Wikiquote

November 15

day of the year

Quotes of the day from previous years:

2004
Every now and then a clear harmonic cry gave new suggestions of a tune that would someday be the only tune in the world and would raise men's souls to joy. ~ Jack Kerouac in On The Road
2005
Variety's the very spice of life,
That gives it all its flavour.
~ William Cowper (born 15 November 1731 (O.S.), but actually 26 November by modern Gregorian reckoning.)
2006
He who, when called upon to speak a disagreeable truth, tells it boldly and has done is both bolder and milder than he who nibbles in a low voice and never ceases nibbling. ~ Johann Kaspar Lavater (born 15 November 1741)
2007
The deepest feeling always shows itself in silence;
not in silence, but restraint.
~ Marianne Moore~ (born 15 November 1887)
2008
Who in the same given time can produce more than others has vigor; who can produce more and better, has talents; who can produce what none else can, has genius. ~ Johann Kaspar Lavater
2009
Mortal danger is an effective antidote for fixed ideas. ~ Erwin Rommel
2010
A phrase begins life as a literary expression; its felicity leads to its lazy repetition; and repetition soon establishes it as a legal formula, undiscriminatingly used to express different and sometimes contradictory ideas. ~ Felix Frankfurter
2011
We need not think alike to love alike. ~ Ferenc Dávid (died 15 November 1579, date of birth unknown )
2012
Wisdom too often never comes, and so one ought not to reject it merely because it comes late.
~ Felix Frankfurter ~
2013
I have things in my head that are not like what anyone has taught me — shapes and ideas so near to me — so natural to my way of being and thinking that it hasn't occurred to me to put them down. I decided to start anew, to strip away what I had been taught.
~ Georgia O'Keeffe ~
2014
You are not male or female, but a plan
deep-set within the heart of man.
~ Marianne Moore ~
2015
Peace for Paris
~ Jean Jullien ~
2016
There is no greater mindlessness and absurdity than to force conscience and the spirit with external power, when only their creator has authority for them.
~ Ferenc Dávid ~
2017
In wartime Shanghai I saw so many horrors … Civilised life is based on a huge number of illusions in which we all collaborate willingly. The trouble is, we forget after a while that they are illusions and we are deeply shocked when reality is torn down around us.
~ J. G. Ballard ~
2018
Let none turn over books, or roam the stars in quest of God, who sees him not in man.
~ Johann Kaspar Lavater ~
2019
Where there is much pretension, much has been borrowed: nature never pretends.
~ Johann Kaspar Lavater ~
2020
Happy the heart to whom God has given enough strength and courage to suffer for Him, to find happiness in simplicity and the happiness of others.
~ Johann Kaspar Lavater ~
2021
A writer is unfair to himself when he is unable to be hard on himself.
~ Marianne Moore ~
2022
If freedom is to be saved and enlarged, poverty must be ended. There is no other solution.
~ Aneurin Bevan ~
2023
To have real knowledge, one must understand the essence of things and not only their manifestations.
~ Daniel Barenboim ~
2024
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Wherever it has been established that it is shameful to be involved with sexual relationships with men, that is due to evil on the part of the rulers, and to cowardice on the part of the governed. ~ Plato.

—This unsigned comment is by MosheZadka (talk • contribs) .
  • 2 ~ UDScott 13:58, 14 November 2006 (UTC)
  • 2 InvisibleSun 18:48, 14 November 2006 (UTC)
  • 1 Zarbon 06:29, 26 April 2008 (UTC)
  • 2 Kalki 16:44, 14 November 2008 (UTC)
  • 2 Antiquary 21:47, 14 November 2008 (UTC)

There is something behind the throne greater than the King himself. ~ William Pitt, 1st Earl of Chatham (born 15 November 1708)

  • 3 Kalki 13:30, 10 November 2007 (UTC)
  • 3 InvisibleSun 20:30, 14 November 2007 (UTC)
  • 1 Zarbon 06:29, 26 April 2008 (UTC)
  • 2 Antiquary 21:47, 14 November 2008 (UTC)

The poorest man may in his cottage bid defiance to all the forces of the Crown. It may be frail — its roof may shake — the wind may blow through it — the storm may enter — the rain may enter — but the King of England cannot enter — all his force dares not cross the threshold of the ruined tenement! ~ William Pitt, 1st Earl of Chatham

  • 3 Kalki 13:30, 10 November 2007 (UTC)
  • 3 InvisibleSun 20:30, 14 November 2007 (UTC)
  • 1 Zarbon 06:29, 26 April 2008 (UTC)
  • 3 Antiquary 21:47, 14 November 2008 (UTC)

I rejoice that America has resisted. Three millions of people, so dead to all the feelings of liberty, as voluntarily to submit to be slaves, would have been fit instruments to make slaves of the rest. ~ William Pitt, 1st Earl of Chatham

