Wikiquote:Quote of the day/October 2017

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October 1

Virtue is not a mushroom, that springeth up of itself in one night when we are asleep, or regard it not; but a delicate plant, that groweth slowly and tenderly, needing much pains to cultivate it, much care to guard it, much time to mature it, in our untoward soil, in this world's unkindly weather.

~ Isaac Barrow ~

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October 2

There is a point of no return, unremarked at the time, in most lives.

~ Graham Greene ~

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October 3

Once a country is habituated to liars, it takes generations to bring the truth back.

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October 4

Yeah, it's over before you know it.
It all goes by so fast.
And bad nights last forever
And the good nights don't ever seem to last.
And man, we never had the real thing,
But sometimes we used to kiss
Back when we didn't understand
What we were caught up in.

Wherever you are tonight
I wish you the best of everything, in the world,
And I hope you found
Whatever you were looking for.

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October 5

Watch out for the fellow who talks about putting things in order! Putting things in order always means getting other people under your control.

~ Denis Diderot ~

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October 6

Perhaps … I should adopt a more positive outlook and try to make the best of what remains of my day. After all, what can we ever gain in forever looking back and blaming ourselves if our lives have not turned out quite as we might have wished? The hard reality is, surely, that for the likes of you and I, there is little choice other than to leave our fate, ultimately, in the hands of those great gentlemen at the hub of this world who employ our services. What is the point in worrying oneself too much about what one could or could not have done to control the course one’s life took? Surely it is enough that the likes of you and I at least try to make our small contribution count for something true and worthy. And if some of us are prepared to sacrifice much in life in order to pursue such aspirations, surely that is in itself, whatever the outcome, cause for pride and contentment.

~ Kazuo Ishiguro ~

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October 7

The belief of some governments that nuclear weapons are a legitimate and essential source of security is not only misguided, but also dangerous, for it incites proliferation and undermines disarmament. All nations should reject these weapons completely — before they are ever used again.
This is a time of great global tension, when fiery rhetoric could all too easily lead us, inexorably, to unspeakable horror. The specter of nuclear conflict looms large once more. If ever there were a moment for nations to declare their unequivocal opposition to nuclear weapons, that moment is now.

~ ICAN ~

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October 8

Bless the Maker and all His Water.
Bless the coming and going of Him,
May His passing cleanse the world.
May He keep the world for his people.

~ Frank Herbert ~
in
~ Dune ~

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October 9

You say you want a revolution,
Well, you know, we all want to change the world...
But when you talk about destruction,
Don't you know that you can count me out.

~ John Lennon ~

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October 10

When small men begin to cast big shadows, it means that the sun is about to set.

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October 11

In order to rally people, governments need enemies. They want us to be afraid, to hate, so we will rally behind them. And if they do not have a real enemy, they will invent one in order to mobilize us.

~ Thích Nhất Hạnh ~

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October 12

File:Burning synagogue on Kristallnacht.jpg

Modern morality and manners suppress all natural instincts, keep people ignorant of the facts of nature and make them fighting drunk on bogey tales. … Knowing nothing and fearing everything, they rant and rave and riot like so many maniacs. The subject does not matter. Any idea which gives them an excuse of getting excited will serve. They look for a victim to chivy, and howl him down, and finally lynch him in a sheer storm of sexual frenzy which they honestly imagine to be moral indignation, patriotic passion or some equally avowable emotion.

~ Aleister Crowley ~

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October 13

In any given society the Remnant are always so largely an unknown quantity. You do not know, and will never know, more than two things about them. You can be sure of those — dead sure, as our phrase is — but you will never be able to make even a respectable guess at anything else. You do not know, and will never know, who the Remnant are, nor what they are doing or will do. Two things you do know, and no more: First, that they exist; second, that they will find you. Except for these two certainties, working for the Remnant means working in impenetrable darkness; and this, I should say, is just the condition calculated most effectively to pique the interest of any prophet who is properly gifted with the imagination, insight and intellectual curiosity necessary to a successful pursuit of his trade.

~ Albert Jay Nock ~

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October 14

No people on earth can be held, as a people, to be an enemy, for all humanity shares the common hunger for peace and fellowship and justice. … No nation's security and well-being can be lastingly achieved in isolation but only in effective cooperation with fellow-nations. … Every gun that is made, every warship launched, every rocket fired signifies, in the final sense, a theft from those who hunger and are not fed, those who are cold and are not clothed. This world in arms is not spending money alone. It is spending the sweat of its laborers, the genius of its scientists, the hopes of its children.

