Wikiquote:Quote of the day/December 2019

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Today is Thursday, November 21, 2024; it is now 12:58 (UTC)

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December 1

Nothing is simpler than to kill a man; the difficulties arise in attempting to avoid the consequences.

~ Rex Stout ~
in
~ Too Many Cooks ~

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December 2

Congress should act to make sure no one on a no-fly list is able to buy a gun. What could possibly be the argument for allowing a terrorist suspect to buy a semi-automatic weapon? This is a matter of national security.
We also need to make it harder for people to buy powerful assault weapons like the ones that were used in San Bernardino. I know there are some who reject any gun safety measures. But the fact is that our intelligence and law enforcement agencies — no matter how effective they are — cannot identify every would-be mass shooter, whether that individual is motivated by ISIL or some other hateful ideology. What we can do — and must do — is make it harder for them to kill.

~ Barack Obama ~

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December 3

I remember my youth and the feeling that will never come back any more — the feeling that I could last for ever, outlast the sea, the earth, and all men; the deceitful feeling that lures us on to joys, to perils, to love, to vain effort — to death; the triumphant conviction of strength, the heat of life in the handful of dust, the glow in the heart that with every year grows dim, grows cold, grows small, and expires — and expires, too soon — too soon before life itself.

~ Joseph Conrad ~

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December 4

Life is the art of drawing sufficient conclusions from insufficient premises.

~ Samuel Butler ~

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December 5

I always like to look on the optimistic side of life, but I am realistic enough to know that life is a complex matter.

~ Walt Disney ~

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December 6

There will be and can be no rest till we admit, what cannot be denied, that there is in man a third faculty, which I call simply the faculty of apprehending the Infinite, not only in religion, but in all things; a power independent of sense and reason, a power in a certain sense contradicted by sense and reason; but yet, I suppose, a very real power, if we see how it has held its own from the beginning of the world — how neither sense nor reason has been able to overcome it, while it alone is able to overcome both reason and sense.

~ Max Müller ~

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December 7

I am persuaded to believe that God had left nations to the liberty of setting up such governments as best pleased themselves, and that magistrates were set up for the good of nations, not nations for the honor and glory of magistrates.

~ Algernon Sydney ~

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December 8

There is no safety in numbers, or in anything else.

~ James Thurber ~

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December 9

Under what torments inwardly I groane;
While they adore me on the Throne of Hell,
With Diadem and Scepter high advanc’d
The lower still I fall, onely Supream
In miserie; such joy Ambition findes.
But say I could repent and could obtaine
By Act of Grace my former state; how soon
Would highth recal high thoughts, how soon unsay
What feign’d submission swore: ease would recant
Vows made in pain, as violent and void.
For never can true reconcilement grow
Where wounds of deadly hate have peirc’d so deep:
Which would but lead me to a worse relapse
And heavier fall: so should I purchase deare
Short intermission bought with double smart.

~ John Milton ~
in
~ Paradise Lost ~

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December 10

I TOOK my power in my hand
And went against the world;
’T was not so much as David had,
But I was twice as bold.

I aimed my pebble, but myself
Was all the one that fell.
Was it Goliath was too large,
Or only I too small?

~ Emily Dickinson ~

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December 11

When we are at the summit of a vain ambition, we are also at the depth of real misery. We are placed where time cannot improve, but must impair us; where chance and change cannot befriend, but may betray us; in short, by attaining all we wish, and gaining all we want, we have only reached a pinnacle, where we have nothing to hope, but every thing to fear.

~ Charles Caleb Colton ~

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December 12

I have been derisively called a "Woman's Rights Man". I know no such distinction. I claim to the a Human Rights Man, and wherever there is a human being, I see God-given rights inherent in that being, whatever may be the sex or complexion.

~ William Lloyd Garrison ~

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December 13

I was sharpshooting. I don't think I missed a shot. It was no time to miss.
In order to sight me or to swing their machine guns on me, the Germans had to show their heads above the trench, and every time I saw a head I just touched it off. All the time I kept yelling at them to come down. I didn't want to kill any more than I had to. But it was they or I. And I was giving them the best I had.

~ Alvin C. York ~

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December 14

Yoga is like music. The rhythm of the body, the melody of the mind and the harmony of the soul creates the symphony of life.

~ BKS Iyengar ~

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December 15

I keep thinking what happens when the power of love is twisted into the love of power.

~ Maurice Davis ~

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December 16

You shall not, for the sake of one individual, change the meaning of principle and integrity, nor endeavour to persuade yourself or me, that selfishness is prudence, and insensibility of danger security for happiness.

~ Jane Austen ~
in
~ Pride and Prejudice ~

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December 17

We must not place the burden on the next generations to take on the problems caused by the previous ones. Instead, we should give them the opportunity to remember our generation as the one that renewed and acted on — with honest, responsible and courageous awareness — the fundamental need to collaborate in order to preserve and cultivate our common home. May we offer the next generation concrete reasons to hope and work for a good and dignified future!

~ Pope Francis ~

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December 18

You'll never know until you try it
You don't have to keep it quiet

And I know it makes you nervous
But I promise you, it's worth it
To show 'em everything you kept inside
Don't hide, don't hide
Too shy to say, but I hope you stay
Don't hide away
Come out and play.

~ Billie Eilish ~

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December 19

One good song with a message can bring a point more deeply to more people than a thousand rallies.

