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February 17

day of the year

Quotes of the day from previous years:

2004
Treat a person as he is, and he will remain as he is. Treat him as he could be, and he will become what he should be. ~ Anonymous
2005
There is one simple Divinity found in all things, everything has Divinity latent within itself. For she enfolds and imparts herself even unto the smallest beings. Without her presence nothing would have being, because she is the essence of the existence of the first unto the last being. ~ Giordano Bruno (died 17 February 1600)
2006
Some people want it to happen, some wish it would happen, others make it happen. ~ Michael Jordan (born 17 February 1963)
2007
Even to have come forth is something, since I see that being able to conquer is placed in the hands of fate. However, there was in me, whatever I was able to do, that which no future century will deny to be mine, that which a victor could have for his own: Not to have feared to die, not to have yielded to any equal in firmness of nature, and to have preferred a courageous death to a noncombatant life. ~ Giordano Bruno (executed 17 February 1600)
2008
A voiceless song in an ageless light
Sings at the coming dawn
Birds in flight are calling there
Where the heart moves the stones
It's there that my heart is calling
All for the love of you.
~ Loreena McKennitt ~
2009
All things are in the Universe, and the universe is in all things: we in it, and it in us; in this way everything concurs in a perfect unity. ~ Giordano Bruno
2010
The Divine Light is always in man, presenting itself to the senses and to the comprehension, but man rejects it. ~ Giordano Bruno
2011
I understand Being in all and over all, as there is nothing without participation in Being, and there is no being without Essence. Thus nothing can be free of the Divine Presence. ~ Giordano Bruno
2012
When the end comes, you will be esteemed by the world and rewarded by God, not because you have won the love and respect of the princes of the earth, however powerful, but rather for having loved, defended and cherished one such as I … what you receive from others is a testimony to their virtue; but all that you do for others is the sign and clear indication of your own. ~ Giordano Bruno
2013
Time is the father of truth, its mother is our mind.
~ Giordano Bruno ~
2014
We recognize a noble image, a marvellous conception, a supreme figure, an exalted shadow, an infinite representation of the represented infinity, a spectacle worthy of the excellence and supremacy of Him who transcendeth understanding, comprehension or grasp. Thus is the excellence of God magnified and the greatness of his kingdom made manifest; He is glorified not in one, but in countless suns; not in a single earth, a single world, but in a thousand thousand, I say in an infinity of worlds.
~ Giordano Bruno ~
2015
Our philosophy... reduceth to a single origin and relateth to a single end, and maketh contraries to coincide so that there is one primal foundation both of origin and of end. From this coincidence of contraries, we deduce that ultimately it is divinely true that contraries are within contraries; wherefore it is not difficult to compass the knowledge that each thing is within every other.
~ Giordano Bruno ~
2016
While the broad principles of democracy are universal, the fact remains that their application varies considerably … We are at the beginning of the road, at the very beginning. We still have a long way to go.
~ Boutros Boutros-Ghali ~
2017
If all things are in common among friends, the most precious is Wisdom. What can Juno give which thou canst not receive from Wisdom? What mayest thou admire in Venus which thou mayest not also contemplate in Wisdom? Her beauty is not small, for the lord of all things taketh delight in her. Her I have loved and diligently sought from my youth up.
~ Giordano Bruno ~
2018
Diverse living things represent diverse divinities and diverse powers, which, besides the absolute being they possess, obtain the being communicated to all things according to their capacity and measure. Whence all of God is in all things (although not totally, but in some more abundantly and in others less) … Just as Divinity descends in a certain manner, to the extent that one communicates with Nature, so one ascends to Divinity through Nature, just as by means of a life resplendent in natural things one rises to the life that presides over them.
~ Giordano Bruno ~
2019
Nature is not merely present, but is implanted within things, distant from none; naught is distant from her except the false, and that which existed never and nowhere — nullity. And while the outer face of things changeth so greatly, there flourisheth the origin of being more intimately within all things than they themselves. The fount of all kinds, Mind, God, Being, One, Truth, Destiny, Reason, Order.
~ Giordano Bruno ~
2020
Political realism is aware of the moral significance of political action. It is also aware of the ineluctable tension between the moral command and the requirements of successful political action. And it is unwilling to gloss over and obliterate that tension and thus to obfuscate both the moral and the political issue by making it appear as though the stark facts of politics were morally more satisfying than they actually are, and the moral law less exacting than it actually is.
~ Hans Morgenthau ~
2021
The people in the government who were voted into power are lying to us. And us kids seem to be the only ones who notice — and our parents — to call BS.
Companies trying to make caricatures of the teenagers these days, saying that all we are self-involved and trend-obsessed and they hush us into submission when our message doesn't reach the ears of the nation, we are prepared to call BS.
Politicians who sit in their gilded House and Senate seats funded by the NRA telling us nothing could have been done to prevent this, we call BS.
They say tougher guns laws do not decrease gun violence. We call BS.
They say a good guy with a gun stops a bad guy with a gun. We call BS.
They say guns are just tools like knives and are as dangerous as cars. We call BS.
They say no laws could have prevented the hundreds of senseless tragedies that have occurred. We call BS.
That us kids don't know what we're talking about, that we're too young to understand how the government works. We call BS.
If you agree, register to vote. Contact your local congresspeople. Give them a piece of your mind.
~ Emma González ~
2022
Political realism believes that politics, like society in general, is governed by objective laws that have their roots in human nature. In order to improve society it is first necessary to understand the laws by which society lives. The operation of these laws being impervious to our preferences, men will challenge them only at the risk of failure.
Realism, believing as it does in the objectivity of the laws of politics, must also believe in the possibility of developing a rational theory that reflects, however imperfectly and one-sidedly, these objective laws. It believes also, then, in the possibility of distinguishing in politics between truth and opinion — between what is true objectively and rationally, supported by evidence and illuminated by reason, and what is only a subjective judgment, divorced from the facts as they are and informed by prejudice and wishful thinking.
~ Hans Morgenthau ~
2023
The struggle for power is universal in time and space and is an undeniable fact of experience. It cannot be denied that throughout historic time, regardless of social, economic and political conditions, states have met each other in contests for power. Even though anthropologists have shown that certain primitive peoples seem to be free from the desire for power, nobody has yet shown how their state of mind can be re-created on a worldwide scale so as to eliminate the struggle for power from the international scene. … International politics, like all politics, is a struggle for power. Whatever the ultimate aims of international politics, power is always the immediate aim.
~ Hans Morgenthau ~
2024
I want Putin and his entourage, Putin’s friends, his government to know — that they will have to pay for what they’ve done with our country, with my family, and my husband. And that day will come very soon. I want to call on the entire world community, everyone present here, people all over the world — so that we shall all together defeat this evil, defeat the terrifying regime that is currently in Russia. This regime and Vladimir Putin must be held accountable for all the horrors they are doing to my country, to our country — to Russia.
~ Yulia Navalnaya ~
2025
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Happy the man whose wish and care
A few paternal acres bound,
Content to breathe his native air
In his own ground.
~ Alexander Pope