~ Dwight D. Eisenhower ~

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October 15

Politics is not the art of the possible. It consists in choosing between the disastrous and the unpalatable.

~ John Kenneth Galbraith ~

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October 16

As nightfall does not come all at once, neither does oppression. In both instances, there is a twilight when everything remains seemingly unchanged. And it is in such twilight that we all must be most aware of change in the air — however slight — lest we become unwitting victims of the darkness.

~ William O. Douglas ~

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October 17

The Crucible became by far my most frequently produced play, both abroad and at home. Its meaning is somewhat different in different places and moments. I can almost tell what the political situation in a country is when the play is suddenly a hit there — it is either a warning of tyranny on the way or a reminder of tyranny just past.

~ Arthur Miller ~

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October 18

A country, after all, is not something you build as the pharaohs built the pyramids, and then leave standing there to defy eternity. A country is something that is built every day out of certain basic shared values.

~ Pierre Trudeau ~

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October 19

The same people who can deny others everything are famous for refusing themselves nothing.

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October 20

I'm watching the water
Watching the coast
Suddenly I know
What I want the most

And I want to tell you
Still I hold back
I need some time
Get my life on track.

I know that look on your face
But there's somethin' lucky about this place
And there's somethin' good comin'
For you and me
Somethin' good comin'
There has to be.

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October 21

The poet, described in ideal perfection, brings the whole soul of man into activity, with the subordination of its faculties to each other according to their relative worth and dignity. He diffuses a tone and spirit of unity, that blends, and (as it were) fuses, each into each, by that synthetic and magical power, to which I would exclusively appropriate the name of Imagination.

~ Samuel Taylor Coleridge ~

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October 22

What matters most is that we learn from living.

~ Doris Lessing ~

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October 23

We must daily decide whether the threats we face are real, whether the solutions we are offered will do any good, whether the problems we're told exist are in fact real problems, or non-problems. Every one of us has a sense of the world, and we all know that this sense is in part given to us by what other people and society tell us; in part generated by our emotional state, which we project outward; and in part by our genuine perceptions of reality. In short, our struggle to determine what is true is the struggle to decide which of our perceptions are genuine, and which are false because they are handed down, or sold to us, or generated by our own hopes and fears.

~ Michael Crichton ~

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October 24

Perform anonymous service. Whenever we do good for others anonymously, our sense of intrinsic worth and self-respect increases. … Selfless service has always been one of the most powerful methods of influence.

~ Stephen Covey ~

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October 25

The Bill of Rights was not written to protect governments from trouble. It was written precisely to give the people the constitutional means to cause trouble for governments they no longer trusted.

~ Henry Steele Commager ~

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October 26

Ophelia was a cyclone, tempest
a god damned hurricane
your common sense
your best defense
lay wasted and in vain.

~ Natalie Merchant ~

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October 27

We stand equally against government by a plutocracy and government by a mob. There is something to be said for government by a great aristocracy which has furnished leaders to the nation in peace and war for generations; even a democrat like myself must admit this. But there is absolutely nothing to be said for government by a plutocracy, for government by men very powerful in certain lines and gifted with "the money touch," but with ideals which in their essence are merely those of so many glorified pawnbrokers.

~ Theodore Roosevelt ~

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October 28

You made me cry,
when you said goodbye
Ain't that a shame
My tears fell like rain
Ain't that a shame
You're the one to blame

~ Fats Domino ~

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October 29

The American public highly overrates its sense of humor. We're great belly laughers and prat fallers, but we never really did have a real sense of humor. Not satire anyway. … When we realize finally that we aren't God's given children, we'll understand satire. Humor is really laughing off a hurt, grinning at misery.

~ Bill Mauldin ~

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October 30

There is nothing which I dread so much as a division of the republic into two great parties, each arranged under its leader, and concerting measures in opposition to each other. This, in my humble apprehension, is to be dreaded as the greatest political evil under our Constitution.

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October 31

I was something that lay under the sun and felt it, like the pumpkins, and I did not want to be anything more. I was entirely happy. Perhaps we feel like that when we die and become a part of something entire, whether it is sun and air, or goodness and knowledge. At any rate, that is happiness; to be dissolved into something complete and great.

~ Willa Cather ~

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Today is Saturday, December 21, 2024; it is now 12:05 (UTC)

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