  • 3 Kalki 13:30, 10 November 2007 (UTC)
  • 3 InvisibleSun 20:30, 14 November 2007 (UTC)
  • 2 Zarbon 06:29, 26 April 2008 (UTC)
  • 3 Antiquary 21:47, 14 November 2008 (UTC)

The prudent see only the difficulties, the bold only the advantages, of a great enterprise; the hero sees both; diminishes the former and makes the latter preponderate, and so conquers. ~ Johann Kaspar Lavater

  • 3 Kalki 13:30, 10 November 2007 (UTC) with a strong lean toward 4
  • 3 InvisibleSun 20:30, 14 November 2007 (UTC)
  • 1 Zarbon 06:29, 26 April 2008 (UTC)

I find that a great part of the information I have was acquired by looking up something and finding something else on the way. ~ Franklin Pierce Adams (born 15 November 1881)

  • 3 Kalki 13:30, 10 November 2007 (UTC)
  • 3 InvisibleSun 20:30, 14 November 2007 (UTC)
  • 2 Zarbon 06:29, 26 April 2008 (UTC)

All our work, our whole life is a matter of semantics, because words are the tools with which we work, the material out of which laws are made, out of which the Constitution was written. Everything depends on our understanding of them. ~ Felix Frankfurter (born 15 November 1882)

  • 3 Kalki 13:30, 10 November 2007 (UTC) with a lean toward 4.
  • 3 InvisibleSun 20:30, 14 November 2007 (UTC)
  • 1 Zarbon 06:29, 26 April 2008 (UTC)
  • 3 Antiquary 21:47, 14 November 2008 (UTC)
  • 3 bystander (talk) 05:43, 15 November 2012 (UTC)

On the question you ask depends the answer you get. ~ Felix Frankfurter

  • 3 Kalki 13:30, 10 November 2007 (UTC)
  • 4 InvisibleSun 20:30, 14 November 2007 (UTC)
  • 2 Zarbon 06:29, 26 April 2008 (UTC)

I know I cannot paint a flower. I can not paint the sun on the desert on a bright summer morning but maybe in terms of paint color I can convey to you my experience of the flower or the experience that makes the flower of significance to me at that particular time. ~ Georgia O'Keeffe (born 15 November 1887)

  • 3 Kalki 13:30, 10 November 2007 (UTC)
  • 3 InvisibleSun 20:30, 14 November 2007 (UTC)
  • 1 Zarbon 06:29, 26 April 2008 (UTC)
  • 2 Antiquary 21:47, 14 November 2008 (UTC)

In a poem the excitement has to maintain itself. I am governed by the pull of the sentence as the pull of a fabric is governed by gravity. ~ Marianne Moore

  • 3 Kalki 13:30, 10 November 2007 (UTC)
  • 3 InvisibleSun 20:30, 14 November 2007 (UTC)
  • 1 Zarbon 06:29, 26 April 2008 (UTC)

The power of the visible
is the invisible; as even where
no tree of freedom grows,
so-called brute courage knows.
~ Marianne Moore ~

  • 3 Kalki 13:30, 10 November 2007 (UTC)
  • 3 InvisibleSun 20:30, 14 November 2007 (UTC)
  • 2 Zarbon 06:29, 26 April 2008 (UTC)

In a man to man fight, the winner is he who has one more round in his magazine. ~ Erwin Rommel (born 15 November 1891)

  • 1 ♞☤☮♌︎Kalki ⚚⚓︎⊙☳☶⚡ 22:05, 14 November 2014 (UTC) 2 Kalki 13:30, 10 November 2007 (UTC)
  • 3 InvisibleSun 20:30, 14 November 2007 (UTC)
  • 4 because I believe in this strongly. The man who has the extra shotgun shell or pistol bullet shall be the one left standing. Zarbon 16:58, 21 April 2008 (UTC)
  • 1 Antiquary 21:47, 14 November 2008 (UTC)

Courage which goes against military expediency is stupidity, or, if it is insisted upon by a commander, irresponsibility. ~ Erwin Rommel

  • 3 Kalki 13:30, 10 November 2007 (UTC)
  • 3 InvisibleSun 20:30, 14 November 2007 (UTC)
  • 2 Zarbon 06:29, 26 April 2008 (UTC)
  • 2 Antiquary 21:47, 14 November 2008 (UTC)

Every soldier thinks something of the moral aspects of what he is doing. But all war is immoral and if you let that bother you, you're not a good soldier. ~ Curtis LeMay

  • 3 Zarbon 05:57, 12 October 2008 (UTC)
  • 1 Kalki 16:44, 14 November 2008 (UTC)
  • 1 InvisibleSun 20:40, 14 November 2008 (UTC)
  • 1 Antiquary 21:47, 14 November 2008 (UTC)

I don't mind being called tough, because in this racket it's tough guys who lead the survivors. ~ Curtis LeMay

