but one who allows art to realize its purpose through him." ~ Carl Jung
  • In Xanadu did Kubla Khan
    A stately pleasure-dome decree:
    Where Alph, the sacred river, ran
    Through caverns measureless to man
    Down to a sunless sea.
    ~ Samuel Taylor Coleridge ~
  • "Thro' many dangers, toils and snares, I have already come; 'Tis grace has brought me safe thus far, and grace will lead me home." ~ John Newton
  • "The private detective of fiction is a fantastic creation who acts and speaks like a real man. He can be completely realistic in every sense but one, that one sense being that in life as we know it such a man would not be a private detective." ~ Raymond Chandler
  • Give me your tired, your poor,
    Your huddled masses yearning to breathe free,
    The wretched refuse of your teeming shore.
    Send these, the homeless, tempest-tost to me,
    I lift my lamp beside the golden door!
    ~ Emma Lazarus ~
  • "We've arranged a civilization in which most crucial elements profoundly depend on science and technology. We have also arranged things so that almost no one understands science and technology. This is a prescription for disaster. We might get away with it for awhile, but sooner or later this combustible mixture of ignorance and power is going to blow up in our faces." ~ Carl Sagan
  • "That's one small step for a man, one giant leap for mankind." ~ Neil Armstrong on first stepping onto the surface of the moon, 20th July 1969.
  • "Anyone who has ever looked into the glazed eyes of a soldier dying on the battlefield will think hard before starting a war." ~ Otto von Bismarck
  • "The greatest glory in living lies not in never falling, but in rising every time we fall." ~ Nelson Mandela
  • "Most of the books, music and movies ever released are not available for sale, anywhere in the world. In the brief time that P2P nets have flourished, the ad-hoc masses of the Internet have managed to put just about everything online. What’s more, they’ve done it far cheaper than any other archiving/revival effort ever." ~ Cory Doctorow
  • "By the declining day, lo! man is in a state of loss, save those who believe and do good works, and exhort one another to truth and exhort one another to endurance." ~ The Qur'an
  • "Eternal vigilance must be maintained to guard against those who seek to stifle ideas, establish a narrow orthodoxy, and divide our nation along arbitrary lines of race, ethnicity, and religious belief or non-belief." ~ Jesse Ventura
  • "We walk in circles, so limited by our own anxieties that we can no longer distinguish between true and false, between the gangster's whim and the purest ideal." ~ Ingmar Bergman
  • "I know that you personally do not fear giving up your own life in order to take others— that is why you are so dangerous. But I know you fear that you may fail in your long-term objective to destroy our free society and I can show you why you will fail." ~ Ken Livingstone, Mayor of London
  • "I don't know the key to success, but the key to failure is trying to please everybody." ~ Bill Cosby
  • "All men profess honesty as long as they can. To believe all men honest would be folly. To believe none so is something worse." ~ John Quincy Adams
  • "All that was great in the past was ridiculed, condemned, combatted, suppressed— only to emerge all the more powerfully, all the more triumphantly from the struggle." ~ Nikola Tesla
  • "God never deserted our people. Right through the ages there were Jews. Through the ages they suffered, but it also made us strong." ~ Anne Frank
  • "Anyone entrusted with power will abuse it if not also animated with the love of truth and virtue, no matter whether he be a prince, or one of the people." ~ Jean de La Fontaine
  • "The more you love, the more you can love— and the more intensely you love. Nor is there any limit on how many you can love. If a person had time enough, he could love all of that majority who are decent and just." ~ Robert A. Heinlein
  • "From time to time the exceptional is necessary. For events as well as for men, the stock company is not enough; geniuses are needed among men, and revolutions among events. Great accidents are the law; the order of things cannot get along without them; and, to see the apparitions of comets, one would be tempted to believe that Heaven itself is in need of star actors." ~ Victor Hugo in Les Misérables
