Wikiquote:Quote of the day/March 2020

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March 1

I am neither a saint nor a theologian.
To me, good works are more important than theology. We all know that religion has been historically, and still is today, a cause of great evil as well as great good in human affairs. We have seen terrible wars and terrible persecutions conducted in the name of religion. We have also seen large numbers of people inspired by religion to lives of heroic virtue, bringing education and medical care to the poor, helping to abolish slavery and spread peace among nations. Religion amplifies the good and evil tendencies of individual souls. Religion will always remain a powerful force in the history of our species. To me, the meaning of progress in religion is simply this, that as we move from the past to the future the good works inspired by religion should more and more prevail over the evil.

~ Freeman Dyson ~

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March 2

My country, right or wrong; if right, to be kept right; and if wrong, to be set right.

~ Carl Schurz ~

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March 3

Persuasion, indeed, is a kind of force. It consists in showing a person the consequences of his actions. It is, in a word, force applied through the mind.

~ James Fitzjames Stephen ~

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March 4

Perfectionism is not a quest for the best. It is a pursuit of the worst in ourselves, the part that tells us that nothing we do will ever be good enough — that we should try again. No. We should not.
Focused on process, our creative life retains a sense of adventure. Focused on product, the same creative life can feel foolish or barren.

~ Julia Cameron ~

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March 5

We shall use only peaceful means and we shall not permit any other kind of method.

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March 6

When everything has to be right, something isn't.

~ Stanisław Jerzy Lec ~

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March 7

A mind which has once imbibed a taste for scientific inquiry, and has learnt the habit of applying its principles readily to the cases which occur, has within itself an inexhaustible source of pure and exciting contemplations. … Accustomed to trace the operation of general causes, and the exemplification of general laws, in circumstances where the uninformed and unenquiring eye perceives neither novelty nor beauty, he walks in the midst of wonders.

~ John Herschel ~

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March 8

The life of the law has not been logic; it has been experience.

~ Oliver Wendell Holmes, Jr. ~

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March 9

Good government is known from bad government by this infallible test: that under the former the labouring people are well fed and well clothed, and under the latter, they are badly fed and badly clothed.

~ William Cobbett ~

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March 10

Search not to find how other men offend,
But by that glass thy own offences mend;
Still seek to learn, yet care not much from whom,
(So it be learning) or from whence it come.
Of thy own actions, others' judgments learn;
Often by small, great matters we discern:
Youth what man's age is like to be doth show;
We may our ends by our beginnings know.

~ John Denham ~

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March 11

Better defence than shield or breastplate, is holy innocence to the naked breast.

~ Torquato Tasso ~

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March 12

A favor well bestowed is almost as great an honor to him who confers it as to him who receives it.

~ Richard Steele ~

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March 13

The whole secret of life is to be interested in one thing profoundly and a thousand other things well.

~ Hugh Walpole ~

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March 14

The most incomprehensible thing about the world is that it is comprehensible.

~ Albert Einstein ~

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March 15

Throwing out preclearance when it has worked and is continuing to work to stop discriminatory changes is like throwing away your umbrella in a rain storm because you are not getting wet.

~ Ruth Bader Ginsburg ~

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March 16

We have seen the mere distinction of colour made in the most enlightened period of time, a ground of the most oppressive dominion ever exercised by man over man. What has been the source of those unjust laws complained of among ourselves? Has it not been the real or supposed interest of the major number? Debtors have defrauded their creditors. The landed interest has borne hard on the mercantile interest. The Holders of one species of property have thrown a disproportion of taxes on the holders of another species. The lesson we are to draw from the whole is that where a majority are united by a common sentiment, and have an opportunity, the rights of the minor party become insecure.

~ James Madison ~

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March 17

Be wise;
Soar not too high, to fall; but stoop to rise.

~ Philip Massinger ~

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March 18

Man is an animal, but a social animal. Society for its manifold blessings asks in exchange sacrifice and compromise. Concession is the world's walking gait. Fevers and hallucinations sweep over us, it is true; but be they permitted to infect the public body, slaughter shall result. Government is either organized benevolence or organized madness; its peculiar magnitude permits no shading.

