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April 22

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Quotes of the day from previous years:

2004
I still believe, in spite of everything, that people are truly good at heart. ~ Anne Frank
2005
Act only on that maxim which you can at the same time will that it should become a universal law. ~ Immanuel Kant (born 22 April 1724)
2006
I know more than I can express in words, and the little I can express would not have been expressed, had I not known more. ~ Vladimir Nabokov (born 22 April 1899) {10 April O.S.}
2007
It is certainly not then — not in dreams — but when one is wide awake, at moments of robust joy and achievement, on the highest terrace of consciousness, that mortality has a chance to peer beyond its own limits, from the mast, from the past and its castle tower. And although nothing much can be seen through the mist, there is somehow the blissful feeling that one is looking in the right direction. ~ Vladimir Nabokov
2008
There are no passengers on Spaceship Earth. We are all crew. ~ Marshall McLuhan (quote for Earth Day)
2009
The death of dogma is the birth of morality. ~ Immanuel Kant
2010
We have lived by the assumption that what was good for us would be good for the world. We have been wrong. We must change our lives, so that it will be possible to live by the contrary assumption that what is good for the world will be good for us. … We must recover the sense of the majesty of the creation and the ability to be worshipful in its presence. For it is only on the condition of humility and reverence before the world that our species will be able to remain in it. ~ Wendell Berry (quote for Earth Day)
2011
Art at its greatest is fantastically deceitful and complex. ~ Vladimir Nabokov
2012
In my music, I'm trying to play the truth of what I am. The reason it's difficult is because I'm changing all the time. ~ Charles Mingus
2013
Love is the emblem of eternity; it confounds all notion of time; effaces all memory of a beginning, all fear of an end…
~ Anne Louise Germaine de Staël ~
2014
Enlightenment is man’s leaving his self-caused immaturity. Immaturity is the incapacity to use one's intelligence without the guidance of another. Such immaturity is self-caused if it is not caused by lack of intelligence, but by lack of determination and courage to use one's intelligence without being guided by another. Sapere Aude! Have the courage to use your own intelligence! is therefore the motto of the enlightenment.
~ Immanuel Kant ~
2015
We live in deeds, not years; in thoughts, not breaths;
In feelings, not in figures on a dial.
We should count time by heart-throbs. He most lives
Who thinks most, feels the noblest, acts the best.
Life's but a means unto an end; that end
Beginning, mean, and end to all things, — God.
~ Philip James Bailey ~
2016
How can U just leave me standing?
Alone in a world that's so cold? (So cold)
Maybe I'm just 2 demanding
Maybe I'm just like my father, 2 bold
Maybe you're just like my mother
She's never satisfied (She's never satisfied)
Why do we scream at each other?
This is what it sounds like
When doves cry.
~ Prince ~
— Added to QOTD layout as tribute to Prince after his death on 21 April 2016 —
I believe that through discipline, though not through discipline alone, we can achieve serenity, and a certain small but precious measure of the freedom from the accidents of incarnation, and charity, and that detachment which preserves the world which it renounces.
~ Robert Oppenheimer ~
2017
Two things fill the mind with ever-increasing wonder and awe, the more often and the more intensely the mind of thought is drawn to them: the starry heavens above me and the moral law within me.
~ Immanuel Kant ~
2018
Despite the vision and farseeing wisdom of our wartime heads of state, the physicists have felt the peculiarly intimate responsibility for suggesting, for supporting, and in the end, in large measure, for achieving the realization of atomic weapons. Nor can we forget that these weapons, as they were in fact used, dramatized so mercilessly the inhumanity and evil of modern war. In some sort of crude sense which no vulgarity, no humor, no overstatement can quite extinguish, the physicists have known sin; and this is a knowledge which they cannot lose.
~ Robert Oppenheimer ~
2019
Our own political life is predicated on openness. We do not believe any group of men adequate enough or wise enough to operate without scrutiny or without criticism. We know that the only way to avoid error is to detect it, that the only way to detect it is to be free to enquire. We know that the wages of secrecy are corruption. We know that in secrecy error, undetected, will flourish and subvert.
~ Robert Oppenheimer ~
2020
It is impossible to care for each other more or differently than we care for the earth.
This … becomes obvious enough when it is considered that the earth is what we all have in common, that it is what we are made of and what we live from, and that we therefore cannot damage it without damaging those with whom we share it. But I believe it goes farther and deeper than that. There is an uncanny resemblance between our behavior toward each other and our behavior toward the earth. … By some connection we do not recognize, the willingness to exploit one becomes the willingness to exploit the other.
~ Wendell Berry ~
2021
The advantage of poetry over life is that poetry, if it is sharp enough, may last.
~ Louise Glück ~
2022
Further escalation of the war, whether by accident or design, threatens all of humanity.
Raising the alert of Russian nuclear forces is a bone-chilling development.
The prospect of nuclear conflict, once unthinkable, is now back within the realm of possibility. … It’s time to stop the horror unleashed on the people of Ukraine and get on the path of diplomacy and peace.
I have been in close contact with a number of countries — including China, France, Germany, India, Israel and Turkey — on mediation efforts to bring an end to this war.
The appeals for peace must be heard.
This tragedy must stop.
It is never too late for diplomacy and dialogue.
We need an immediate cessation of hostilities and serious negotiations based on the principles of the UN Charter and international law.
We need peace.
Peace for the people of Ukraine.
Peace for the world.
We need peace now.
~ António Guterres ~
2023
The soul is silent.
If it speaks at all
it speaks in dreams.
~ Louise Glück ~
2024
If atomic bombs are to be added as new weapons to the arsenals of a warring world, or to the arsenals of the nations preparing for war, then the time will come when mankind will curse the names of Los Alamos and Hiroshima. The people of this world must unite or they will perish. This war that has ravaged so much of the earth, has written these words. The atomic bomb has spelled them out for all men to understand. Other men have spoken them in other times, and of other wars, of other weapons. They have not prevailed. There are some misled by a false sense of human history, who hold that they will not prevail today. It is not for us to believe that. By our minds we are committed, committed to a world united, before the common peril, in law and in humanity.
~ Robert Oppenheimer ~
2025
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All that is required for this enlightenment is freedom; and particularly the least harmful of all that may be called freedom, namely, the freedom for man to make public use of his reason in all matter. ~ Immanuel Kant

