Quotes of the day from previous years:
- 2004
- Play the man, Master Ridley; we shall this day light such a candle, by God's grace, in England, as I trust shall never be put out. ~ Hugh Latimer
- 2005
- Political language — and with variations this is true of all political parties, from Conservatives to Anarchists — is designed to make lies sound truthful and murder respectable, and to give an appearance of solidity to pure wind. ~ George Orwell (born 25 June 1903)
- 2006
- The nationalist not only does not disapprove of atrocities committed by his own side, but he has a remarkable capacity for not even hearing about them. ~ George Orwell (born 25 June 1903)
- 2007
- I always disagree … when people end up saying that we can only combat Communism, Fascism or what not if we develop an equal fanaticism. It appears to me that one defeats the fanatic precisely by not being a fanatic oneself, but on the contrary by using one's intelligence. In the same way, a man can kill a tiger because he is not like a tiger and uses his brain to invent the rifle, which no tiger could ever do. ~ George Orwell
- 2008
- By "nationalism" I mean first of all the habit of assuming that human beings can be classified like insects and that whole blocks of millions or tens of millions of people can be confidently labelled "good" or "bad." … By "patriotism" I mean devotion to a particular place and a particular way of life, which one believes to be the best in the world but has no wish to force on other people. Patriotism is of its nature defensive, both militarily and culturally. Nationalism, on the other hand, is inseperable from the desire for power. ~ George Orwell
- 2009
- If liberty means anything at all, it means the right to tell people what they do not want to hear. ~ George Orwell
- 2010
- We have now sunk to a depth at which the restatement of the obvious is the first duty of intelligent men. … Bully-worship, under various disguises, has become a universal religion, and such truisms as that a machine-gun is still a machine-gun even when a "good" man is squeezing the trigger … have turned into heresies which it is actually becoming dangerous to utter. ~ George Orwell
- 2011
- Properly speaking, there is no such thing as revenge. Revenge is an act which you want to commit when you are powerless and because you are powerless: as soon as the sense of impotence is removed, the desire evaporates also. ~ George Orwell
- 2012
- 2013
- 2014
- 2015
| I applied my reason at every moment. Reason is excellent for getting food, clothing and shelter. Reason is the very best tool kit. Nothing beats reason for keeping tigers away. But be excessively reasonable and you risk throwing out the universe with the bathwater.
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| ~ Yann Martel ~
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- 2016
- 2017
- 2018
| It seems that the more places I see and experience, the bigger I realize the world to be. The more I become aware of, the more I realize how relatively little I know of it, how many places I have still to go, how much more there is to learn. Maybe that's enlightenment enough — to know that there is no final resting place of the mind, no moment of smug clarity. Perhaps wisdom, at least for me, means realizing how small I am, and unwise, and how far I have yet to go.
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| ~ Anthony Bourdain ~
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- 2019
- 2020
- 2021
- 2022
- proposed by Kalki; recent remarks on recent events.
- 2023
- 2024
| The past is a curious thing. It's with you all the time. I suppose an hour never passes without your thinking of things that happened ten or twenty years ago, and yet most of the time it's got no reality, it's just a set of facts that you've learned, like a lot of stuff in a history book. Then some chance sight or sound or smell, especially smell, sets you going, and the past doesn't merely come back to you, you're actually in the past.
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| ~ George Orwell ~
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- 2025
- Rank or add further suggestions…
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Fall is my favorite season in Los Angeles, watching the birds change color and fall from the trees. David Letterman
- Rationale: Last episode of w:Late Night with David Letterman aired on June 25, 1993
- 3 MosheZadka 00:32, 15 Jun 2005 (UTC)
- 3 Jeff Q (talk) 11:41, 20 Jun 2005 (UTC)
- 1 Kalki 11:54, 24 Jun 2005 (UTC) I feel this particular quote might be better in the fall perhaps.
- 1 Zarbon 04:32, 24 April 2008 (UTC)
- 1 //Gbern3 (talk) 16:39, 21 June 2013 (UTC)
| Freedom became one of the beacon lights of my life and it has remained so ever since. Freedom with the passing of years transcended the mere freedom of my country and embraced freedom of man everywhere and from every sort of trammel—above all, it meant freedom of the human personality, freedom of the mind, freedom of the spirit. This freedom has become the passion of my life and I shall not see it compromised for bread, for security, for prosperity, for the glory of the state or for anything else.
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| ~ Jayaprakash Narayan (a state of national emergency was proclaimed on 25 June 1975) ~
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- 3 --ΞΔΞ (talk) 06:23, 30 June 2019 (UTC)
| It is not possible for any thinking person to live in such a society as our own without wanting to change it.
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| ~ George Orwell ~
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| Every war, when it comes, or before it comes, is represented not as a war but as an act of self-defence against a homicidal maniac.
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| ~ George Orwell ~
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| War against a foreign country only happens when the moneyed classes think they are going to profit from it.
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| ~ George Orwell ~
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| We are all capable of believing things which we know to be untrue, and then, when we are finally proved wrong, impudently twisting the facts so as to show that we were right. Intellectually, it is possible to carry on this process for an indefinite time: the only check on it is that sooner or later a false belief bumps up against solid reality, usually on a battlefield.
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| ~ George Orwell ~
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| It is quite possible that we are descending into an age in which two plus two will make five when the Leader says so.
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| ~ George Orwell ~
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- 2 ♞☤☮♌︎Kalki ⚚⚓︎⊙☳☶⚡ 20:47, 24 June 2022 (UTC), with a lean toward 3.
| I am well acquainted with all the arguments against freedom of thought and speech — the arguments which claim that it cannot exist, and the arguments which claim that it ought not to. I answer simply that they don't convince me and that our civilization over a period of four hundred years has been founded on the opposite notice.
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| ~ George Orwell ~
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| A society becomes totalitarian when its structure becomes flagrantly artificial: that is, when its ruling class has lost its function but succeeds in clinging to power by force or fraud. Such a society, no matter how long it persists, can never afford to become either tolerant or intellectually stable. It can never permit either the truthful recording of facts or the emotional sincerity that literary creation demands. But to be corrupted by totalitarianism one does not have to live in a totalitarian country. The mere prevalence of certain ideas can spread a kind of poison that makes one subject after another impossible for literary purposes. Wherever there is an enforced orthodoxy — or even two orthodoxies, as often happens — good writing stops.
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| ~ George Orwell ~
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