Wikiquote:Quote of the day/September 2020

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September 1

All my life, I've always wanted to be somebody, but I see now I should have been more specific.

~ Jane Wagner & Lily Tomlin ~

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September 2

There are conditions of blindness so voluntary that they become complicity.

~ Paul Bourget ~

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September 3

True art, springing fresh from Nature, must have in it, to live, much of the glance of an eye, much of the sound of a voice, much of the life of a life.

~ Louis Sullivan ~

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September 4

If this country can’t find its way to a human path, if it can’t inform conduct with a deep sense of life, then all of us, black as well as white, are going down the same drain…
I picked up a pencil and held it over a sheet of white paper, but my feelings stood in the way of my words. Well, I would wait, day and night, until I knew what to say. Humbly now, with no vaulting dream of achieving a vast unity, I wanted to try to build a bridge of words between me and that world outside, that world which was so distant and elusive that it seemed unreal.
I would hurl words into this darkness and wait for an echo, and if an echo sounded, no matter how faintly, I would send other words to tell, to march, to fight, to create a sense of the hunger for life that gnaws in us all, to keep alive in our hearts a sense of the inexpressibly human.

~ Richard Wright ~

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September 5

We cannot allow Donald Trump to redefine the Republican Party. That is what he is doing, as long as we give the impression by our silence that his words are our words and his actions are our actions. We cannot allow that impression to go unchallenged.
As has been true since our beginning, we Republicans are the party of Lincoln, the party of the Union. We believe in our founding principle. We are proud of our illustrious history. We believe that we are an essential part of present-day American politics. Our country needs a responsibly conservative party. But our party has been corrupted by this hateful man, and it is now in peril.

~ John Danforth ~

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September 6

Better were the prospects of a people under the influence of the worst government who should hold the power of changing it, than those of a people under the best who should hold no such power.

~ Frances Wright ~

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September 7

Donald Trump’s hold on history loosened, and may be breaking. In some new way his limitations are being seen and acknowledged, and at a moment when people are worried about the continuance of their country and their own ability to continue within it. He hasn’t been equal to the multiple crises. Good news or bad, he rarely makes any situation better. And everyone kind of knows.

~ Peggy Noonan ~

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September 8

Donald Trump is the most dangerous president in the modern history of our country and he must be defeated.
Tragically, we have a president today who is a pathological liar and who is running a corrupt administration. He clearly does not understand the Constitution of the United States and thinks that he is a president who is above the law. In my view, he is a racist, a sexist, a homophobe, a xenophobe and a religious bigot, and he must be defeated, and I will do everything in my power to make that happen.

~ Bernie Sanders ~

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September 9

We do not free ourselves from something by avoiding it, but only by living though it.

~ Cesare Pavese ~

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September 10

Let us not pretend to doubt in philosophy what we do not doubt in our hearts.

~ Charles Sanders Peirce ~

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September 11

Not very long ago some one invented the assertion that there were only "Four Hundred" people in New York City who were really worth noticing. But a wiser man has arisen — the census taker — and his larger estimate of human interest has been preferred in marking out the field of these little stories of the "Four Million".

~ O. Henry ~

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September 12

He who must be what he is, may curse his fate, but cannot change it; on the other hand, he who can transform himself has no one in the world but himself to blame for his failings, no one but himself to hold responsible for his dissatisfaction.

~ Stanisław Lem ~

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September 13

The painful secret of gods and kings is that men are free. They are free, Aegisthus. You know it, but they do not.

~ Jean-Paul Sartre ~

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September 14

The most worthwhile form of education is the kind that puts the educator inside you, as it were, so that the appetite for learning persists long after the external pressure for grades and degrees has vanished. Otherwise you are not educated; you are merely trained.

~ Sydney J. Harris ~

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September 15

It is not a great misfortune to be of service to ingrates, but it is an intolerable one to be obliged to a dishonest man.

~ François de La Rochefoucauld ~

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September 16

Grant us the single heart once more
That mocks no sacred thing,
The Sword of Truth our fathers wore
When Thou wast Lord and King.

Let darkness unto darkness tell
Our deep unspoken prayer;
For, while our souls in darkness dwell,
We know that Thou art there.

~ Alfred Noyes ~

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September 17

I'm so crazy I plan to vote for Eisenhower again this November.

~ Ken Kesey ~

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September 18

Men more frequently require to be reminded than informed.

~ Samuel Johnson ~

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September 19

Who may tell
What strange conceits upon the earth were sown
And gender'd by the fond garrulity
Of your aereal music? Scatter'd notes,
Half heard, half fancied by the erring sense
Of man, on which they fell like downy seeds
Sown by autumnal winds, grew up, and teem'd
With plenteous madness.

~ Hartley Coleridge ~

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September 20

My most fervent wish is that I will not be replaced until a new president is installed.

~ Ruth Bader Ginsburg ~

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September 21

What fascinates me — mesmerizes me — isn't so much Trump himself as the American government he's crafted: a major world power with no policy, no consistency, and no idea what it's doing.

~ Stephen King ~

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September 22

Cheerful with wisdom, with innocence gay,
And calm with your joys gently glide thro' the day.
The dews of the evening most carefully shun —
Those tears of the sky for the loss of the sun.

~ Philip Stanhope, 4th Earl of Chesterfield ~

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September 23

I don’t think anybody truly knows where we’re going from here yet. It depends on too many unknowns. We don’t know where the COVID virus is going to take us. We don’t know where Black Lives Matter is going to take us right now. Do we get a real practical conversation going about race and policing and ultimately about the economic inequality that’s been a stain on our social contract?
And of course, nobody knows where our next election is going to take us. I believe that our current president is a threat to our democracy. He simply makes any kind of reform that much harder. I don’t know if our democracy could stand another four years of his custodianship. These are all existential threats to our democracy and our American way of life.

~ Bruce Springsteen ~

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September 24

You have many years to live — do things you will be proud to remember when you're old.

~ John Brunner ~

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September 25

Poets are almost always wrong about facts. That's because they are not really interested in facts: only in truth: which is why the truth they speak is so true that even those who hate poets by simple and natural instinct are exalted and terrified by it.

~ William Faulkner ~

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September 26

Every thinking of being, all philosophy, can never be confirmed by "facts," ie, by beings. Making itself intelligible is suicide for philosophy. Those who idolize "facts" never notice that their idols only shine in a borrowed light. They are also meant not to notice this; for thereupon they would have to be at a loss and therefore useless. But idolizers and idols are used wherever gods are in flight and so announce their nearness.

~ Martin Heidegger ~

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September 27

It is a very great mistake to imagine that the object of loyalty is the authority and interest of one individual man, however dignified by the applause or enriched by the success of popular actions.

~ Samuel Adams ~

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September 28

If every man did the little he could — what a different world!

~ Evelyn Beatrice Hall ~

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September 29

Man sees, hears, touches, tastes and smells that which it is necessary for him to see, hear, touch, taste and smell in order to preserve his life. The decay or loss of any of these senses increases the risks with which his life is environed, and if it increases them less in the state of society in which we are actually living, the reason is that some see, hear, touch, taste and smell for others. A blind man, by himself and without a guide, could not live long. Society is an additional sense; it is the true common sense.

~ Miguel de Unamuno ~

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September 30

If it were proved to me that in making war, my ideal had a chance of being realized, I would still say "No" to war. For one does not create human society on mounds of corpses.

~ Louis Lecoin ~

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Today is Thursday, May 2, 2024; it is now 22:38 (UTC)