April 18

day of the year

Quotes of the day from previous years:

2004
The eyes of fear want you to put bigger locks on your doors, buy guns, close yourself off. The eyes of love, instead, see all of us as one. ~ Bill Hicks
2005
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 (born 18 April 1882)
2006
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 (born 18 April 1857)
2007
History repeats itself. That’s one of the things wrong with history. ~ Clarence Darrow
2008
You can only protect your liberties in this world by protecting the other man's freedom. You can only be free if I am free. ~ Clarence Darrow
2009
I believe that music can be an inspirational force in all our lives — that its eloquence and the depth of its meaning are all-important, and that all personal considerations concerning musicians and the public are relatively unimportant — that music come from the heart and returns to the heart — that music is spontaneous, impulsive expression — that its range is without limit — that music is forever growing — that music can be one element to help us build a new conception of life in which the madness and cruelty of wars will be replaced by a simple understanding of the brotherhood of man. ~ Leopold Stokowski
2010
Many a genius has been slow of growth. Oaks that flourish for a thousand years do not spring up into beauty like a reed. ~ George Henry Lewes
2011
Instead … of saying that Man is the creature of Circumstance, it would be nearer the mark to say that Man is the architect of Circumstance. It is Character which builds an existence out of Circumstance. Our strength is measured by our plastic power. From the same materials one man builds palaces, another hovels, one warehouses, another villas. ~ George Henry Lewes
2012
If there is to be any permanent improvement in man and any better social order, it must come mainly from the education and humanizing of man. I am quite certain that the more the question of crime and its treatment is studied the less faith men have in punishment. ~ Clarence Darrow
2013
The moral nature of man is more sacred in my eyes than his intellectual nature. I know they cannot be divorced — that without intelligence we should be Brutes — but it is the tendency of our gaping, wondering dispositions to give pre-eminence to those faculties which most astonish us. Strength of character seldom, if ever, astonishes; goodness, lovingness, and quiet self-sacrifice, are worth all the talents in the world.
~ George Henry Lewes ~
2014
No deeply-rooted tendency was ever extirpated by adverse argument. Not having originally been founded on argument, it cannot be destroyed by logic.
~ George Henry Lewes ~
2015
Among the many strange servilities mistaken for pieties, one of the least lovely is that which hopes to flatter God by despising the world, and vilifying human nature.
~ George Henry Lewes ~
2016
Every book, remember, is dead until a reader activates it by reading. Every time that you read you are walking among the dead, and, if you are listening, you just might hear prophecies.
~ Kathy Acker ~
2017
The West won the world not by the superiority of its ideas or values or religion (to which few members of other civilizations were converted) but rather by its superiority in applying organized violence. Westerners often forget this fact; non-Westerners never do.
~ Samuel P. Huntington ~
2018
Cultural and civilizational diversity challenges the Western and particularly American belief in the universal relevance of Western culture. … Normatively the Western universalist belief posits that people throughout the world should embrace Western values, institutions, and culture because they embody the highest, most enlightened, most liberal, most rational, most modern, and most civilized thinking of humankind.
In the emerging world of ethnic conflict and civilizational clash, Western belief in the universality of Western culture suffers three problems: it is false; it is immoral; and it is dangerous.
~ Samuel P. Huntington ~
2019
The objector and the rebel who raises his voice against what he believes to be the injustice of the present and the wrongs of the past is the one who hunches the world along.
~ Clarence Darrow ~
2020
As long as the world shall last there will be wrongs, and if no man objected and no man rebelled, those wrongs would last forever. The objector and the rebel who raises his voice against what he believes to be the injustice of the present and the wrongs of the past is the one who hunches the world along.
~ Clarence Darrow ~
2021
The greatest artist is he who is greatest in the highest reaches of his art, even although he may lack the qualities necessary for the adequate execution of some minor details. It is not by his faults, but by his excellences, that we measure a great man. The strength of a beam is measured by its weakest part, of a man by his strongest.
~ George Henry Lewes ~
2022
Russia calls it a "military operation", and not a war. But look what happened in Bucha. It's clear that is not even a war. It's a genocide.
They just killed people, not soldiers, people. They just shot people in the streets. People were riding bicycles, taking the bus, or just walking down the street. There were corpses lying in the streets. These were not soldiers. They were civilians.
~ Volodymyr Zelenskyy ~
2023
The great desire of this age is for a Doctrine which may serve to condense our knowledge, guide our researches, and shape our lives, so that Conduct may really be the consequence of Belief.
~ George Henry Lewes ~
2024
It is my hypothesis that the fundamental source of conflict in this new world will not be primarily ideological or primarily economic. The great divisions among humankind and the dominating source of conflict will be cultural. Nation-states will remain the most powerful actors in world affairs, but the principal conflicts of global politics will occur between nations and groups of different civilizations. The clash of civilizations will dominate global politics. The fault lines between civilizations will be the battle lines of the future.
~ Samuel P. Huntington ~
2025
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Reason is always in the service of the political and economic masters. It is here that literature strikes, at this base, where the concepts and actings of order impose themselves. Literature is that which denounces and slashes apart the repressing machine at the level of the signified. ~ Kathy Acker

  • 3 Kalki 22:11, 17 April 2008 (UTC) with a strong lean toward 4.
  • 1 Zarbon 23:55, 22 April 2008 (UTC)

A painter paints his pictures on canvas. But musicians paint their pictures on silence. We provide the music, and you provide the silence. ~ Leopold Stokowski

  • 3 Zarbon 03:49, 11 April 2009 (UTC)
  • 3 Kalki 19:48, 17 April 2009 (UTC) with a slight lean toward 4.

In the emerging era, clashes of civilization are the greatest threat to world peace, and an international order based on civilizations is the surest safeguard against world war. ~ Samuel P. Huntington

  • 2 Zarbon 03:49, 11 April 2009 (UTC)
  • 3 Kalki 19:48, 17 April 2009 (UTC)

No man ever made a discovery (he may have stumbled on one) without the exercise of as much imagination as, employed in another direction and in alliance with other faculties, would have gone to the creation of a poem. ~ George Henry Lewes

  • 2 Zarbon 03:49, 11 April 2009 (UTC)
  • 2 Kalki 19:48, 17 April 2009 (UTC) with a lean toward 3.

To some men popularity is always suspicious. Enjoying none themselves, they are prone to suspect the validity of those attainments which command it. ~ George Henry Lewes

  • 3 Kalki 19:48, 17 April 2009 (UTC)
  • 1 Zarbon 15:17, 18 April 2009 (UTC)

Whatever lies beyond the limits of experience, and claims another origin than that of induction and deduction from established data, is illegitimate. ~ George Henry Lewes

  • 3 Kalki 19:48, 17 April 2009 (UTC)
  • 1 Zarbon 15:17, 18 April 2009 (UTC)