Wikiquote

August 9

day of the year

Quotes of the day from previous years:

2003
The battle of the sexes will never be won as long as we keep sleeping with the enemy. ~ Emo Phillips
2004
Long live freedom and damn the ideologies. ~ Robinson Jeffers
2005
TCP implementations will follow a general principle of robustness: be conservative in what you do, be liberal in what you accept from others. ~ Jonathan B. Postel, RFC 793, entire text of section 2.10
2006
Education, for most people, means trying to lead the child to resemble the typical adult of his society... But for me, education means making creators... You have to make inventors, innovators, not conformists. ~ Jean Piaget
2007
You do not chop off a section of your imaginative substance and make a book specifically for children, for — if you are honest — you have no idea where childhood ends and maturity begins. It is all endless and all one. ~ P. L. Travers (born 9 August 1899)
2008
The principal goal of education in the schools should be creating men and women who are capable of doing new things, not simply repeating what other generations have done; men and women who are creative, inventive and discoverers, who can be critical and verify, and not accept, everything they are offered. ~ Jean Piaget
2009
For me there are no answers, only questions, and I am grateful that the questions go on and on. I don't look for an answer, because I don't think there is one. I'm very glad to be the bearer of a question.
~ P. L. Travers
2010
If you are not ready, and did not know what to do, it could hurt you in different ways. It could knock you down, hard, or throw you against a tree or a wall. It is such a big explosion, it can smash in buildings and knock signboards over, and break windows all over town, but if you duck and cover, like Bert, you will be much safer. ~ Duck and Cover (1951), about protecting yourself from an atomic explosion; the last-ever nuclear attack (so far) occurred on this date
2011

When the rain came down — I was standing in the green
My soul was touched by every tree that my eyes could see
I am in peace, in love, in harmony — when the rain comes
down

When the rain came down — melded with my tears
When the rain came down — flow away the fears
When the rain came down — bigger than the sea
When the rain came down — then came me.

~ Happy Rhodes ~

2012
This darkness will not last forever. There will some day come a Fifth of November — or another date, it doesn't matter — when fires will burn in a chain of brightness from Land's End to John O' Groats. The children will dance and leap about them as they did in the times before. They will take each other by the hand and watch the rockets breaking, and afterwards they will go home singing to the houses full of light...
~ P. L. Travers ~
2013
What magical trick makes us intelligent? The trick is that there is no trick. The power of intelligence stems from our vast diversity, not from any single, perfect principle.
~ Marvin Minsky ~
2014
We are all made of the same stuff, remember, we of the Jungle, you of the City. The same substance composes us — the tree overhead, the stone beneath us, the bird, the beast, the star — we are all one, all moving to the same end. Remember that when you no longer remember me, my child.
~ P. L. Travers ~
2015
If I had foreseen Hiroshima and Nagasaki, I would have torn up my formula in 1905.
~ Albert Einstein ~
  • proposed by Kalki for the 70th anniversary of the bombing of Nagasaki.
2016
I am transparent
An open book;
There's no choice in the matter
But the breath from my mind
Is living air,
And the notes from my heart
Are what I share.
Words weren't made for cowards.
~ Happy Rhodes ~
2017
I've found that people aren't really as different as they sometimes seem. We all have joy and tragedy in our lives. So it only follows that if I write something from my heart and stay true to myself, others will easily identify.
~ Happy Rhodes ~
2018

I dreamed I was an animal
In a human world
Now when I hear big sounds
I cry like a little girl

I'm talking about connections
Between here and there
All things exist at once
Seems more than we can bear.

~ Happy Rhodes ~
2019
The need to speak the truth and even to seek it for oneself is only conceivable in so far as the individual thinks and acts as one of a society, and not of any society … but of a society founded on reciprocity and mutual respect, and therefore on cooperation.
~ Jean Piaget ~
2020
Look to your health; and if you have it, praise God, and value it next to a good conscience; for health is the second blessing that we mortals are capable of; a blessing that money cannot buy.
~ Izaak Walton ~
2021
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 ~
2022

Sometimes there’s a miracle just beyond the pain
When you can see the rainbow in the rain

Live on, live on
Brighter skies will come again
Cry the tears you cry and then live on, live on
Love is all we leave when we are gone
Live on.

~ Olivia Newton-John ~
  • proposed by Kalki; in regard of her recent death.
2023
Good company and good discourse are the very sinews of virtue.
~ Izaak Walton ~
2024
The relations between parents and children are certainly not only those of constraint. There is spontaneous mutual affection, which from the first prompts the child to acts of generosity and even of self-sacrifice, to very touching demonstrations which are in no way prescribed. And here no doubt is the starting point for that morality of good which we shall see developing alongside of the morality of right or duty, and which in some persons completely replaces it.
~ Jean Piaget ~
2025
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I am acutely aware that you have not elected me as your president by your ballots, so I ask you to confirm me with your prayers. ~ Gerald Ford, became president on 9 August after Nixon's resignation.

  • 3 ~ MosheZadka (Talk) 11:31, 20 July 2005 (UTC)
  • 1 don't want to use this if we use Nixon on 8th AllanHainey 12:00, 26 July 2005 (UTC)
  • 1 Kalki 17:32, 8 August 2006 (UTC)
  • 1 ~ Jeff Q (talk) 03:12, 7 August 2007 (UTC); ditto on "not after Nixon"
  • 1 InvisibleSun 23:15, 8 August 2007 (UTC)
  • 1 Zarbon 15:18, 24 April 2008 (UTC)

Genius is one per cent inspiration and ninety-nine per cent perspiration. - Thomas Edison got telegraph patent today

No man can lose what he never had. ~ Izaak Walton

We rarely recognize how wonderful it is that a person can traverse an entire lifetime without making a single really serious mistake — like putting a fork in one's eye or using a window instead of a door. ~ Marvin Minsky

  • 3 Kalki 11:59, 8 August 2008 (UTC) with a lean toward 4.
  • 3 InvisibleSun 23:31, 8 August 2008 (UTC)
  • 2 Zarbon 01:34, 9 August 2008 (UTC)
  • 1 //Gbern3 (talk) 03:31, 1 August 2013 (UTC)

Mary Poppins herself had flown away, but the gifts she had brought would remain for always. ~ P. L. Travers

A writer is, after all, only half his book. The other half is the reader and from the reader the writer learns. ~ P. L. Travers

You can ask me anything you like about my work, but I'll never talk about myself. ~ P. L. Travers

Tonight the small are free from the great and the great protect the small. ~ P. L. Travers

Every step I take, I am alive. I am Life.
~ Happy Rhodes ~

Before games are played in common, no rules in the proper sense can come into existence. Regularities and ritualized schemas are already there, but these rites, being the work of the individual, cannot call forth that submission to something superior to the self which characterizes the appearance of any rule.
~ Jean Piaget ~
There is an adult in every child and a child in every adult. … There exist in the child certain attitudes and beliefs which intellectual development will more and more tend to eliminate: there are others which will acquire more and more importance. The later are not derived from the former but are partly antagonistic to them.
~ Jean Piaget ~
When the child comes to draw things as he sees them, it will be precisely because he has given up taking isolated objects in and for themselves and has begun to construct real systems of relations which take account of the true perspective in which things are connected
~ Jean Piaget ~


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