Wikiquote

October 3

date

Quotes of the day from previous years:

2003
We shall not cease from exploration
And the end of all our exploring
Will be to arrive where we started
And know the place for the first time.
~ The Four Quartets by T. S. Eliot ~
2004
Given the choice between two theories, take the one which is funnier. ~ "Blore's Razor" (Author unknown)
2005
Everyone seems to be playing well within the boundaries of his usual rule set. I have yet to hear anyone say something that seemed likely to mitigate the idiocy of this age. ~ John Perry Barlow (born 3 October 1947)
2006
The average "educated" American has been made to believe that, somehow, the United States must lead the world even though hardly anyone has any information at all about those countries we are meant to lead. Worse, we have very little information about our own country and its past. ~ Gore Vidal (born 3 October 1925)
2007
I'm an optimist. In order to be libertarian, you have to be an optimist. You have to have a benign view of human nature, to believe that human beings left to their own devices are basically good. But I'm not so sure about human institutions, and I think the real point of argument here is whether or not large corporations are human institutions or some other entity we need to be thinking about curtailing. Most libertarians are worried about government but not worried about business. I think we need to be worrying about business in exactly the same way we are worrying about government. ~ John Perry Barlow (born 3 October 1947)
2008
As societies grow decadent, the language grows decadent, too. Words are used to disguise, not to illuminate, action: you liberate a city by destroying it. Words are to confuse, so that at election time people will solemnly vote against their own interests. ~ Gore Vidal
2009
We are forming our own Social Contract. This governance will arise according to the conditions of our world, not yours. Our world is different.
Cyberspace consists of transactions, relationships, and thought itself, arrayed like a standing wave in the web of our communications. Ours is a world that is both everywhere and nowhere, but it is not where bodies live.
We are creating a world that all may enter without privilege or prejudice accorded by race, economic power, military force, or station of birth.
We are creating a world where anyone, anywhere may express his or her beliefs, no matter how singular, without fear of being coerced into silence or conformity. ~ John Perry Barlow
2010
I have always felt that no matter how inscrutable its ways and means, the universe is working perfectly and working according to a greater plan than we can know. ~ John Perry Barlow
2011
The theater needs continual reminders that there is nothing more debasing than the work of those who do well what is not worth doing at all. ~ Gore Vidal
2012
Don't ever make the mistake with people like me thinking we are looking for heroes. There aren't any and if there were, they would be killed immediately. I'm never surprised by bad behaviour. I expect it.
~ Gore Vidal ~
2013
We have no elected government, nor are we likely to have one, so I address you with no greater authority than that with which liberty itself always speaks. I declare the global social space we are building to be naturally independent of the tyrannies you seek to impose on us. You have no moral right to rule us nor do you possess any methods of enforcement we have true reason to fear.
Governments derive their just powers from the consent of the governed. You have neither solicited nor received ours. We did not invite you. You do not know us, nor do you know our world. Cyberspace does not lie within your borders.
~ John Perry Barlow ~
2014
TV in America created the most coherent reality distortion field that I’ve ever seen. Therein is the problem: People who vote watch TV, and they are hallucinating like a sonofabitch. Basically, what we have in this country is government by hallucinating mob.
~ John Perry Barlow ~
2015
You have reached the pinnacle of success as soon as you become uninterested in money, compliments, or publicity.
~ Thomas Wolfe ~
2016
Through Chance, we are each a ghost to all the others, and our only reality; through Chance, the huge hinge of the world, and a grain of dust; the stone that starts an avalanche, the pebble whose concentric circles widen across the seas.
~ Thomas Wolfe ~
2017
Once a country is habituated to liars, it takes generations to bring the truth back.
~ Gore Vidal ~
2018
Christ himself, who preached the life of love, was yet as lonely as any man that ever lived. Yet I could not say that he was mistaken because he preached the life of love and fellowship, and lived and died in loneliness; nor would I dare assert his way was wrong because a billion men have since professed his way and never followed it.
~ Thomas Wolfe ~
2019
Happily for the busy lunatics who rule over us, we are permanently the United States of Amnesia. We learn nothing because we remember nothing.
~ Gore Vidal ~
2020
My father had a deep and lifelong contempt for politicians in general ("They tell lies," he used to say with wonder, "even when they don't have to").
~ Gore Vidal ~
2021
The whole conviction of my life now rests upon the belief that loneliness, far from being a rare and curious phenomenon, peculiar to myself and to a few other solitary men, is the central and inevitable fact of human existence.
~ Thomas Wolfe ~
2022

They say I gotta learn, but nobody's here to teach me
If they can't understand it, how can they reach me
I guess they can't, I guess they won't
I guess they front, that's why I know my life is out of luck, fool.

Been spendin' most their lives, livin' in the gangsta's paradise
Been spendin' most their lives, livin' in the gangsta's paradise
Keep spendin' most our lives, livin' in the gangsta's paradise
Keep spendin' most our lives, livin' in the gangsta's paradise.

Tell me why are we, so blind to see
That the ones we hurt, are you and me?

