Wikiquote:Quote of the day/August 2021

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August 1

Familiarity with danger makes a brave man braver, but less daring. Thus with seamen: he who goes the oftenest round Cape Horn goes the most circumspectly.

~ Herman Melville ~

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August 2

It is as fatal as it is cowardly to blink facts because they are not to our taste.

~ John Tyndall ~

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August 3

You can make life a lot harder for yourself by focusing on negative things in your path or making excuses for why things didn't go your way. Or, you can refuse to take things personally, let them go, learn from them, and become the best version of yourself. It's a choice. It's actually your choice.

~ Tom Brady ~

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August 4

In reaffirming the greatness of our nation, we understand that greatness is never a given. It must be earned. Our journey has never been one of short-cuts or settling for less. It has not been the path for the faint-hearted — for those who prefer leisure over work, or seek only the pleasures of riches and fame. Rather, it has been the risk-takers, the doers, the makers of things — some celebrated but more often men and women obscure in their labor, who have carried us up the long, rugged path towards prosperity and freedom.

~ Barack Obama ~

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August 5

I think we're going to the moon because it's in the nature of the human being to face challenges. It's by the nature of his deep inner soul ... we're required to do these things just as salmon swim upstream.

~ Neil Armstrong ~

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August 6

Souls that have toil'd, and wrought, and thought with me —
That ever with a frolic welcome took
The thunder and the sunshine, and opposed
Free hearts, free foreheads — you and I are old;
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 ~

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August 7

The real struggle is not between the right and the left — that's where most people assume — but it's between the party of the thoughtful and the party of the jerks. And no side of the political spectrum has a monopoly on either of those qualities.

~ Jimmy Wales ~

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August 8

Men have been laughed out of faults which a sermon could not reform; nay, there are many little indecencies which are improper to be mentioned in such solemn discourses. Now ridicule with contempt or ill-nature, is indeed always irritating and offensive; but we may, by testifying a just esteem for the good qualities of the person ridiculed, and our concern for his interests, let him see that our ridicule of his weakness flows from love to him, and then we may hope for a good effect. This then is another necessary rule, "That along with our ridicule of smaller faults we should always join evidences of good nature and esteem."

~ Francis Hutcheson ~

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August 9

Knowing reality means constructing systems of transformations that correspond, more or less adequately, to reality. They are more or less isomorphic to transformations of reality. The transformational structures of which knowledge consists are not copies of the transformations in reality; they are simply possible isomorphic models among which experience can enable us to choose. Knowledge, then, is a system of transformations that become progressively adequate.

~ Jean Piaget ~

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August 10

Great leaps forward in history are often, in fact, giant leaps back. The Reformation did initiate brutal sectarian warfare. The French Revolution did degenerate into barbarous tyranny. Communist utopias — allegedly the wave of an Elysian future — turned into murderous nightmares. Modern neoliberalism has, for its part, created a global capitalist machine that is seemingly beyond anyone’s control, fast destroying the planet’s climate, wiping out vast tracts of life on Earth while consigning millions of Americans to economic stagnation and cultural despair.
And at an even deeper level, the more we discover about human evolution, the more illusory certain ideas of progress become.

~ Andrew Sullivan ~

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August 11

The sign work of the Orient it runneth up and down;
The Talmud stalks from right to left, a rabbi in a gown;

The Roman rolls from left to right from Maytime unto May;
But the gods shake up their symbols in an absent-minded way.

Their language runs to circles like the language of the eyes,
Emphasised by strange dilations with little panting sighs.

~ Nathalia Crane ~

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August 12

I am born into an environment — I know not whence I came nor whither I go nor who I am. This is my situation as yours, every single one of you. The fact that everyone always was in this same situation, and always will be, tells me nothing. Our burning question as to the whence and whither — all we can ourselves observe about it is the present environment. That is why we are eager to find out about it as much as we can. That is science, learning, knowledge; it is the true source of every spiritual endeavour of man.

~ Erwin Schrödinger ~

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August 13

The past speaks to us in a thousand voices, warning and comforting, animating and stirring to action. What its great thinkers have thought and written on the deepest problems of life, shall we not hear and enjoy? The future calls upon us to prepare its way. Dare we fail to answer its solemn summons?