Her intense and pure religiousness took the form of her having equal faith in the existence of another world and in the impossibility of comprehending it in terms of earthly life. All one could do was to glimpse, amid the haze and the chimeras, something real ahead, just as persons endowed with an unusual persistence of diurnal cerebration are able to perceive in their deepest sleep, somewhere beyond the throes of an entangled and inept nightmare, the ordered reality of the waking hour. ~ Vladimir Nabokov

What is this jest in majesty? This ass in passion? How do God and Devil combine to form a live dog? ~ Vladimir Nabokov

And we know that as long as men are free to ask what they must, free to say what they think, free to think what they will, freedom can never be lost, and science can never regress. ~ Robert Oppenheimer (born April 22)

  • 3 because the regression of science is the death of mankind. Zarbon 22:45, 29 April 2008 (UTC)
  • 3 ♞☤☮♌︎Kalki ⚚⚓︎⊙☳☶⚡ 01:19, 22 April 2019 (UTC) 2 Kalki 15:44, 21 April 2009 (UTC) but trimmed of the initial "And". with a lean toward 4, but ONLY if extended for context to read:
There must be no barriers to freedom of inquiry … There is no place for dogma in science. The scientist is free, and must be free to ask any question, to doubt any assertion, to seek for any evidence, to correct any errors. Our political life is also predicated on openness. We know that the only way to avoid error is to detect it and that the only way to detect it is to be free to inquire. And we know that as long as men are free to ask what they must, free to say what they think, free to think what they will, freedom can never be lost, and science can never regress.
~ Robert Oppenheimer ~


It is perfectly obvious that the whole world is going to hell. The only possible chance that it might not is that we do not attempt to prevent it from doing so. ~ Robert Oppenheimer (born April 22)

  • 3 because the entire world is full of people who have sheer hatred for one another and that is moreso a fact than anything else. The very prevention of this hatred will result in even worse a fate for everyone...maintaining that prevention can end up being deadlier than the actual act which will send one to "hell". Zarbon 22:45, 29 April 2008 (UTC)
  • 2 Kalki 15:44, 21 April 2009 (UTC)

I need physics more than friends. ~ Robert Oppenheimer (born April 22)

  • 3 because friends are plenty, but physics will allow for much more. Zarbon 22:45, 29 April 2008 (UTC)
  • 2 Kalki 15:44, 21 April 2009 (UTC)

We knew the world would not be the same. A few people laughed, a few people cried, most people were silent. I remembered the line from the Hindu scripture, the Bhagavad-Gita. Vishnu is trying to persuade the Prince that he should do his duty and to impress him takes on his multi-armed form and says, "Now I become Death, the destroyer of worlds." ~ Robert Oppenheimer (born April 22)

  • 4 for the full version or just trimmed to "Now I become Death, the destroyer of worlds" in reference to the old scripture and the usage of the atomic bomb as a dual dynamic. But 4 either way. Zarbon 03:04, 27 September 2008 (UTC)
  • 2 Kalki 15:44, 21 April 2009 (UTC) for full version only.

