Wikiquote:Quote of the day/January 2025

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Today is Wednesday, February 19, 2025; it is now 13:41 (UTC)


January 1
 
Romance only dies with life. No pair of pincers will ever pull it out of us. But there is a spurious sentiment which cannot resist the unexpected and the incongruous and the grotesque. A touch will loosen it, and the sooner it goes from us the better.
~ E. M. Forster‎‎ ~
 

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January 2
 
My crime is that I have never labored to make myself popular — I admit that much — and I have paid too little attention to fools who are old enough to be senile but young enough to have power.
~ Isaac Asimov ~
 

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January 3
 
Gratitude is not only the greatest of virtues, but the parent of all others.
~ Cicero ~
 

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January 4
 
Once upon a time Phaethon, the son of Helios, having yoked the steeds in his father's chariot, because he was not able to drive them in the path of his father, burnt up all that was upon the earth, and was himself destroyed by a thunderbolt. Now this has the form of a myth, but really signifies a declination of the bodies moving in the heavens around the earth, and a great conflagration of things upon the earth, which recurs after long intervals.
~ Plato ~
 

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January 5
 
A story is not finished, until it has taken the worst turn.
~ Friedrich Dürrenmatt ~
 

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January 6
 
This is an attack on our democracy, our way of life, and not just by the criminals who assaulted our Congress today.  The good news is our Constitution is strong, and our people are overwhelmingly devoted to the rule of law.  What we need to do going forward — what we have to do as a people — not as Democrats, or Republicans, or independents, but as Americans, is to ask ourselves how did we ever get to this place.  We need to look infinitely harder at who we elect to any office in our land.  At the office seeker's character, at their morals, at their ethical record, their integrity, their honesty, their flaws, what they have said about women, and minorities, why they are seeking office in the first place, and only then consider the policies they espouse.
~ John F. Kelly ~
 

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January 7
 
We have familiar experience of the order, the constancy, the perpetual renovation of the material world which surrounds us. Frail and transitory as is every part of it, restless and migratory as are its elements, still it abides. It is bound together by a law of permanence, and though it is ever dying, it is ever coming to life again. Dissolution does but give birth to fresh modes of organization, and one death is the parent of a thousand lives. Each hour, as it comes, is but a testimony how fleeting, yet how secure, how certain, is the great whole.
~ William Peter Blatty ~
 

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January 8
 
We are defined by how we use our power.
Power often stands in the way of learning. Wisdom revealed by simple lessons is hard to see for leaders wearing the blinders of power. But we, too, have choices. We can relieve much of the suffering in this world and promote the potential of the species, or we can horde our power and exercise it for our own aggrandizement.
~ Gerry Spence ~
 

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January 9
 
The only way to achieve a practical, liveable peace in a world of competing nations is to take the profit out of war.
~ Richard Nixon ~
 

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January 10
 
Honesty and truth-teller were synonymous with the name Jimmy Carter.
Those traits were instilled in him by his loving parents Lillian and Earl Carter and the strength of his honesty was was reinforced by his upbringing in the rural South poised on the brink of social transformation. He displayed that honesty throughout his life as a naval officer, state legislator, governor, president, and world leader.
For Jimmy Carter, honesty was was not a aspirational goal — it was part of his very soul.
~ Gerald Ford ~
 

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January 11
 
A strong nation, like a strong person, can afford to be gentle, firm, thoughtful, and restrained. It can afford to extend a helping hand to others. It's a weak nation, like a weak person, that must behave with bluster and boasting and rashness and other signs of insecurity.
~ Jimmy Carter ~
 

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January 12
 
This life is short, the vanities of the world are transient, but they alone live who live for others, the rest are more dead than alive.
~ Swami Vivekananda ~
 

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January 13
 
And as she lookt about, she did behold,
How over that same dore was likewise writ,
Be bold, be bold, and every where Be bold,
That much she muz'd, yet could not construe it
By any ridling skill, or commune wit.
At last she spyde at that same roomes upper end,
Another yron dore, on which was writ,
Be not too bold.
~ Edmund Spenser ~
 

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January 14
 
Very little of the great cruelty shown by men can really be attributed to cruel instinct. Most of it comes from thoughtlessness or inherited habit. The roots of cruelty, therefore, are not so much strong as widespread. But the time must come when inhumanity protected by custom and thoughtlessness will succumb before humanity championed by thought. Let us work that this time may come.
~ Albert Schweitzer ~
 

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January 15
 
In 2020, then-President Donald J. Trump ran for reelection against Joseph R. Biden, Jr. Mr. Trump lost. As alleged in the original and superseding indictments, substantial evidence demonstrates that Mr. Trump then engaged in an unprecedented criminal effort to overturn the legitimate results of the election in order to retain power.
~ Jack Smith ~
 