~ Coolio ~
  • proposed by Kalki; in regard to his recent death.
2023
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Think of the earth as a living organism that is being attacked by billions of bacteria whose numbers double every forty years. Either the host dies, or the virus dies, or both die. ~ Gore Vidal (born 3 October 1925)

  • 3 InvisibleSun 07:30, 1 October 2006 (UTC)
  • 2 Kalki 23:49, 2 October 2006 (UTC)
  • 2 UDScott 20:51, 2 October 2007 (UTC)
  • 2 Zarbon 03:48, 25 April 2008 (UTC)

I used to be able to summon up scenes at will, but now aging memory is so busy weeding its own garden that, promiscuously, it pulls up roses as well as crabgrass. ~ Gore Vidal

  • 3 InvisibleSun 07:30, 1 October 2006 (UTC)
  • 2 Kalki 23:49, 2 October 2006 (UTC)
  • 2 UDScott 20:51, 2 October 2007 (UTC)
  • 1 Zarbon 03:48, 25 April 2008 (UTC)

When I look back on it now, I am so glad that the one thing that I had in my life was my belief that everything in life is a learning experience, whether it be positive or negative. If you can see it as a learning experience, you can turn any negative into a positive. ~ Neve Campbell

If a man has talent and can't use it, he's failed. If he uses only half of it, he has partly failed. If he uses the whole of it, he has succeeded, and won a satisfaction and triumph few men ever know. ~ Thomas Wolfe

  • 2 Zarbon 03:46, 1 July 2008 (UTC)
  • 3 Kalki 19:07, 2 October 2008 (UTC)
  • 3 InvisibleSun 20:18, 2 October 2008 (UTC)
  • 3 N6n 14:31, 15 September 2010 (UTC)

I don't know yet what I am capable of doing, but, by God, I have genius — I know it too well to blush behind it. ~ Thomas Wolfe

  • 2 Zarbon 03:46, 1 July 2008 (UTC)
  • 2 Kalki 19:07, 2 October 2008 (UTC)
  • 2 InvisibleSun 20:18, 2 October 2008 (UTC)
  • 3 N6n 14:31, 15 September 2010 (UTC)

The notion that the public accepts or rejects anything in modern art is merely romantic fiction. The game is completed and the trophies distributed long before the public knows what has happened. ~ Thomas Wolfe

And out of mind as soon as out of sight. ~ Fulke Greville

Hard-hearted minds relent and rigor's tears abound,
And envy strangely rues his end, in whom no fault was found.
Knowledge her light hath lost, valor hath slain her knight,
Sidney is dead, dead is my friend, dead is the world's delight. ~ Fulke Greville

  • 2 Zarbon 03:46, 1 July 2008 (UTC)
  • 2 Kalki 19:07, 2 October 2008 (UTC)
  • 3 InvisibleSun 20:18, 2 October 2008 (UTC)
  • 3 N6n 14:31, 15 September 2010 (UTC)

We that are bound by vows and by promotion,
With pomp of holy sacrifice and rites,
To teach belief in good and still devotion,
To preach of heaven's wonders and delights—
Yet, when each of us in his own heart looks,
He finds the God there far unlike his books. ~ Fulke Greville

  • 3 Zarbon 03:46, 1 July 2008 (UTC)
  • 2 Kalki 21:42, 2 October 2009 (UTC) * 3 Kalki 19:07, 2 October 2008 (UTC)
  • 3 InvisibleSun 20:18, 2 October 2008 (UTC)
  • 3 N6n 14:31, 15 September 2010 (UTC)

It is only requisite for me to add that the doctrines which I commenced to preach some seven years since are as firmly believed by me as ever; and through persecutions have attended, and the rage and malice of men been heaped upon me, I feel equally as firm in the great and glorious cause as when first I received my mission from the holy messenger. ~ Oliver Cowdery

I am at heart a propagandist, a tremendous hater, a tiresome nag, complacently positive that there is no human problem which could not be solved if people would simply do as I advise. ~ Gore Vidal

  • 3 Kalki 08:29, 2 October 2009 (UTC)
  • 2 Zarbon 13:08, 2 October 2009 (UTC)
  • 3 N6n 14:31, 15 September 2010 (UTC)

The corporate grip on opinion in the United States is one of the wonders of the Western World. No First World country has ever managed to eliminate so entirely from its media all objectivity — much less dissent. ~ Gore Vidal

  • 3 Kalki 09:09, 2 October 2009 (UTC)
  • 2 Zarbon 13:08, 2 October 2009 (UTC)
  • 3 N6n 14:31, 15 September 2010 (UTC)
What Christ is saying always, what he never swerves from saying, what he says a thousand times and in a thousand different ways, but always with a central unity of belief, is this: "I am my Father’s son, and you are my brothers." And the unity that binds us all together, that makes this earth a family, and all men brothers and the sons of God, is love.
~ Thomas Wolfe ~
  • I first am nature's subject, then my prince's;
    I will not serve to innocency's ruine.
    Whose heaven is earth, let them beleeve in princes;
    My God is not the God of subtile murther. ~ Fulke Greville, 1st Baron Brooke


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