~ Phil Ochs ~

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December 20

Our enemy really isn't capitalism, it's cynicism. That's one the things I learned from Woody … Not to be cynical … That cynicism … It destroys you, it rots you away from the inside. So that sense of optimism and humanity … which 20 years ago I would have called socialism but now I'll call compassion … You know, that idea is still out there and alive and if you can plug into that and encourage that it makes it all worth while.

~ Billy Bragg ~

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December 21

Fascism … is a headlong flight into fantasy from the necessity for political thought … persons supporting Fascism behave as if man were already in possession of principles which would enable him to deal with all our problems, and as if it were only a question of appointing a dictator to apply them.

~ Rebecca West ~

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December 22

I write for one and only one purpose, to overcome the invincible ignorance of the traduced heart. My poems are acts of force and violence directed against the evil which murders us all.

~ Kenneth Rexroth ~

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December 23

Laws, wisely administered, will secure men in the enjoyment of the fruits of their labour, whether of mind or body, at a comparatively small personal sacrifice; but no laws, however stringent, can make the idle industrious, the thriftless provident, or the drunken sober. Such reforms can only be effected by means of individual action, economy, and self-denial; by better habits, rather than by greater rights.
The Government of a nation itself is usually found to be but the reflex of the individuals composing it. The Government that is ahead of the people will inevitably be dragged down to their level, as the Government that is behind them will in the long run be dragged up. In the order of nature, the collective character of a nation will as surely find its befitting results in its law and government, as water finds its own level. The noble people will be nobly ruled, and the ignorant and corrupt ignobly. Indeed all experience serves to prove that the worth and strength of a State depend far less upon the form of its institutions than upon the character of its men. For the nation is only an aggregate of individual conditions, and civilization itself is but a question of the personal improvement of the men, women, and children of whom society is composed.

~ Samuel Smiles ~

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December 24

As far as I'm concerned we are all God.
That's the difference.
If you really think another guy is God he doesn't lock you up …
Funny about that.

~ Ram Dass ~

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December 25

Charles Lamb, in one of his most delightful essays, sets high worth on the observance of All Fools' Day, because it says to a man: "You look wise. Pray correct that error!" Christmas brings the universal message to men: "You look important and great; pray correct that error." It overturns the false standards that have blinded the vision and sets up again in their rightful magnitude those childlike qualities by which we enter the Kingdom.
Christmas turns things inside out. Under the spell of the Christmas story the locked up treasures of kindliness and sympathy come from the inside of the heart, where they are often kept imprisoned, to the outside of actual expression in deed and word. … It is the vision of the Christ-child which enables all men to get at the best treasures of their lives and offer them for use.

~ Halford E. Luccock ~

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December 26

War has no longer the justification that it makes for the survival of the fittest; it involves the survival of the less fit. The idea that the struggle between nations is a part of the evolutionary law of man's advance involves a profound misreading of the biological analogy.
The warlike nations do not inherit the earth; they represent the decaying human element.

~ Norman Angell ~

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December 27

The Greeks understood the mysterious power of the hidden side of things. They bequeathed to us one of the most beautiful words in our language — the word "enthusiasm" — en theos [Εν Θεος] — a god within. The grandeur of human actions is measured by the inspiration from which they spring. Happy is he who bears a god within and obeys it.

~ Louis Pasteur ~

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December 28

The universe is of the nature of a thought or sensation in a universal Mind … To put the conclusion crudely — the stuff of the world is mind-stuff. As is often the way with crude statements, I shall have to explain that by "mind" I do not exactly mean mind and by "stuff" I do not at all mean stuff. Still that is about as near as we can get to the idea in a simple phrase. The mind-stuff of the world is something more general than our individual conscious minds; but we may think of its nature as not altogether foreign to feelings in our consciousness … Having granted this, the mental activity of the part of world constituting ourselves occasions no great surprise; it is known to us by direct self-knowledge, and we do not explain it away as something other than we know it to be — or rather, it knows itself to be.

~ Arthur Eddington ~

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December 29

Every child, at birth, is the Universal Man. But, as it grows, we turn it into "a petty man." It should be the function of education to turn it again into the original "Universal Man."
The child which by birth was the universal man is fettered by us with such constraints as country, language, religion, caste, race and colour. To free it from all these limitations and transform it into "the enlightened soul", that is to say, the universal man, — this should become the first and foremost function of our education, culture, civilization, and what not.

~ Kuvempu ~

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December 30

The emperor needs all the headmasters he can get. If a quarter of his people were headmasters he would be perfectly happy. But more than two poets would tear his kingdom apart.

~ Alasdair Gray ~

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December 31

We must never regard as normal the regular and casual undermining of our democratic norms and ideals. We must never meekly accept the daily sundering of our country, the personal attacks, the threats against principles, freedoms and institution, the flagrant disregard for truth and decency, the reckless provocations, most often for the pettiest and most personal reasons — reasons having nothing whatsoever to do with the fortunes of the people that we have been elected to serve. None of these appalling features of our current politics should ever be regarded as normal. We must never allow ourselves to lapse into thinking that that is "just the way things are now." If we simply become inured to this condition, thinking that it is just politics as usual, then heaven help us.
Without fear of the consequences and without consideration of the rules of what is politically safe or palatable, we must stop pretending that the degradation of our politics and the conduct of some in our executive branch are normal.
They are not normal.

~ Jeff Flake ~

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Today is Thursday, November 21, 2024; it is now 12:58 (UTC)