  • 1 bystander 05:54, 12 February 2012 (UTC) Nice quote but I don't see the connection to this day.

Political power is a psychological relation between those who exercise it and those over which it is exercised. It gives the former control over certain actions of the latter through the influence which the former exert over the latter's minds. That influence may be exerted through orders, threats, persuasion, or a combination of any of those. ~ Hans Morgenthau (born 1904 Feb 17)

Bruno stood at the stake in solitary and awful grandeur. There was not a friendly face in the vast crowd around him. It was one man against the world. Surely the knight of Liberty, the champion of Freethought, who lived such a life and died such a death, without hope of reward on earth or in heaven, sustained only by his indomitable manhood, is worthy to be accounted the supreme martyr of all time. ~ George William Foote

Perchance you who pronounce my sentence are in greater fear than I who receive it. ~ Giordano Bruno

The important thing is not to suppress ideas. Freedom of thought is the life blood of science. That’s why {Giordano} Bruno’s story is important. ~ Astrophysicist Steven Soter, a co-writer with Carl Sagan for Cosmos:A Personal Voyage (1980) and a co-writer for Cosmos: A Spacetime Odyssey (2014), in a March 13, 2014 written discussion about Giordano Bruno with the editor of Discover Magazine.

  • 4 Pithy Francoln (talk) 20:59, 7 October 2016 (UTC)
  • 1 ♞☤☮♌︎Kalki ⚚⚓︎⊙☳☶⚡ 23:58, 16 February 2018 (UTC) with a lean towards 2, for now. I like the statement, but in most years would probably prefer to use a quote of Bruno.
Don't look for big things, just do small things with great love.... The smaller the thing, the greater must be our love.
~ Mother Teresa ~


Hello! This is New York calling. ~ With these words the U.S. Voice of America (VOA) began its first radio broadcasts to the Soviet Union on February 17, 1947.

Political realism refuses to identify the moral aspirations of a particular nation with the moral laws that govern the universe. As it distinguishes between truth and opinion, so it distinguishes between truth and idolatry. All nations are tempted — and few have been able to resist the power for long — to clothe their own aspirations and action in the moral purposes of the universe. To know that nations are subject to the moral law is one thing, while to pretend to know with certainty what is good and evil in the relations among nations is quite another. There is a world of difference between the belief that all nations stand under the judgment of God, inscrutable to the human mind, and the blasphemous conviction that God is always on one's side and that what one wills oneself cannot fail to be willed by God also.
~ Hans Morgenthau ~
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