  • "We hold these truths to be self-evident, that all men are created equal, that they are endowed by their Creator with certain inalienable Rights, that among these are Life, Liberty and the pursuit of Happiness." ~ The Declaration of Independence of the United States of America
  • "The splendor of life forever lies in wait about each one of us in all its fullness, but veiled from view, deep down, invisible, far off. It is there, though; not hostile, not reluctant, not deaf. If you summon it by the right word, by its right name, it will come." ~ Franz Kafka
  • "Wisdom is not communicable. The wisdom which a wise man tries to communicate always sounds foolish... Knowledge can be communicated, but not wisdom." ~ Hermann Hesse
  • "We tried to break it up from the outside, but that wouldn't work. Now that we're inside we can make a complete pig's breakfast of the whole thing: set the Germans against the French, the French against the Italians, the Italians against the Dutch. The Foreign Office is terribly pleased, it's just like old times." ~ "Sir Humphrey" on European unity, in the comedy series Yes, Minister
[edit]

June 2005

  • "It followed from the special theory of relativity that mass and energy are both but different manifestations of the same thing— a somewhat unfamilar conception for the average mind. Furthermore, the equation E = mc†, in which energy is put equal to mass, multiplied by the square of the velocity of light, showed that very small amounts of mass may be converted into a very large amount of energy and vice versa." ~ Albert Einstein
  • "Perfection is achieved, not when there is nothing more to add, but when there is nothing left to take away." ~ Antoine de Saint-Exupéry
  • "Now you see, Lone Starr, that evil will always triumph, because good is dumb." ~ "Dark Helmet" in Spaceballs by Mel Brooks
  • "Some potentates I would kill by any and all means at my disposal. They are Ignorance, Superstition, and Bigotry— the most sinister and tyrannical rulers on earth." ~ Emma Goldman
  • "The sons of torture victims make good terrorists." ~ André Malraux
  • "Political language— and with variations this is true of all political parties, from Conservatives to Anarchists— is designed to make lies sound truthful and murder respectable, and to give an appearance of solidity to pure wind." ~ George Orwell
  • Conservative, n. A statesman enamored of existing evils, as opposed to a Liberal, who wants to replace them with new ones. ~ Ambrose Bierce
  • "Science is a differential equation. Religion is a boundary condition." ~ Alan Turing
  • "The sea does not reward those who are too anxious, too greedy, or too impatient... Patience, patience, patience, is what the sea teaches. Patience and faith. One should lie empty, open, choiceless as a beach— waiting for a gift from the sea." ~ Anne Morrow Lindbergh
  • "Life has no meaning a priori... It is up to you to give it a meaning, and value is nothing but the meaning that you choose." ~ Jean-Paul Sartre
  • "I cannot and will not cut my conscience to fit this year's fashions." ~ Lillian Hellman
  • "True eloquence makes light of eloquence, true morality makes light of morality... To make light of philosophy is to be a true philosopher." ~ Blaise Pascal
  • "In the end, the love you take is equal to the love you make." ~ Paul McCartney
  • "I observed, 'Love is the fulfilling of the law, the end of the commandment.' It is not only 'the first and great' command, but all the commandments in one. 'Whatsoever things are just, whatsoever things are pure, if there be any virtue, if there be any praise,' they are all comprised in this one word, love. ~ John Wesley
  • "I cannot think we are useless or Usen would not have created us. He created all tribes of men and certainly had a righteous purpose in creating each." ~ Geronimo
  • "If fate means you to lose, give him a good fight anyhow." ~ William McFee
  • "At the risk of seeming ridiculous, let me say that the true revolutionary is guided by a great feeling of love. It is impossible to think of a genuine revolutionary lacking this quality... We must strive every day so that this love of living humanity will be transformed into actual deeds, into acts that serve as examples, as a moving force." ~ Che Guevara
  • "I don't want to have lived in vain like most people. I want to be useful or bring enjoyment to people, even those I've never met. I want to go on living even after my death! And that's why I'm grateful to God for having given me this gift, which I can use to develop and to express all that's inside me!" ~ Anne Frank
