Wikiquote:Quote of the day/February 2021

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Today is Wednesday, April 24, 2024; it is now 10:16 (UTC)

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February 1

A literature that is alive does not live by yesterday's clock, nor by today's but by tomorrow's.

~ Yevgeny Zamyatin ~

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February 2

You can't plan a day like today.

~ Groundhog Day ~

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February 3

The needs of a human being are sacred. Their satisfaction cannot be subordinated either to reasons of state, or to any consideration of money, nationality, race, or colour, or to the moral or other value attributed to the human being in question, or to any consideration whatsoever.
There is no legitimate limit to the satisfaction of the needs of a human being except as imposed by necessity and by the needs of other human beings.

~ Simone Weil ~

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February 4

Life is like a landscape. You live in the midst of it but can describe it only from the vantage point of distance.

~ Charles Lindbergh ~

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February 5

In matters of national security emotion is no substitute for intelligence, nor rigidity for prudence. To act coolly, intelligently and prudently in perilous circumstances is the test of a man — and also a nation.

~ Adlai Stevenson II ~

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February 6

I've seen what men can do for each other and do to each other. I've seen war and peace, feast and famine, depression and prosperity, sickness and health. I've seen the depths of suffering and the peaks of triumph. And I know in my heart that man is good, that what is right will always eventually triumph, and that there is purpose and worth to each and every life.

~ Ronald Reagan ~

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February 7

Charity begins at home, and justice begins next door.

~ Charles Dickens ~
in
~ The Life and Adventures of Martin Chuzzlewit ~

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February 8

The world is not divine sport, it is divine destiny. There is divine meaning in the life of the world, of man, of human persons, of you and of me.
Creation happens to us, burns itself into us, recasts us in burning — we tremble and are faint, we submit. We take part in creation, meet the Creator, reach out to Him, helpers and companions.

~ Martin Buber ~

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February 9

When my mother was dying in the hospital, he thought, when she knew her end was coming, it was not me she looked to but someone who stood behind me: her mother or the ghost of her mother. To me she was a woman but to herself she was still a child calling to her mother to hold her hand and help her. And her own mother, in the secret life we do not see, was a child too. I come from a line of children without end.

~ J. M. Coetzee ~

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February 10

What is laid down, ordered, factual is never enough to embrace the whole truth: life always spills over the rim of every cup.

~ Boris Pasternak ~

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February 11

In order to succeed it is not necessary to be much cleverer than other people. All you have to do is be one day ahead of them.

~ Leó Szilárd ~

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February 12

Our popular Government has often been called an experiment. Two points in it our people have already settled — the successful establishing and the successful administering of it. One still remains — its successful maintenance against a formidable internal attempt to overthrow it. It is now for them to demonstrate to the world that those who can fairly carry an election can also suppress a rebellion; that ballots are the rightful and peaceful successors of bullets, and that when ballots have fairly and constitutionally decided there can be no successful appeal back to bullets; that there can be no successful appeal except to ballots themselves at succeeding elections. Such will be a great lesson of peace, teaching men that what they can not take by an election neither can they take it by a war; teaching all the folly of being the beginners of a war.

~ Abraham Lincoln ~

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February 13

The wrongs which we seek to condemn and punish have been so calculated, so malignant, and so devastating, that civilization cannot tolerate their being ignored, because it cannot survive their being repeated.

~ Robert H. Jackson ~

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February 14

Love is blind, and lovers cannot see
The pretty follies that themselves commit.

~ William Shakespeare ~
in
~ The Merchant of Venice ~

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February 15

America has furnished to the world the character of Washington! And if our American institutions had done nothing else, that alone would have entitled them to the respect of mankind.

~ Daniel Webster ~

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February 16

Modern politics is, at bottom, a struggle not of men but of forces. The men become every year more and more creatures of force, massed about central power-houses. The conflict is no longer between the men, but between the motors that drive the men, and the men tend to succumb to their own motive forces.

~ Henry Adams ~

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February 17

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 ~

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February 18

You know, I have a philosophy there’s good that happens in everything.
It may not reveal itself immediately, and even in the most dire circumstances, if you just wait, if you just remain open to things, the good in it will reveal itself. And that has happened to me as well in countless, countless ways.

~ Rush Limbaugh‎‎ ~

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February 19

Love is always before you. Love it.

~ André Breton ~

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February 20

It is a secret but I have pulled the chain out of the wall. I can see out the little window all I like.

~ Richard Matheson ~

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February 21

The intolerant can be viewed as free-riders, as persons who seek the advantages of just institutions while not doing their share to uphold them.

~ John Rawls ~

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February 22

Democratical States must always feel before they can see: it is this that makes their Governments slow, but the people will be right at last.

~ George Washington ~

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February 23

The cost of liberty is less than the price of repression.

~ W. E. B. Du Bois ~

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February 24

Whoever, in the present juncture of our affairs, can proclaim his entire political creed as frankly in Charleston as in Boston, can do it only because he has stricken from the list our distinctive national principle, without which we are not Americans at all — the natural equal rights of men. If Washington or Jefferson or Madison should utter upon his native soil today the opinions he entertained and expressed upon this question, he would be denounced as a fanatical abolitionist. To declare the right of all men to liberty is sectional, because slavery is afraid of liberty and strikes the mouth that speaks the word.

~ George William Curtis ~

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February 25

Military people have a heavy investment in rules against torture, not only because we want to protect our own POWs from reciprocal brutalities… but also because war is so terrible that it desperately requires any limits anyone can agree on, any gesture toward dignity, any mitigation suggesting civilized scruple. There isn’t even persuasive evidence that torture makes its victims tell their secrets, instead of saying whatever we want to hear.

~ John Leonard ~

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February 26

Civil war? What does this mean? Is there any foreign war? Is not every war between men, war between brothers? War is modified only by its aim. There is neither foreign war, nor civil war; there is only unjust war and just war.

~ Victor Hugo ~
in
~ Les Misérables ~

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February 27

Time is the only critic without ambition.

~ John Steinbeck ~

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February 28

Wherever your life ends, it is all there. The utility of living consists not in the length of days, but in the use of time; a man may have lived long, and yet lived but a little. Make use of time while it is present with you. It depends upon your will, and not upon the number of days, to have a sufficient length of life. Is it possible you can imagine never to arrive at the place towards which you are continually going? and yet there is no journey but hath its end. And, if company will make it more pleasant or more easy to you, does not all the world go the self-same way?

~ Michel de Montaigne ~

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Today is Wednesday, April 24, 2024; it is now 10:16 (UTC)