Wikiquote:Quote of the day/August 2014

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August 1

Nobody had more class than Melville. To do what he did in Moby-Dick, to tell a story and to risk putting so much material into it. If you could weigh a book, I don’t know any book that would be more full. It’s more full than War and Peace or The Brothers Karamazov. It has Saint Elmo’s fire, and great whales, and grand arguments between heroes, and secret passions. It risks wandering far, far out into the globe. Melville took on the whole world, saw it all in a vision, and risked everything in prose that sings. You have a sense from the very beginning that Melville had a vision in his mind of what this book was going to look like, and he trusted himself to follow it through all the way.

~ Ken Kesey ~

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August 2

We have heard much of Faraday's gentleness and sweetness and tenderness. It is all true, but it is very incomplete. You cannot resolve a powerful nature into these elements, and Faraday's character would have been less admirable than it was had it not embraced forces and tendencies to which the silky adjectives "gentle" and "tender" would by no means apply. Underneath his sweetness and gentleness was the heat of a volcano. He was a man of excitable and fiery nature; but through high self-discipline he had converted the fire into a central glow and motive power of life, instead of permitting it to waste itself in useless passion. "He that is slow to anger" saith the sage, "is greater than the mighty, and he that ruleth his own spirit than he that taketh a city." Faraday was not slow to anger, but he completely ruled his own spirit, and thus, though he took no cities, he captivated all hearts.

~ John Tyndall ~

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August 3

There was a world of mutants, men and women who were more than normal men and women, persons who had certain human talents and certain human understandings which the normal men and women of the world had never known, or having known, could not utilize in their entirety, unable to use intelligently all the mighty powers which lay dormant in their brains.

~ Clifford D. Simak ~

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August 4

We do not have to think that human nature is perfect for us to still believe that the human condition can be perfected. We do not have to live in an idealized world to still reach for those ideals that will make it a better place. The non-violence practiced by men like Gandhi and King may not have been practical or possible in every circumstance, but the love that they preached — their fundamental faith in human progress — that must always be the North Star that guides us on our journey.
For if we lose that faith — if we dismiss it as silly or naïve; if we divorce it from the decisions that we make on issues of war and peace — then we lose what's best about humanity. We lose our sense of possibility. We lose our moral compass.

~ Barack Obama ~

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August 5

If we are serious about peace, then we must work for it as ardently, seriously, continuously, carefully, and bravely as we have ever prepared for war.

~ Wendell Berry ~

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August 6

The Holy Thing is here again
Among us, brother, fast thou too and pray,
And tell thy brother knights to fast and pray,
That so perchance the vision may be seen
By thee and those, and all the world be healed.

~ Alfred, Lord Tennyson ~
in
~ Idylls of the King ~

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August 7

If the government can round up someone and never be required to explain why, then it's no longer the United States of America as you and I always understood it. Our enemies have succeeded beyond their wildest dreams. They have made us become like them.

~ Garrison Keillor ~

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August 8

Most people understand the need for neutrality. The real struggle is not between the right and the left — that's where most people assume — but it's between the party of the thoughtful and the party of the jerks. And no side of the political spectrum has a monopoly on either of those qualities.

~ Jimmy Wales ~

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August 9

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 ~

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August 10

Words without actions are the assassins of idealism.

~ Herbert Hoover ~

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August 11

I have made up my mind that if there is a God,
he will be merciful to the merciful.
Upon that rock I stand.

That he will not torture the forgiving.
Upon that rock I stand.

That every man should be true to himself,
and that there is no world, no star, in which honesty is a crime.
Upon that rock I stand.

The honest man, the good woman, the happy child, have nothing to fear,
either in this world or the world to come.
Upon that rock I stand.

~ Robert G. Ingersoll ~

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August 12

Comedy can be a cathartic way to deal with personal trauma.

~ Robin Williams ~

Although I think that life may be the result of an accident, I do not think that of consciousness. Consciousness cannot be accounted for in physical terms. For consciousness is absolutely fundamental. It cannot be accounted for in terms of anything else.

~ Erwin Schrödinger ~

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August 13

Spiritual evolution is the progressive advance of mankind toward a state of things in which the light of ethical perfection shall be reflected from the face of human society; that is, in which all men shall live and move and have their being in mutually promoting the highest life of each and all. It means that the object of social reformation shall not be a mere change in the conditions under which men live, but a change in human nature itself. It means that we shall look forward consciously to the breaking forth of new powers in ourselves, to the release, through our own efforts, of capacities dimly latent in us.

~ Felix Adler ~

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August 14

It isn't enough to love people because they're good to you, or because in some way or other you're going to get something by it. We have to love because we love loving.

