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Wikiquote:Quote of the day/2003

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In the first six months of the Wikiquote project a new Quote of the Day was not always selected for each day, and sometimes several days would pass before a new one was chosen.

December 2003

  • "They were nothing like the French people I had imagined. If anything, they were too kind, too generous and too knowledgable in the fields of plumbing and electricity." ~ David Sedaris
  • "Judge not, and ye shall not be judged: condemn not, and ye shall not be condemned: forgive, and ye shall be forgiven." ~ Yeshua (Jesus Christ)
  • "We are not afraid to follow truth wherever it may lead, nor to tolerate any error so long as reason is left free to combat it." ~ Thomas Jefferson
  • "That virtue we appreciate is as much ours as anothers. We see so much only as we possess." ~ Henry David Thoreau
  • "Men are born ignorant, not stupid. They are made stupid by education." ~ Bertrand Russell
  • "Someday, after mastering the winds, the waves, the tides and gravity, we shall harness for God the energies of love, and then, for a second time in the history of the world, man will have discovered fire." ~ Pierre Teilhard de Chardin
  • "Some mornings it just doesn't seem worth it to gnaw through the leather straps." ~ Emo Phillips
  • "If your morals make you dreary, depend upon it, they are wrong. I do not say give them up, for they may be all you have, but conceal them like a vice lest they spoil the lives of better and simpler people." ~ Robert Louis Stevenson
  • "I'm completely in favor of the separation of Church and State. My idea is that these two institutions screw us up enough on their own, so both of them together is certain death." ~ George Carlin
  • "I have never let my schooling get in the way of my education." ~ Mark Twain
  • "For myself, I am an optimist— it does not seem to be much use being anything else." ~ Winston Churchill

November 2003

  • "Security is mostly a superstition... Life is either a daring adventure, or nothing." ~ Helen Keller
  • "If the only prayer you said in your whole life was, 'Thank You', that would suffice." ~ Meister Eckhart
  • "A coward is incapable of exhibiting love; it is the prerogative of the brave." ~ Mohandas Gandhi
  • "One's philosophy is not best expressed in words; it is expressed in the choices one makes. In the long run, we shape our lives and we shape ourselves. The process never ends until we die. And, the choices we make are ultimately our own responsibility." ~ Eleanor Roosevelt
  • "A beginning is the time for taking the most delicate care that the balances are correct. This every sister of the Bene Gesserit knows." ~ Frank Herbert in Dune
  • "The growing good of the world is partly dependent on unhistoric acts; and that things are not so ill with you and me as they might have been, is half owing to the number who lived faithfully a hidden life, and rest in unvisited tombs." ~ George Eliot
  • "Each friend represents a world in us, a world possibly not born until they arrive, and it is only by this meeting that a new world is born." ~ Anaïs Nin

October 2003

  • "I really believe that if there's any kind of God, he wouldn't be in any one of us— not you, not me, but just this space in between. If there's some magic in this world, it must be in the attempt of understanding someone else, sharing something." ~ Before Sunrise (motion picture)
  • "He who fights with monsters should look to it that he himself does not become a monster. And when you gaze long into an abyss the abyss also gazes into you." ~ Friedrich Nietzsche
  • "The reason that clichés become clichés is that they are the hammers and screwdrivers in the toolbox of communication." ~ Terry Pratchett
  • "We've moved away from being a culture of people who think about movies to one made up of people who believe that spouting a list of preferences is the same as registering an opinion." ~ Stephanie Zacharek
  • "One of the basic tenets of Zen Buddhism is that there is no way to characterize what Zen is. No matter what verbal space you try to enclose Zen in, it resists, and spills over..." ~ Gödel, Escher, Bach: an Eternal Golden Braid by Douglas Hofstadter
  • "We shall not cease from exploration
    And the end of all our exploring
    Will be to arrive where we started
    And know the place for the first time."
    ~ The Four Quartets by T. S. Eliot ~

September 2003

  • "Outside of the killings, DC has one of the lowest crime rates in the country." ~ Marion Barry
  • "If homosexuality is a disease, let's all call in queer to work. 'Hello, can't work today. Still queer.'" ~ Robin Tyler
  • "You can build a throne with bayonets, but you can't sit on it for long." ~ Boris Yeltsin
  • "We have a firm commitment to NATO; we are a part of NATO. We have a firm commitment to Europe; we are a part of Europe." ~ Dan Quayle
  • "Since love and fear can hardly exist together, if we must choose between them, it is far safer to be feared than loved." ~ Niccolo Machiavelli
  • "When smashing monuments, save the pedestals— they always come in handy." ~ Stanislaw Jerzy Lec
  • "I never desire to converse with a man who has written more than he has read." ~ Samuel Johnson
  • "It's not that I'm afraid to die, I just don't want to be there when it happens." ~ Woody Allen
  • "One can promise actions, but not feelings, for the latter are involuntary. He who promises to love forever or hate forever or be forever faithful to someone is promising something that is not in his power." ~ Human, All Too Human by Friedrich Nietzsche
  • "Our chiefs said 'Done,' and I did not deem it;
    Our seers said 'Peace,' and it was not peace;
    Earth will grow worse till men redeem it,
    And wars more evil, ere all wars cease."
    ~ A Song of Defeat by Gilbert Keith Chesterton ~
  • "Your theory is crazy, but it's not crazy enough to be true." ~ Niels Bohr
  • "Never burn a penny candle looking for a halfpenny." ~ Irish proverb
  • "It is now possible for a flight attendant to get a pilot pregnant." ~ Richard Ferris
  • "Most people today still believe, perhaps unconsciously, in the heliocentric universe ... every newspaper in the land has a section on astrology, yet few have anything at all on astronomy." ~ Hannes Alfven
  • "Every man desires to live long, but no man would be old." ~ Jonathan Swift
  • "There's nothing in the middle of the road but a yellow stripe and dead armadillos." ~ Jim Hightower
  • "Ars longa, vita brevis." ("Art is long, life is short.") ~ Horace