Man's consciousness not only reflects the objective world, but creates it. ~ Vladimir Lenin

  • 3 Zarbon 03:17, 27 September 2008 (UTC)
  • 2 Kalki 15:44, 21 April 2009 (UTC)

The natural scientist must be a modern materialist, a conscious adherent of the materialism represented by Marx, i.e., he must be a dialectical materialist. ~ Vladimir Lenin

  • 2 Zarbon 03:17, 27 September 2008 (UTC)
  • 2 Kalki 15:44, 21 April 2009 (UTC)

One cannot live in society and be free from society. ~ Vladimir Lenin

  • 3 Zarbon 03:17, 27 September 2008 (UTC)
  • 2 Kalki 15:44, 21 April 2009 (UTC)

To picture world history as advancing smoothly and steadily without sometimes taking gigantic strides backward is undialectical, unscientific and theoretically wrong. ~ Vladimir Lenin

  • 3 because for better or for worse, history repeats itself. Zarbon 03:17, 27 September 2008 (UTC)
  • 2 Kalki 15:44, 21 April 2009 (UTC)

While the State exists, there can be no freedom. When there is freedom there will be no State. ~ Vladimir Lenin

  • 2 Zarbon 03:17, 27 September 2008 (UTC)
  • 2 Kalki 15:44, 21 April 2009 (UTC)

The state does not function as desired. The car does not obey. A man is at the wheel and he seems to lead it, but the car does not drive in the desired direction. It moves as another force wishes. ~ Vladimir Lenin

  • 2 Zarbon 03:17, 27 September 2008 (UTC)
  • 1 Kalki 15:44, 21 April 2009 (UTC)

Love is the whole history of a woman's life, it is an episode in a man's. ~ Anne Louise Germaine de Staël

  • 2 Zarbon 03:33, 20 April 2009 (UTC)
  • 2 Kalki 15:44, 21 April 2009 (UTC)

Wit lies in recognizing the resemblance among things which differ and the difference between things which are alike. ~ Anne Louise Germaine de Staël

  • 3 Zarbon 03:33, 20 April 2009 (UTC)
  • 2 Kalki 15:44, 21 April 2009 (UTC)

The voice of conscience is so delicate that it is easy to stifle it; but it is also so clear that it is impossible to mistake it. ~ Anne Louise Germaine de Staël

  • 2 Zarbon 03:33, 20 April 2009 (UTC)
  • 3 Kalki 15:44, 21 April 2009 (UTC)

Search for the truth is the noblest occupation of man; its publication is a duty. ~ Anne Louise Germaine de Staël

  • 2 Zarbon 03:33, 20 April 2009 (UTC)
  • 3 Kalki 15:44, 21 April 2009 (UTC)

Men do not change; they unmask themselves. ~ Anne Louise Germaine de Staël

  • 3 Zarbon 03:33, 20 April 2009 (UTC)
  • 2 Kalki 15:44, 21 April 2009 (UTC)

To whom nothing is given, of him can nothing be required. ~ Henry Fielding

  • 3 Zarbon 03:33, 20 April 2009 (UTC)
  • 2 Kalki 15:44, 21 April 2009 (UTC)

When I'm not thanked at all, I'm thanked enough;
I've done my duty, and I've done no more. ~ Henry Fielding

  • 3 Zarbon 03:33, 20 April 2009 (UTC)
  • 3 Kalki 15:44, 21 April 2009 (UTC)

I am content; that is a blessing greater than riches; and he to whom that is given need ask no more. ~ Henry Fielding

  • 2 Zarbon 03:33, 20 April 2009 (UTC)
  • 3 Kalki 15:44, 21 April 2009 (UTC)

I describe not men, but manners; not an individual, but a species. ~ Henry Fielding

  • 2 Zarbon 03:33, 20 April 2009 (UTC)
  • 2 Kalki 15:44, 21 April 2009 (UTC)

It hath been often said, that it is not death, but dying which is terrible. ~ Henry Fielding

A good face they say, is a letter of recommendation. O Nature, Nature, why art thou so dishonest, as ever to send men with these false recommendations into the World! ~ Henry Fielding

Anyone can make the simple complicated. Creativity is making the complicated simple. ~ Charles Mingus

Making the simple complicated is commonplace; making the complicated simple, awesomely simple, that's creativity. ~ Charles Mingus