~ John Galsworthy ~

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August 15

The Flag links up the past and the present. It is the legacy bequeathed to us by the architects of our liberty. … The world is full of misunderstandings, suspicions and distrusts. In these difficult days it depends on us under what banner we fight. Here we are Putting in the very centre the white, the white of the Sun's rays. The white means the path of light … the ideal light, the light of truth … The Asoka's wheel represents to us the wheel of the Law, the wheel Dharma. Truth can be gained only by the pursuit of the path of Dharma, by the practice of virtue. ...the orange, the Bhagwa colour, represents the spirit of renunciation. All forms of renunciation are to be embodied in Raja Dharma. … Our leaders must be disinterested. They must be dedicated spirits … The green is there, our relation to the soil, our relation to the plant life here, on which all other life depends. We must build our Paradise, here on this green earth... This flag tells us "Be ever alert, be ever on the move, go forward, work for a free, flexible, compassionate, decent, democratic society in which Christians, Sikhs, Muslims, Hindus, Buddhists will all find a safe shelter." Let us all unite under this banner and rededicate ourselves to the ideas our flag symbolizes.

~ Sarvepalli Radhakrishnan ~

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August 16

That man is good who does good to others; if he suffers on account of the good he does, he is very good; if he suffers at the hands of those to whom he has done good, then his goodness is so great that it could be enhanced only by greater sufferings; and if he should die at their hands, his virtue can go no further: it is heroic, it is perfect.

~ Jean de La Bruyère ~

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August 17

The idea of global unity is not new, but the absolute necessity of it has only just arrived, like a sudden radical alteration of the sun, and we shall have to adapt or disappear. If the nations are ever to make a working synthesis of their ferocious contradictions, the plan will be created in spirit before it can be formulated or accepted in political fact. And it is in poetry that we can refresh our hope that such a unity is occupying people's imaginations everywhere, since poetry is the voice of spirit and imagination and all that is potential, as well as of the healing benevolence that used to be the privilege of the gods.

~ Ted Hughes ~

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August 18

Whatever creativity is, it is in part a solution to a problem.

~ Brian Aldiss ~

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August 19

Peace is never long preserved by weight of metal or by an armament race. Peace can be made tranquil and secure only by understanding and agreement fortified by sanctions. We must embrace international cooperation or international disintegration. Science has taught us how to put the atom to work. But to make it work for good instead of for evil lies in the domain dealing with the principles of human dignity. We are now facing a problem more of ethics than of physics.

~ Bernard Baruch ~

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August 20

Isn't life the strangest thing you've ever seen?

~ Patricia Rozema ~

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August 21

I like to play any character that allows me the freedom to explore it and teach the audience something they didn't know, and show them a journey they identify with... or be inspired, or moved. Anything that touches someone's heart is important for me.

~ Alicia Witt ~

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August 22

At the center of religion is love. I love you and I forgive you. I am like you and you are like me. I love all people. I love the world. I love creating. Everything in our life should be based on love.

~ Ray Bradbury ~

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August 23

We are the Choice of the Will: God, when He gave the word
That called us into line, set in our hand a sword;
Set us a sword to wield none else could lift and draw,
And bade us forth to the sound of the trumpet of the Law.

~ William Ernest Henley ~

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August 24

The term "just war" contains an internal contradiction. War is inherently unjust, and the great challenge of our time is how to deal with evil, tyranny, and oppression without killing huge numbers of people.

~ Howard Zinn ~

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August 25

Is there any good reason why we cannot extend our multi-cultural generosity to include another dimension? That of time. The past, too, is another country. Its ghosts may look strange and frightening and slightly misshapen in body and mind, but all the more reason then, to welcome them to our shores.

~ Martin Amis ~

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August 26

If you judge people, you have no time to love them.

~ Mother Teresa ~

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August 27

Instead of insight, maybe all a man gets is strength to wander for a while. Maybe the only gift is a chance to inquire, to know nothing for certain. An inheritance of wonder and nothing more.

~ William Least Heat-Moon ~

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August 28

I have a dream that one day this nation will rise up and live out the true meaning of its creed: "We hold these truths to be self-evident: that all men are created equal." I have a dream that one day on the red hills of Georgia the sons of former slaves and the sons of former slave-owners will be able to sit down together at a table of brotherhood. I have a dream that one day even the state of Mississippi, a state, sweltering with the heat of injustice, sweltering with the heat of oppression, will be transformed into an oasis of freedom and justice. I have a dream that my four little children will one day live in a nation where they will not be judged by the color of their skin but by the content of their character. I have a dream today.

~ Martin Luther King, Jr. ~

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August 29

There is reason to think, that, if men were better instructed themselves, they would be less imposing on others.

~ John Locke ~

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August 30

I happen to have a talent for allocating capital. But my ability to use that talent is completely dependent on the society I was born into. If I’d been born into a tribe of hunters, this talent of mine would be pretty worthless. I can’t run very fast. I’m not particularly strong. I’d probably end up as some wild animal’s dinner.
But I was lucky enough to be born in a time and place where society values my talent, and gave me a good education to develop that talent, and set up the laws and the financial system to let me do what I love doing — and make a lot of money doing it. The least I can do is help pay for all that.

~ Warren Buffett ~

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August 31

I can't hate for long. It isn't worth it.

~ William Saroyan ~

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Today is Thursday, November 21, 2024; it is now 08:29 (UTC)