~ John Updike ~

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March 19

No one I know of has foreseen an America like the one we live in today. No one (except perhaps the acidic H. L. Mencken, who famously described American democracy as "the worship of jackals by jackasses") could have imagined that the 21st-century catastrophe to befall the U.S.A., the most debasing of disasters, would appear not, say, in the terrifying guise of an Orwellian Big Brother but in the ominously ridiculous commedia dell’arte figure of the boastful buffoon.

~ Philip Roth ~

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March 20

The real question is not whether machines think but whether men do. The mystery which surrounds a thinking machine already surrounds a thinking man.

~ B. F. Skinner ~

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March 21

Nobody grows old merely by a number of years. We grow old by deserting our ideals.
Years may wrinkle the skin, but to give up enthusiasm wrinkles the soul.

~ Samuel Ullman ~

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March 22

Nobody sings a love song quite like you do
Oh, and nobody else can make me sing along
Nobody else can make me feel things are right
When I know they're wrong,
Nobody sings a love song quite like you.
…
Sing your song sweet music man, I believe in you.

~ Kenny Rogers ~

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March 23

To die is poignantly bitter, but the idea of having to die without having lived is unbearable.

~ Erich Fromm ~

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March 24

First-rate pursuits involving, as they must, trying to understand what life is about and trying to convey that understanding — inevitably result in a sense of failure. A Napoleon, a Churchill, a Roosevelt can feel themselves to be successful, but never a Socrates, a Pascal, a Blake. Understanding is for ever unattainable. Therein lies the inevitability of failure in embarking upon its quest, which is none the less the only one worthy of serious attention.

~ Malcolm Muggeridge ~

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March 25

Dictatorship, the most extreme form of tyranny, can never lead to social liberation. In Russia, the so-called dictatorship of the proletariat has not led to Socialism, but to the domination of a new bureaucracy over the proletariat and the whole people. … What the Russian autocrats and their supporters fear most is that the success of libertarian Socialism in Spain might prove to their blind followers that the much vaunted "necessity of dictatorship" is nothing but one vast fraud which in Russia has led to the despotism of Stalin and is to serve today in Spain to help the counter-revolution to a victory over the revolution of the workers and the peasants.

~ Rudolf Rocker ~

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March 26

We are going to die, and that makes us the lucky ones. Most people are never going to die because they are never going to be born. The potential people who could have been here in my place but who will in fact never see the light of day outnumber the sand grains of Arabia. Certainly those unborn ghosts include greater poets than Keats, scientists greater than Newton. We know this because the set of possible people allowed by our DNA so massively outnumbers the set of actual people. In the teeth of these stupefying odds it is you and I, in our ordinariness, that are here. … what I see as I write is that I am lucky to be alive and so are you.

~ Richard Dawkins ~

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March 27

The king can drink the best of wine;
So can I:
And has enough when he would dine —
So have I;
He cannot order rain or shine;
Nor can I.
Then, where's the difference — let me see —
Betwixt my lord the king and me?

~ Charles Mackay ~

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March 28

Words are not (except in their own little corner) facts or things: we need therefore to prise them off the world, to hold them apart from and against it, so that we can realize their inadequacies and arbitrariness, and can relook at the world without blinkers.

~ J. L. Austin ~

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March 29

We do not need presidents who are bigger than the country, but rather ones who speak for it and support it.

~ Eugene McCarthy ~

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March 30

Wealth often takes away chances from men as well as poverty. There is none to tell the rich man to go on striving, for a rich man makes the law that hallows and hollows his own life.

~ Seán O'Casey ~

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March 31

We have suffered unnumbered ills and crimes in the name of the Law of the Land. Our men, women, and children have suffered not only the basic brutality of stoop labor, and the most obvious injustices of the system; they have also suffered the desperation of knowing that the system caters to the greed of callous men and not to our needs. Now we will suffer for the purpose of ending the poverty, the misery, and the injustice, with the hope that our children will not be exploited as we have been. They have imposed hunger on us, and now we hunger for justice. We draw our strength from the very despair in which we have been forced to live. We shall endure.

~ Cesar Chavez ~

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