I know many crooks and they never preach, but I don't know anyone who preaches that isn't a crook also. ~ Indro Montanelli

Cynics are all moralists, and merciless too. ~ Indro Montanelli

Men do not know how to appreciate and measure luck except that of others. Their own never. ~ Indro Montanelli

Fascism rewarded jackasses in uniform. Democracy gives priviliges to those in sports' gear. In Italy, political regimes come to pass. The jackasses remain. Triumphant. ~ Indro Montanelli

Genius is essentially creative; it bears the stamp of the individual who possesses it.
~ Anne Louise Germaine de Staël ~
Let us then blend everything: love, religion, genius, with sunshine, perfume, music, and poetry. Atheism exists only in coldness, selfishness and baseness.
~ Anne Louise Germaine de Staël ~
Art is man's nature; nature is God's art.
~ Philip James Bailey ~
I cannot be content with less than heaven;
Living, and comprehensive of all life.
Thee, universal heaven, celestial all;
Thee, sacrjd seat of intellective time;
Field of the soul's best wisdom: home of truth,
Star-throned.
~ Philip James Bailey ~
Poets are all who love, who feel great truths,
And tell them; and the truth of truths is love.
~ Philip James Bailey ~
Night brings out stars as sorrow shows us truths.
~ Philip James Bailey ~
Let each man think himself an act of God,
His mind a thought, his life a breath of God;
And let each try, by great thoughts and good deeds,
To show the most of Heaven he hath in him.
~ Philip James Bailey ~
Science is not everything, but science is very beautiful.
~ Robert Oppenheimer ~

More solar energy falls on Earth in one hour than all the energy our civilization consumes in an entire year. If we could harness a tiny fraction of the available solar and wind power, we could supply all our energy needs forever, and without adding any carbon to the atmosphere. ~ In commemoration of Earth Day, from the twelfth episode of the science documentary television series Cosmos: A Spacetime Odyssey (2014).

  • 4 Pithy Francoln (talk) 21:41, 7 October 2016 (UTC) To celebrate Earth Day (April 22nd), I propose discussing the solution (renewable energy) instead of simply complaining about the problem (impending global warming disaster).

Here is a longer version of the same quote, with a pep talk in the second paragraph:

"More solar energy falls on Earth in one hour than all the energy our civilization consumes in an entire year. If we could harness a tiny fraction of the available solar and wind power, we could supply all our energy needs forever, and without adding any carbon to the atmosphere.

"It's not too late. There's a future worth fighting for. How do I know? Every one of us comes from a long line of survivors. Our species is nothing if not adaptive. It was only because our ancestors learned to think long-term, and act accordingly, that we're here at all. We've had our backs to the wall before, and we came through to scale new heights."

  • Pithy Francoln (talk) 13:00, 21 March 2017 (UTC) I am indifferent as to whether the longer or shorter version of the above quote could be used. However, I do think that the challenge of global warming and adoption of renewable energy as a response to that challenge is of vital importance for our world community. I would love to see either one displayed as a quote of the day.
  • 2 ♞☤☮♌︎Kalki ⚚⚓︎⊙☳☶⚡ 00:01, 22 April 2017 (UTC) 3 Kalki 21:26, 20 April 2008 (UTC) with a lean toward 4.

Keep your eye on the man, not the dog. (Comparing the gradual curve of Neil deGrasse Tyson's path along a beach to climate and the erratic path of a dog Tyson is holding on a leash to weather.) ~ In commemoration of Earth Day, from the twelfth episode of the science documentary television series Cosmos: A Spacetime Odyssey (2014).

  • 3 Pithy Francoln (talk) 22:36, 11 October 2016 (UTC) This is such a great illustration, but any more talk just explaining the problem is less important now than discussing the solution (renewable energy).

By burning coal, oil and gas, our civilization is exhaling carbon dioxide much faster than Earth can absorb it. So, CO2 is building up in the atmosphere. The planet is heating up. . . . It's a pretty tight case. Our fingerprints are all over this one. ~ In commemoration of Earth Day, from the twelfth episode of the science documentary television series Cosmos: A Spacetime Odyssey (2014).

  • 3 Pithy Francoln (talk) 23:14, 11 October 2016 (UTC) This is also a great quote, but nowhere in there is a mention of renewable energy (the solution we must focus on to ensure long-term celebration of Earth Day for decades to come).
From the beginning of time,
in childhood, I thought
that pain meant
I was not loved.
It meant I loved.
~ Louise Glück ~


The master said You must write what you see.
But what I see does not move me.
The master answered Change what you see.
~ Louise Glück ~




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