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January 16
 
Early in life, as a witness to the limitless tragedy of World War I, I felt grow in me a determination to act, to work with others to influence the course of history and not supinely to accept what, in the absence of will and action, might be the world's fate. … For almost five decades I have played some role in the affairs of state, working with others to bend what otherwise might have been called the "inevitable trends of history."
Some of the outcomes were wholly satisfactory, some marginally successful, and some were failures — but, on the whole, they were better, I think, than would otherwise have come about.
~ Paul Nitze ~
 

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January 17
 
Sell not virtue to purchase wealth, nor Liberty to purchase power.
~ Benjamin Franklin ~
 

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January 18
 
I'm not always good with words. Some people are poets and have a beautiful way of saying things with words. But cinema is its own language. And with it you can say so many things, because you've got time and sequences. You've got dialogue. You've got music. You've got sound effects. You have so many tools. And so you can express a feeling and a thought that can't be conveyed any other way. It's a magical medium.
~ David Lynch ~
 

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January 19
 
I want to warn the country of some things that give me great concern. … and that's the dangerous concentration of power in the hands of very few ultra-wealthy people, and the dangerous consequences if their abuse of power is left unchecked.
Today, an oligarchy is taking shape in America of extreme wealth, power, and influence that literally threatens our entire democracy, our basic rights and freedoms, and a fair shot for everyone to get ahead.
We see the consequences all across America. And we've seen it before, more than a century ago. But the American people stood up to the robber barons back then and busted the trusts.
They didn't punish the wealthy. They just made the wealthy … play by the rules everybody else had to.
~ Joe Biden ~
 

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January 20
 
We will make America powerful again.
We will make America wealthy again.
We will make America strong again.
We will make America proud again.
We will make America safe again.
We will make America great again!
~ Donald Trump ~
 

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January 21
 
Princes may make laws and repeal them, but they can neither make nor destroy virtue, and how indeed should they be able to do what is impossible to the Deity himself? Virtue being as immutable in its nature as the divine will which is the ground of it.
~ Ethan Allen ~
 

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January 22
 
A man that hath no virtue in himself, ever envieth virtue in others. For men's minds, will either feed upon their own good, or upon others' evil; and who wanteth the one, will prey upon the other; and whoso is out of hope, to attain to another's virtue, will seek to come at even hand, by depressing another's fortune.
~ Francis Bacon ~
in
~ Essayes or Counsels, Civill and Morall ~
 

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January 23
 
Objective evidence is the ultimate authority. Recorders may lie, but Nature is incapable of it.
~ Walter M. Miller, Jr. ~
 

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January 24
 
I'm the innocent bystander
Somehow I got stuck
Between the rock and the hard place
And I'm down on my luck
~ Warren Zevon ~
 

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January 25
 
No passion is stronger in the breast of man than the desire to make others believe as he believes. Nothing so cuts at the root of his happiness and fills him with rage as the sense that another rates low what he prizes high. Whigs and Tories, Liberal party and Labour party — for what do they battle except their own prestige? It is not the love of truth, but desire to prevail that sets quarter against quarter and makes parish desire the downfall of parish. Each seeks peace of mind and subserviency rather than the triumph of truth and exaltation of virtue — But these moralities belong, and should be left to the historian, since they are as dull as ditch water.
~ Virginia Woolf ~
in
~ Orlando: A Biography ~
 

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January 26
 
Being on President Nixon's enemies list was the highest single honor I've ever received.
~ Paul Newman ~
 

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January 27
 
"Thinking again?" the Duchess asked, with another dig of her sharp little chin.
"I've a right to think," said Alice sharply, for she was beginning to feel a little worried.
"Just about as much right," said the Duchess, "as pigs have to fly."
~ Lewis Carroll ~
in
~ Alice's Adventures in Wonderland ~
 

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January 28
 
Mankind is composed of two sorts of men — those who love and create, and those who hate and destroy.
~ José Martí ~
 

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January 29
 
Advances in AI are making it easier to spread false or inauthentic information across the internet — and harder to detect it. At the same time, nations are engaging in cross-border efforts to use disinformation and other forms of propaganda to subvert elections, while some technology, media, and political leaders aid the spread of lies and conspiracy theories. This corruption of the information ecosystem undermines the public discourse and honest debate upon which democracy depends. The battered information landscape is also producing leaders who discount science and endeavor to suppress free speech and human rights, compromising the fact-based public discussions that are required to combat the enormous threats facing the world.
Blindly continuing on the current path is a form of madness.
~ Bulletin of the Atomic Scientists ~
 

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January 30
 
Would an alien outsider judge America's performance by My Lai and Wounded Knee or by Lincoln and Jefferson?
~ Gregory Benford ~
 

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January 31
 
Revolutions are the periods of history when individuals count most.
~ Norman Mailer ~
 

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Today is Wednesday, February 19, 2025; it is now 13:41 (UTC)