  • "The good writing of any age has always been the product of someone's neurosis, and we'd have a mighty dull literature if all the writers that came along were a bunch of happy chuckleheads." ~ William Styron
  • "A novel is balanced between a few true impressions and the multitude of false ones that make up most of what we call life. It tells us that for every human being there is a diversity of existences, that the single existence is itself an illusion in part, that these many existences signify something, tend to something, fulfill something; it promises us meaning, harmony and even justice." ~ Saul Bellow
  • "There are always good parts. They may not pay what you want, and they may not have as many days' work as you want, they may not have the billing that you want, they may not have a lot of things, but—the content of the role itself—I find there are many roles." ~ Anne Bancroft
  • "I have something to tell you today. Mac OS X has been leading a secret double life— for the past five years." ~ Steve Jobs
  • "Truth-tellers are not always palatable. There is a preference for candy bars." ~ Gwendolyn Brooks
  • "Fearing no insult, asking for no crown, receive with indifference both flattery and slander, and do not argue with a fool." ~ Aleksandr Pushkin
  • "A study of the history of opinion is a necessary preliminary to the emancipation of the mind." ~ John Maynard Keynes
  • "I know nothing except the fact of my ignorance." ~ Socrates
  • "A time is marked not so much by ideas that are argued about as by ideas that are taken for granted. The character of an era hangs upon what needs no defense. Power runs with ideas that only the crazy would draw into doubt. The "taken for granted" is the test of sanity... In these times, the hardest task for social or political activists is to find a way to get people to wonder again about what we all believe is true. The challenge is to sow doubt." ~ Lawrence Lessig
  • "I'm the guy they used to call Deep Throat." ~ W. Mark Felt
  • "I want to walk through life instead of being dragged through it." ~ Alanis Morissette
[edit]

May 2005

  • "When there are no more memories of heroes and martyrs, And when all life and all the souls of men and women are discharged from any part of the earth, Then only shall liberty or the idea of liberty be discharged from that part of the earth, And the infidel come into full possession." ~ Walt Whitman in Leaves of Grass
  • "The liberty of man consists solely in this: that he obeys natural laws because he has himself recognized them as such, and not because they have been externally imposed upon him by any extrinsic will whatever, divine or human, collective or individual." ~ Mikhail Bakunin
  • "Learn why the world wags and what wags it. That is the only thing which the mind can never exhaust, never alienate, never be tortured by, never fear or distrust, and never dream of regretting. Learning is the only thing for you. Look what a lot of things there are to learn." ~ T. H. White
  • "We have gotten some terrible reviews at times but if we depended on the judgment of the studios or critics, we never would have made more than one movie." ~ Ismail Merchant
  • "The strokes of the pen need deliberation as much as the sword needs swiftness." ~ Julia Ward Howe
  • "It is a wholesome and necessary thing for us to turn again to the earth and in the contemplation of her beauties to know of wonder and humility." ~ Rachel Carson
  • "If the stars should appear one night in a thousand years, how would men believe and adore; and preserve for many generations the remembrance of the city of God which had been shown! But every night come out these envoys of beauty, and light the universe with their admonishing smile." ~ Ralph Waldo Emerson
  • "I think of a hero as someone who understands the degree of responsibility that comes with his freedom." ~ Bob Dylan
  • "It seems that it is madder never to abandon one's self than often to be infatuated; better to be wounded, a captive and a slave, than always to walk in armor." ~ Margaret Fuller
  • "The highest morality may prove also to be the highest wisdom when the half-told story comes to be finished." ~ Arthur Conan Doyle
  • "May the Force be with you." ~ Jedi saying; used in all Star Wars episodes.