August 2003

  • "Government is too big and too important to be left to the politicians." ~ Chester Bowles
  • "I don't like spinach, and I'm glad I don't, because if I liked it I'd eat it, and I just hate it." ~ Clarence Darrow
  • "Certain old men prefer to rise at dawn, taking a cold bath and a long walk with an empty stomach and otherwise mortifying the flesh. They then point with pride to these practices as the cause of their sturdy health and ripe years; the truth being that they are hearty and old, not because of their habits, but in spite of them. The reason we find only robust persons doing this thing is that it has killed all the others who have tried it." ~ The Devil's Dictionary by Ambrose Bierce
  • "He caught glimpses of everything, but saw nothing." ~ Les Miserables by Victor Hugo
  • "One half of the world cannot understand the pleasures of the other." ~ Emma by Jane Austen
  • "The conservation movement is a breeding ground of Communists and other subversives. We intend to clean them out, even if it means rounding up every bird watcher in the country." ~ John Mitchell
  • "I don't know anything about music. In my line you don't have to." ~ Elvis Presley
  • "Beware lest you lose the substance by grasping at the shadow." ~ Aesop
  • "There comes a point when a man must refuse to answer to his leader if he is also to answer to his own conscience." ~ Hartley Shawcross
  • "I don't mind making jokes, but I don't want to look like one." ~ Marilyn Monroe
  • "I never met a man so stupid I could not learn something from him." ~ Galileo Galilei
  • "As long as I am mayor of this city the great industries are secure. We hear about constitutional rights, free speech and the free press. Every time I hear these words I say to myself, 'That man is a Red, that man is a Communist.' You never hear a real American talk like that." ~ Frank Hague
  • "A free society is one where it is safe to be unpopular." ~ Adlai Stevenson
  • "The battle of the sexes will never be won as long as we keep sleeping with the enemy." ~ Emo Phillips
  • "A man said to the Universe: 'Sir, I exist!' 'However,' replied the Universe, 'the fact has not created in me a sense of obligation.'" ~ Stephen Crane
  • "It's a damn poor mind that can only think of one way to spell a word." ~ Andrew Jackson
  • "When the weight of the paperwork equals the weight of the plane, the plane will fly." ~ Donald Douglas
  • "Computer Science is no more about computers than astronomy is about telescopes." ~ Edsger Dijkstra
  • "Without friends no one would choose to live, though he had all other goods." ~ Aristotle

July 2003

  • "History would be an excellent thing if only it were true." ~ Leo Tolstoy
  • "On two occasions I have been asked [by members of Parliament!], 'Pray, Mr. Babbage, if you put into the machine wrong figures, will the right answers come out?' I am not able rightly to apprehend the kind of confusion of ideas that could provoke such a question." ~ Charles Babbage
  • "The law will never make men free; it is men who have got to make the law free." ~ Henry David Thoreau
  • "I think all foreigners should stop interfering in the internal affairs of Iraq." ~ Paul Wolfowitz
  • "The most beautiful thing we can experience is the mysterious. It is the source of all true art and all science. He to whom this emotion is a stranger, who can no longer pause to wonder and stand rapt in awe, is as good as dead: his eyes are closed." ~ Albert Einstein
  • "This country has come to feel the same when Congress is in session as when the baby gets hold of a hammer." ~ Will Rogers
  • "I am reminded of the professor who, in his declining hours, was asked by his devoted pupils for his final counsel. He replied, 'Verify your quotations.'" ~ Winston Churchill
  • "One can no more prevent the mind from returning to an idea than the sea from returning to a shore. In the case of the sailor, this is called a tide; in the case of the guilty, it is called remorse." ~ Les Miserables by Victor Hugo
  • "The barge she sat in, like a burnishd throne, burnd on the water; the poop was beaten gold, purple the sails, and so perfumed, that the winds were love-sick with them, the oars were silver, which to the tune of flutes kept stroke, and made the water which they beat to follow faster, as amorous of their strokes. For her own person, it beggard all description" ~ (Enobarbus, II.ii) Antony and Cleopatra by William Shakespeare
  • "I found one day in school a boy of medium size ill-treating a smaller boy. I expostulated, but he replied: 'The bigs hit me, so I hit the babies; that's fair.' In these words he epitomized the history of the human race." ~ Education and the Social Order by Bertrand Russell
  • "To-morrow, and to-morrow, and to-morrow, creeps in this petty pace from day to day, to the last syllable of recorded time; and all our yesterdays have lighted fools the way to dusty death. Out, out, brief candle! Life's but a walking shadow, a poor player that struts and frets his hour upon the stage, and then is heard no more; it is a tale told by an idiot, full of sound and fury, signifying nothing." ~ Macbeth by William Shakespeare
  • "Experience is the name everyone gives to their mistakes." ~ Oscar Wilde
  • "Most people would rather die than think; in fact, they do so." ~ Bertrand Russell
  • "If we knew what we were doing, it wouldn't be called research, would it?" ~ Albert Einstein
  • "It is amazing what you can accomplish if you do not care who gets the credit." ~ Harry S. Truman
  • "I have a dream that my four little children will one day live in a nation where they will not be judged by the color of their skin but by the content of their character." ~ Martin Luther King

The first Quote of the Day at Wikiquote was the above quotation of Martin Luther King, selected by Nanobug on July 11, 2003.

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