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August 17

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Quotes of the day from previous years:

2003
I don't mind making jokes, but I don't want to look like one. ~ Marilyn Monroe
2004
Life is a mystery to be lived, not a problem to be solved. ~ Søren Kierkegaard
2005
Be sure that you are right, and then go ahead. ~ Davy Crockett (born 17 August 1786)
2006
One isn't born one's self. One is born with a mass of expectations, a mass of other people's ideas — and you have to work through it all. ~ V. S. Naipaul
2007
I have always supported measures and principles and not men. I have acted fearless and independent and I never will regret my course. I would rather be politically buried than to be hypocritically immortalized. ~ Davy Crockett
2008
Everything of value about me is in my books. Whatever extra there is in me at any given moment isn't fully formed. I am hardly aware of it; it awaits the next book. It will — with luck — come to me during the actual writing, and it will take me by surprise. That element of surprise is what I look for when I am writing. ~ V. S. Naipaul
2009
To this day, if you ask me how I became a writer, I cannot give you an answer. To this day, if you ask me how a book is written, I cannot answer. For long periods, if I didn't know that somehow in the past I had written a book, I would have given up. ~ V. S. Naipaul (born August 17, 1932)
2010
Most of authors seek fame, but I seek for justice — a holier impulse than ever entered into the ambitious struggles of the votaries of that fickle, flirting goddess. ~ Davy Crockett
2011
I have never knew what it was to sacrifice my own judgment to gratify any party and I have no doubt of the time being close at hand when I will be rewarded for letting my tongue speak what my heart thinks. I have suffered myself to be politically sacrificed to save my country from ruin and disgrace and if I am never again elected I will have the gratification to know that I have done my duty. ~ Davy Crockett
2012
The Iron Man came to the top of the cliff. How far had he walked? Nobody knows. Where did he come from? Nobody knows. How was he made? Nobody knows. Taller than a house the Iron Man stood at the top of the cliff, at the very brink, in the darkness.
~ Ted Hughes ~
2013
Life doesn't have a neat beginning and a tidy end, life is always going on. You should begin in the middle and end in the middle, and it should be all there.
~ V. S. Naipaul ~
2014
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 ~
2015
Maybe all poetry, insofar as it moves us and connects with us, is a revealing of something that the writer doesn’t actually want to say but desperately needs to communicate, to be delivered of. Perhaps it’s the need to keep it hidden that makes it poetic — makes it poetry.
~ Ted Hughes ~
2016
We now give more serious weight to the words of a country's poets than to the words of its politicians — though we know the latter may interfere more drastically with our lives. Religions, ideologies, mercantile competition divide us. The essential solidarity of the very diverse poets of the world, besides being mysterious fact is one we can be thankful for, since its terms are exclusively those of love, understanding and patience. It is one of the few spontaneous guarantees of possible unity that mankind can show, and the revival of an appetite for poetry is like a revival of an appetite for all man's saner possibilities, and a revulsion from the materialist cataclysms of recent years and the worse ones which the difference of nations threatens for the years ahead.
~ Ted Hughes ~
2017
I think it’s the shock of every writer’s life when their first book is published. The shock of their lives. One has somehow to adjust from being anonymous, a figure in ambush, working from concealment, to being and working in full public view.
~ Ted Hughes ~
2018
R-E-S-P-E-C-T
Find out what it means to me
~ Aretha Franklin ~
  • proposed by Kalki, in regard to her recent death.
2019
Religion now had to have its compartment, almost its social place.
The frontier had ceased to exist. And the religions it had bred were beginning slowly to die. In the old days, when men, often of little education, had needed only to declare themselves ministers, people would have seen themselves reflected in the expounders of the Word. This quality of homespun would have made the religions appear creations of a community, personal and close and inviolable. Now a certain distance was needed.
~ V. S. Naipaul ~
2020
Poems get to the point where they are stronger than you are. They come up from some other depth and they find a place on the page. You can never find that depth again, that same kind of authority and voice. I might feel I would like to change something about them, but they’re still stronger than I am and I cannot.
~ Ted Hughes ~
2021
Life is a play acted by dying men,
Where, if its heroes seem to foot it well
And go light-tongued without grimace of pain,
Death will be found anon. And who shall tell
Which part was saddest, or in youth or age,
When the tired actor stops and leaves the stage?
~ Wilfrid Scawen Blunt ~
2022
The universal civilization has been a long time in the making. It wasn't always universal; it wasn't always as attractive as it is today. … the beauty of the idea of the pursuit of happiness. Familiar words, easy to take for granted; easy to misconstrue.
This idea of the pursuit of happiness is at the heart of the attractiveness of the civilization to so many outside it or on its periphery. I find it marvelous to contemplate to what an extent, after two centuries, and after the terrible history of the earlier part of this century, the idea has come to a kind of fruition. It is an elastic idea; it fits all men. It implies a certain kind of society, a certain kind of awakened spirit. … So much is contained in it: the idea of the individual, responsibility, choice, the life of the intellect, the idea of vocation and perfectibility and achievement. It is an immense human idea. It cannot be reduced to a fixed system. It cannot generate fanaticism. But it is known to exist, and because of that, other more rigid systems in the end blow away.
~ V. S. Naipaul ~
2023
What matters in the end in literature, what is always there, is the truly good. And — though played out forms can throw up miraculous sports like The Importance of Being Earnest or Decline and Fall — what is good is always what is new, in both form and content. What is good forgets whatever models it might have had, and is unexpected; we have to catch it on the wing.
~ V. S. Naipaul ~
2024
We are expanding the area of active operations. … Hundreds of Russian servicemen have already surrendered, and all of them will receive humane treatment — they did not experience such treatment even in their own Russian army. … And now all of us in Ukraine should act as unitedly and efficiently as we did in the first weeks and months of this war, when Ukraine took the initiative and began to turn the situation to the benefit of our state. … we have proven once again that we, Ukrainians, are capable of achieving our goals in any situation — capable of defending our interests and our independence. And we must make full use of our achievements. And we will. … Special attention is paid to the Kursk region, and thus to the protection of all our border communities nearby. The more the Russian military presence in the border area is destroyed, the closer peace and real security will be for our country. The Russian state must be held accountable for what it has done. And it is.
~ Volodymyr Zelenskyy ~
  • proposed by Kalki; recent remarks on recent situations.
2025
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I have discovered a truly remarkable proof of this theorem that the margin of this page is too small to contain. ~ Pierre de Fermat (b. August 17, 1601)

One always writes comedy at the moment of deepest hysteria. ~ V. S. Naipaul

With the emergence of nuclear-missile weaponry, cybernetics, electronics, and computer equipment, any subjective approach to military problems, hare-brained plans, and superficiality can cause irreparable damage. ~ Matvei Zakharov

Dark to me is the earth. Dark to me are the heavens.
Where is she that I loved, the woman with eyes like stars?
Desolate are the streets. Desolate is the city.
A city taken by storm, where none are left but the slain.
~ Wilfrid Scawen Blunt

We must not permit our respect for the dead or our sympathy for part of the living to lead us into an act of injustice to the balance of the living. ~ Davy Crockett


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