Wikiquote

August 2

day of the year

Quotes of the day from previous years:

2004
All the world's a stage, and all the men and women merely players: They have their exits and their entrances; and one man in his time plays many parts... ~ William Shakespeare in As You Like It
2005
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
2006
Ignorance, allied with power, is the most ferocious enemy justice can have. ~ James Baldwin (born 2 August 1924)
2007
The moment always comes when, having collected one's ideas, certain images, an intuition of a certain kind of development — whether psychological or material — one must pass on to the actual realization. ~ Michelangelo Antonioni (recent death)
2008
Now, it is true that the nature of society is to create, among its citizens, an illusion of safety; but it is also absolutely true that the safety is always necessarily an illusion. Artists are here to disturb the peace. ~ James Baldwin
2009
Religious feeling is as much a verity as any other part of human consciousness; and against it, on the subjective side, the waves of science beat in vain. ~ John Tyndall
2010
One writes out of one thing only — one's own experience. Everything depends on how relentlessly one forces from this experience the last drop, sweet or bitter, it can possibly give. This is the only real concern of the artist, to recreate out of the disorder of life that order which is art. ~ James Baldwin
2011
Life is a wave, which in no two consecutive moments of its existence is composed of the same particles. ~ John Tyndall
2012
Words like "freedom," "justice," "democracy" are not common concepts; on the contrary, they are rare. People are not born knowing what these are. It takes enormous and, above all, individual effort to arrive at the respect for other people that these words imply.
~ James Baldwin ~
2013
The brightest flashes in the world of thought are incomplete until they have been proved to have their counterparts in the world of fact.
~ John Tyndall ~
2014
We have heard much of Faraday's gentleness and sweetness and tenderness. It is all true, but it is very incomplete. You cannot resolve a powerful nature into these elements, and Faraday's character would have been less admirable than it was had it not embraced forces and tendencies to which the silky adjectives "gentle" and "tender" would by no means apply. Underneath his sweetness and gentleness was the heat of a volcano. He was a man of excitable and fiery nature; but through high self-discipline he had converted the fire into a central glow and motive power of life, instead of permitting it to waste itself in useless passion. "He that is slow to anger" saith the sage, "is greater than the mighty, and he that ruleth his own spirit than he that taketh a city." Faraday was not slow to anger, but he completely ruled his own spirit, and thus, though he took no cities, he captivated all hearts.
~ John Tyndall ~
2015
You think your pain and your heartbreak are unprecedented in the history of the world, but then you read. It was Dostoevsky and Dickens who taught me that the things that tormented me most were the very things that connected me with all the people who were alive, or who ever had been alive. Only if we face these open wounds in ourselves can we understand them in other people. An artist is a sort of emotional or spiritual historian. His role is to make you realize the doom and glory of knowing who you are and what you are. He has to tell, because nobody else can tell, what it is like to be alive.
~ James Baldwin ~
2016
I imagine one of the reasons people cling to their hates so stubbornly is because they sense, once hate is gone, they will be forced to deal with pain.
~ James Baldwin ~
2017
Perhaps I did not succumb to ideology … because I have never seen myself as a spokesman. I am a witness. In the church in which I was raised you were supposed to bear witness to the truth. Now, later on, you wonder what in the world the truth is, but you do know what a lie is.
~ James Baldwin ~
2018
All art is a kind of confession, more or less oblique. All artists, if they are to survive, are forced, at last, to tell the whole story, to vomit the anguish up.
~ James Baldwin ~
2019
They are not long, the days of wine and roses;
Out of a misty dream
Our path emerges for a while, then closes
Within a dream.
~ Ernest Dowson ~
2020
In the long run, a society's strength depends on the way that ordinary people voluntarily behave. Ordinary people matter because there are so many of them. Voluntary behavior matters because it is hard to supervise everyone all the time. … Successful societies — those which progress economically and politically and can control the terms on which they deal with the outside world — succeed because they have found ways to match individual self-interest to the collective good. The behavior that helps each person will, as a cumulative ethos, help the society as a whole.
~ James Fallows ~
2021
It is as fatal as it is cowardly to blink facts because they are not to our taste.
~ John Tyndall ~
2022
I played because I enjoyed it — but there's more to it than that. I played because I was dedicated to being the best. I was part of a team, and I dedicated myself to making that team the best. To me, one of the most beautiful things to see is a group of men coordinating their efforts toward a common goal — alternately subordinating and asserting themselves to achieve real teamwork in action. I tried to do that — we all tried to do that — on the Celtics. I think we succeeded. Often, in my mind's eye, I stood off and watched that effort. I found it beautiful to watch. It's just as beautiful to watch in things other than sports.
~ Bill Russell ~
  • proposed by Kalki; in regard of his recent death.
2023
The attack on our nation's capital on January 6, 2021, was an unprecedented assault on the seat of American democracy. As described in the indictment, it was fueled by lies. Lies by the defendant targeted at obstructing a bedrock function of the U.S. government, the nation's process of collecting, counting, and certifying the results of the presidential election.
The men and women of law enforcement who defended the U.S. Capitol on January 6 are heroes. They're patriots, and they are the very best of us. They did not just defend a building or the people sheltering in it. They put their lives on the line to defend who we are as a country and as a people. They defended the very institutions and principles that define the United States.
Since the attack on our Capitol, the Department of Justice has remained committed to ensuring accountability for those criminally responsible for what happened that day. This case is brought consistent with that commitment, and our investigation of other individuals continues.
~ Jack Smith ~
  • proposed by Kalki; historical remarks on a major historical indictment.
2024
Today is a powerful example of why it’s vital to have friends in this world — friends you can trust, work with, and depend upon, especially on matters of great consequence and sensitivity like this.
Our alliances make our people safer, and we began to see that again today.
Let me say this. It says a lot about the United States that we work relentlessly to free Americans who are unjustly held around the world. It also says a lot about us that this deal includes the release of Russian political prisoners.
They stood up for democracy and human rights. Their own leaders threw them in prison. The United States helped secure their release as well. That’s who we are in the United States.
We stand for freedom, for liberty, for justice — not only for our own people but for others as well. And that’s why all Americans can take pride in what we’ve achieved today.
~ Joe Biden ~
  • proposed by Kalki; recent remarks on recent events.
2025
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edit