  • "If all mankind minus one were of one opinion, and only one person were of the contrary opinion, mankind would be no more justified in silencing that one person, than he, if he had the power, would be justified in silencing mankind." ~ John Stuart Mill
  • "Time is on the side of the oppressed today, it's against the oppressor. Truth is on the side of the oppressed today, it's against the oppressor. You don't need anything else." ~ Malcolm X
  • "To fear love is to fear life, and those who fear life are already three parts dead." ~ Bertrand Russell
  • "I had a stick of Carefree gum, but it didn't work. I felt pretty good while I was blowing that bubble, but as soon as the gum lost its flavor, I was back to pondering my mortality." ~ Mitch Hedberg
  • "Things had to be dreamed of before they became realities. So I believe that dreams— day dreams, you know, with your eyes wide open and your brain machinery whizzing— are likely to lead to the betterment of the world. The imaginative child will become the imaginative man or woman most apt to invent, and therefore to foster civilization." ~ L. Frank Baum
  • "If I had my way, if I was lucky enough, if I could be on the brink my entire life— that great sense of expectation and excitement without the disappointment— that would be the perfect state." ~ Cate Blanchett
  • "It behoved that there should be sin— but all shall be well, and all shall be well, and all manner of thing shall be well." ~ Julian of Norwich
  • "Were there none who were discontented with what they have, the world would never reach anything better." ~ Florence Nightingale
  • "When you separate yourself by belief, by nationality, by tradition, it breeds violence. So a man who is trying to understand violence does not belong to any country, to any religion, to any political party or partial system; he is concerned with the total understanding of mankind." ~ J. Krishnamurti
  • "The world is more malleable than you think and it's waiting for you to hammer it into shape." ~ Bono
  • "If they can get you asking the wrong questions, they don't have to worry about answers." ~ Thomas Pynchon
  • "Where men are the most sure and arrogant, they are commonly the most mistaken, and have there given reins to passion, without that proper deliberation and suspense, which can alone secure them from the grossest absurdities." ~ David Hume
  • "Democracy is the destiny of humanity; freedom its indestructible arm." ~ Benito Juárez
  • "Be ashamed to die until you have won some victory for humanity." ~ Horace Mann
  • "It ought to be remembered that there is nothing more difficult to take in hand, more perilous to conduct, or more uncertain in its success, than to take the lead in the introduction of a new order of things." ~ Niccolò Machiavelli
  • "DON'T PANIC"
    ~ Douglas Adams in The Hitchhiker's Guide To The Galaxy ~
[edit]

April 2005

  • "It is not knowledge, but the act of learning, not possession but the act of getting there, which grants the greatest enjoyment. When I have clarified and exhausted a subject, then I turn away from it, in order to go into darkness again." ~ Carl Friedrich Gauss
  • "Sometimes the road less traveled is less traveled for a reason." ~ Jerry Seinfeld
  • "It is well known that a vital ingredient of success is not knowing that what you're attempting can't be done." ~ Terry Pratchett
  • "Independence I have long considered as the grand blessing of life, the basis of every virtue; and independence I will ever secure by contracting my wants, though I were to live on a barren heath." ~ Mary Wollstonecraft
  • "If people did not sometimes do silly things, nothing intelligent would ever get done." ~ Ludwig Wittgenstein
  • "Everyone is a prisoner of his own experiences. No one can eliminate prejudices— just recognize them." ~ Edward R. Murrow
  • "Act only on that maxim which you can at the same time will that it should become a universal law." ~ Immanuel Kant
  • "When we try to pick out anything by itself, we find it hitched to everything else in the Universe." ~ John Muir
  • "Dear brothers and sisters, after the great Pope, John Paul II, the cardinals have elected me, a simple and humble worker in the Lord's vineyard. The fact that the Lord can work and act even with insufficient means consoles me, and above all I entrust myself to your prayers." ~ Pope Benedict XVI
  • "Music can be all things to all persons. It is like a great dynamic sun in the center of a solar system which sends out its rays and inspiration in every direction.... Music makes us feel that the heavens open and a divine voice calls. Something in our souls responds and understands." ~ Leopold Stokowski
  • "We ourselves shall be loved for a while and forgotten. But the love will have been enough; all those impulses of love return to the love that made them. Even memory is not necessary for love. There is a land of the living and a land of the dead and the bridge is love, the only survival, the only meaning." ~ Thornton Wilder
  • "In this world there is room for everyone. And the good earth is rich and can provide for everyone. The way of life can be free and beautiful, but we have lost the way. Greed has poisoned men’s souls, has barricaded the world with hate, has goose-stepped us into misery and bloodshed. We have developed speed, but we have shut ourselves in. Machinery that gives abundance has left us in want. Our knowledge has made us cynical. Our cleverness, hard and unkind. We think too much and feel too little. More than machinery we need humanity. More than cleverness we need kindness and gentleness. Without these qualities, life will be violent and all will be lost." ~ Charlie Chaplin in The Great Dictator
  • "Here forms, here colours, here the character of every part of the universe are concentrated to a point; and that point is so marvellous a thing ... Oh! marvellous, O stupendous Necessity— by thy laws thou dost compel every effect to be the direct result of