  • 3 Zarbon 05:57, 12 October 2008 (UTC)
  • 2 Kalki 16:44, 14 November 2008 (UTC)

Man must first live before he can live abundantly. ~ Aneurin Bevan

  • 2 Zarbon 06:08, 12 October 2008 (UTC)
  • 2 Kalki 16:44, 14 November 2008 (UTC)
  • 2 InvisibleSun 20:40, 14 November 2008 (UTC)
  • 3 Antiquary 21:47, 14 November 2008 (UTC)

Neither the sword of popes, nor the cross, nor the image of death — nothing will halt the march of truth. ~ Ferenc Dávid

I define Inner Space as an imaginary realm in which on the one hand the outer world of reality, and on the other the inner world of the mind meet and merge. Now, in the landscapes of the surrealist painters, for example, one sees the regions of Inner Space; and increasingly I believe that we will encounter in film and literature scenes which are neither solely realistic nor fantastic. In a sense, it will be a movement in the interzone between both spheres.
~ J. G. Ballard ~
The uneasy marriage of reason and nightmare which has dominated the 20th century has given birth to an increasingly surreal world. More and more, we see that the events of our own times make sense in terms of surrealism rather than any other view — whether the grim facts of the death-camps, Hiroshima and Viet Nam, or our far more ambiguous unease at organ transplant surgery and the extra-uterine foetus, the confusions of the media landscape with its emphasis on the glossy, lurid and bizarre, its hunger for the irrational and sensational. The art of Salvador Dalí, an extreme metaphor at a time when only the extreme will do, constitutes a body of prophecy about ourselves unequaled in accuracy since Freud's "Civilization And Its Discontents".
~ J. G. Ballard ~
Art is the principal way in which the human mind has tried to remake the world in a way that makes sense.
~ J. G. Ballard ~
Given that external reality is a fiction, the writer's role is almost superfluous. He does not need to invent the fiction because it is already there.
~ J. G. Ballard ~
The more honesty a man has, the less he affects the air of a saint.
~ Johann Kaspar Lavater ~
Have you ever seen a pedant with a warm heart?
~ Johann Kaspar Lavater ~
Act well at the moment, and you have performed a good action to all eternity.
~ Johann Kaspar Lavater ~
The founding fathers of the State of Israel considered the principle of equality and the pursuit of peace as the bedrock of the society they were building. What happened? ... I still believe that despite all the objective and subjective difficulties, the future of Israel and its position in the family of enlightened nations will depend on our ability to realize the promise of the founding fathers as they canonized it in the Declaration of Independence. Yet, nothing has really changed since 2004. Instead, we now have a law that confirms the Arab population as second-class citizens. It therefore is a very clear form of apartheid. I don’t think the Jewish people survived for 20 centuries, mostly through persecution and enduring endless cruelties, in order to now become the oppressors, inflicting cruelty on others.
~ Daniel Barenboim ~
I have lived as a Jew in Berlin for the past 23 years, something that would not have been possible if I did not believe that the Germans had thought long and hard about their past. No one else has managed to do this to the extent the Germans have, and I admire them for it.
~ Daniel Barenboim ~
Wagner exploited all forms of expression at a composer's disposal — harmony, dynamics, orchestration — to the extreme. His music is highly emotional, and at the same time Wagner has extraordinary control over the effect he achieves. That's why there is also something manipulative about Wagner's music, which is not to say that it's not honest. In fact, I believe that it's totally honest, but it also happens to be manipulative.
~ Daniel Barenboim ~
I am a Palestinian ..… and an Israeli … So you see it is possible to be both. … Everyone has to understand that the Palestinian cause is a just cause therefore it can be only given justice if it is achieved without violence. Violence can only weaken the righteousness of the Palestinian cause.
~ Daniel Barenboim ~
Every musician here has played these pieces many times, sometimes hundreds of times. Yesterday we looked at this music as if we had seen it for the first time. We never accept that the next note will played the same way it was played before. Thinking anew is our daily activity. I hope all the people of this region can take note of that.
~ Daniel Barenboim ~
Despite the fact that as an art, music cannot compromise its principles, and politics, on the other hand, is the art of compromise, when politics transcends the limits of the present existence and ascents to the higher sphere of the possible, it can be joined there by music. Music is the art of the imaginary par excellence, an art free of all limits imposed by words, an art that touches the depth of human existence, and art of sounds that crosses all borders. As such, music can take the feelings and imagination of Israelis and Palestinians to new unimaginable spheres.
~ Daniel Barenboim ~
Israel’s lasting future depends on its government’s willingness to enter into a genuine peace agreement with the Palestinians. That this also goes for the Palestinians grouped around Hamas hardly needs to be stressed. Both sides have to understand that they must live together for better or worse and that hatred, terror and territorial, ethnic and religious exclusion have never produced peace, but rather have led to killing and more killing.
~ Daniel Barenboim ~



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