There is no toy called easy joy.

  • 0 (no source, no anon, no relevance) ~ MosheZadka (Talk) 04:43, 20 July 2005 (UTC)
  • 0 Zarbon 14:58, 24 April 2008 (UTC)

Confronted with the impossibility of remaining faithful to one’s beliefs, and the equal impossibility of becoming free of them, one can be driven to the most inhuman excesses. ~ James Baldwin (born 2 August 1924)

Nobody is more dangerous than he who imagines himself pure in heart; for his purity, by definition, is unassailable. ~ James Baldwin

  • 3 InvisibleSun 03:31, 31 July 2006 (UTC)
  • 3 Kalki 10:26, 1 August 2007 (UTC) with a lean toward 4.
  • 1 Zarbon 14:58, 24 April 2008 (UTC)
  • 2 //Gbern3 (talk) 11:37, 29 July 2013 (UTC)

The bones of our ancestors, and the stones of their works, are everywhere. Our liberties were won in wars and revolutions so terrible that we do not fear our governors: they fear us. Our children giggle and eat ice-cream in the palaces of past rulers. We snap our fingers at kings. We laugh at popes. When we have built up tyrants, we have brought them down. ~ Ken MacLeod

Money, it turned out, was exactly like sex. You thought of nothing else if you didn't have it and thought of other things if you did. ~ James Baldwin

  • 2 Zarbon 03:46, 22 May 2008 (UTC)
  • 2 Kalki 11:10, 31 July 2008 (UTC) with a lean toward 3.
  • 3 InvisibleSun 23:15, 1 August 2009 (UTC)
  • 2 //Gbern3 (talk) 11:37, 29 July 2013 (UTC)

If the concept of God has any validity or any use, it can only be to make us larger, freer, and more loving. If God cannot do this, then it is time we got rid of Him. ~ James Baldwin

It's no credit to this enormously rich country that there are more oppressive, less decent governments elsewhere. We claim superiority of our institutions. We ought to live up to our own standards, not use misery elsewhere as an endless source of self-gratification and justification. ~ James Baldwin

  • 2 Zarbon 03:46, 22 May 2008 (UTC)
  • 2 Kalki 11:10, 31 July 2008 (UTC) with a lean toward 3.
  • 3 InvisibleSun 23:15, 1 August 2009 (UTC)
  • 2 //Gbern3 (talk) 11:37, 29 July 2013 (UTC)

Perhaps the whole root of our trouble, the human trouble, is that we will sacrifice all the beauty of our lives, will imprison ourselves in totems, taboos, crosses, blood sacrifices, steeples, mosques, races, armies, flags, nations, in order to deny the fact of death, which is the only fact we have. ~ James Baldwin

  • 2 Zarbon 03:46, 22 May 2008 (UTC)
  • 3 Kalki 11:10, 31 July 2008 (UTC)
  • 3 InvisibleSun 23:15, 1 August 2009 (UTC) with a lean toward 4.
  • 2 //Gbern3 (talk) 11:37, 29 July 2013 (UTC)

Anyone who has ever struggled with poverty knows how extremely expensive it is to be poor. ~ James Baldwin

You don't realize that you're intelligent until it gets you into trouble. ~ James Baldwin

Knowledge once gained casts a faint light beyond its own immediate boundaries. ~ John Tyndall

God has given to man no sharper spur to victory than contempt of death. ~ Hannibal, quoted in relation to the anniversary of the Battle of Cannae (2 August 216 BC)

A person whose conduct consists of not hurting anyone is not good; such a person is merely not bad. To be a good person involves the active pursuit of good. It is not enough merely to refrain from hurting other human beings; one must intercede on their behalf.
~ Dennis Prager ~
You do not have to do something bad in order to do bad; you only have to do nothing.
~ Dennis Prager ~


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