~ Felix Adler ~

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August 14

God save the pennon, ragged to the dawn,
That signs to moon to stand, and sun to fly;
And flutters when the weak is overborne
To stem the tide of fate and certainty.
That knows not reason, and that seeks no fame —

So! Undismayed beneath the serried clouds,
Raise up the banner of forlorn defence —
A jest to the complacency of crowds —
Bright-haloed with the one diviner sense:
To hold itself as nothing to itself;
And in the quest of its imagined star
To lose all thought of after-recompense!

~ John Galsworthy ~

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August 15

It is the nature of human institutions to degenerate, to lose their vitality, and decay, and the first sign of decay is the loss of flexibility and oblivion of the essential spirit in which they were conceived. The spirit is permanent, the body changes; and a body which refuses to change must die. The spirit expresses itself in many ways while itself remaining essentially the same but the body must change to suit its changing environments if it wishes to live.

~ Sri Aurobindo ~

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August 16

An intelligent man neither allows himself to be controlled nor attempts to control others; he wishes reason alone to rule, and that always.

~ Jean de La Bruyère ~
in
~ Les Caractères ~

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August 17

Life is a play acted by dying men,
Where, if its heroes seem to foot it well
And go light-tongued without grimace of pain,
Death will be found anon. And who shall tell
Which part was saddest, or in youth or age,
When the tired actor stops and leaves the stage?

~ Wilfrid Scawen Blunt ~

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August 18

I feel that the end of my days is drawing near; my senses are failing me; my delight and strength in creating songs are gone; he, who was once honored by half of Europe, is forgotten; others have come and are the objects of admiration; one must give place to another. Nothing remains for me but trust in God, and the hope of an unclouded existence in the Land of Peace.

~ Antonio Salieri ~

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August 19

Great wits are sure to madness near allied,
And thin partitions do their bounds divide.

~ John Dryden ~

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August 20

Memories and possibilities are ever more hideous than realities.

~ H. P. Lovecraft ~

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August 21

Friend, I haven't a dollar in the world, but if thee knows a fugitive who needs a breakfast, send him to me.

~ Thomas Garrett ~

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August 22

People ask me to predict the future, when all I want to do is prevent it. Better yet, build it. Predicting the future is much too easy, anyway. You look at the people around you, the street you stand on, the visible air you breathe, and predict more of the same. To hell with more. I want better.

~ Ray Bradbury ~

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August 23

It would be well if, in studying the past, we could always bear in mind the problems of the present, and go to that past to seek large views of what is of lasting importance to the human race.

~ Arnold Toynbee ~

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August 24

As I think of the many myths, there is one that is very harmful, and that is the myth of countries.

~ Jorge Luis Borges ~

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August 25

Every writer hopes or boldly assumes that his life is in some sense exemplary, that the particular will turn out to be universal.

~ Martin Amis ~

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August 26

The task of leadership is not to put greatness into humanity, but to elicit it, for the greatness is already there.

~ John Buchan, 1st Baron Tweedsmuir ~

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August 27

Those who have served through the ages have drawn inspiration from the book of Isaiah, when the Lord says: "Who shall I send, who shall go for us?" American military has been answering for a long time: "Here I am, Lord send me. Here I am, send me." Each one of these women and men of our armed forces are the heirs of that tradition of sacrifice of volunteering to go in harm's way — to risk everything — not for glory, not for profit but to defend what we love and the people we love. And I ask that you join me now, in a moment of silence, for all those, in uniform and out; beautiful military and civilians who have given the last full measure of devotion.

~ Joe Biden ~

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August 28

One ought, every day at least, to hear a little song, read a good poem, see a fine picture, and, if it were possible, to speak a few reasonable words.

~ Johann Wolfgang von Goethe ~

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August 29

War is wretched beyond description, and only a fool or a fraud could sentimentalize its cruel reality.

~ John McCain ~

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August 30

It takes 20 years to build a reputation and five minutes to ruin it. If you think about that, you'll do things differently.

~ Warren Buffett ~

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August 31

I'm here to announce the completion of our withdrawal from Afghanistan and the end of the military mission to evacuate American citizens, third country nationals and vulnerable Afghans. The last C-17 lifted off from Hamid Karzai International Airport on August 30th, this afternoon, at 3:29 p.m. east coast time, and the last manned aircraft is now clearing the space above Afghanistan. … Tonight's withdrawal signifies both the end of the military component of the evacuation, but also the end of the nearly 20-year mission that began in Afghanistan shortly after September 11th 2001.

~ Kenneth F. McKenzie Jr. ~

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Today is Sunday, April 28, 2024; it is now 00:51 (UTC)