Wikiquote:Quote of the day/February 2019

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February 1

Liberty sets the mind free, fosters independence and unorthodox thinking and ideas. But it does not offer instant prosperity or happiness and wealth to everyone. This is something that politicians in particular must keep in mind.

~ Boris Yeltsin ~

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February 2

When Chekhov saw the long winter, he saw a winter bleak and dark and bereft of hope. Yet we know that winter is just another step in the cycle of life. But standing here among the people of Punxsutawney and basking in the warmth of their hearths and hearts, I couldn't imagine a better fate than a long and lustrous winter.

~ Bill Murray as "Phil" ~
in
~ Groundhog Day ~

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February 3

The longing in the depth of the heart for absolute good, and the power, though only latent, of directing attention and love to a reality beyond the world and of receiving good from it — constitutes a link which attaches every man without exception to that other reality.
Whoever recognizes that reality recognizes also that link. Because of it, he holds every human being without any exception as something sacred to which he is bound to show respect. This is the only possible motive for universal respect towards all human beings. Whatever formulation of belief or disbelief a man may choose to make, if his heart inclines him to feel this respect, then he in fact also recognizes a reality other than this world's reality. Whoever in fact does not feel this respect is alien to that other reality also.

~ Simone Weil ~

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February 4

When I go onstage as Alice to this day, I play Alice to the hilt — I play him for everything he is worth, but when I’m offstage, I never think about Alice Cooper. He never occurs to me. … I walk off stage though and I turn away from the audience, I go back to being me again. Whenever I see an audience, that’s when I turn into Alice. If there was no audience there, there would be no reason to be Alice. … If I tried to be Alice Cooper all the time — I’d either be in an insane asylum or in jail or dead. Alice is just too intense, and you just can’t be Alice all the time.

~ Alice Cooper ~

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February 5

The sound of tireless voices is the price we pay for the right to hear the music of our own opinions. But there is also, it seems to me, a moment at which democracy must prove its capacity to act. Every man has a right to be heard; but no man has the right to strangle democracy with a single set of vocal chords.

~ Adlai Stevenson II ~

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February 6

I've spoken of the shining city all my political life, but I don't know if I ever quite communicated what I saw when I said it. But in my mind it was a tall proud city built on rocks stronger than oceans, wind-swept, God-blessed, and teeming with people of all kinds living in harmony and peace, a city with free ports that hummed with commerce and creativity, and if there had to be city walls, the walls had doors and the doors were open to anyone with the will and the heart to get here. That's how I saw it and see it still.

~ Ronald Reagan ~

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February 7

Take nothing on its looks; take everything on evidence. There's no better rule.

~ Charles Dickens ~
in
~ Great Expectations ~

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February 8

There is never vulgarity in a whole truth, however commonplace. It may be unimportant or painful. It cannot be vulgar. Vulgarity is only in concealment of truth, or in affectation.

~ John Ruskin ~

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February 9

Our lies reveal as much about us as our truths.

~ J. M. Coetzee ~

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February 10

File:Boris Pasternak 1920.jpg

The great majority of us are required to live a life of constant duplicity. Your health is bound to be affected if, day after day, you say the opposite of what you feel, if you grovel before what you dislike, and rejoice at what brings you nothing but misfortune. Our nervous system isn't just a fiction, it's part of our physical body, and our souls exists in space and is inside us, like the teeth in the mouth. It can't forever be violated with impunity.

~ Boris Pasternak ~

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February 11

Do not lie without need.

~ Leó Szilárd ~

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February 12

In vain were all her sighs and tears,
In vain were all his anxious fears:
All, insubstantial, doomed to pass,
As moonlight mirrored in the water,
Or flowers reflected in a glass.

~ Cao Xueqin ~
in
~ Dream of the Red Chamber ~

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February 13

The world never knows, and cannot for the life of it imagine, what this man sees in that maid and that maid in this man. The world cannot think why they fell in love with each other. But they have their reason, their beautiful secret, that never gets told to more than one person; and what they see in each other is what they show to each other; and it is the truth. Only they kept it hidden in their hearts until the time came.

~ Eleanor Farjeon ~

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February 14

Love comforteth, like sunshine after rain,
But lust's effect is tempest after sun;
Love's gentle spring doth always fresh remain,
Lust's winter comes ere summer half be done;
Love surfeits not,; lust like a glutton dies,
Love is all truth; lust full of forged lies.

~ William Shakespeare ~

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February 15

What I like best is the kind of complicated messed up truth, you know … the one that's so imperfect that you know it's true.

~ Miranda July ~

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February 16

Boys never see a conclusion; only on the edge of the grave can man conclude anything; but the first impulse given to the boy is apt to lead or drive him for the rest of his life into conclusion after conclusion that he never dreamed of reaching.

~ Henry Adams ~

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February 17

Nature is not merely present, but is implanted within things, distant from none; naught is distant from her except the false, and that which existed never and nowhere — nullity. And while the outer face of things changeth so greatly, there flourisheth the origin of being more intimately within all things than they themselves. The fount of all kinds, Mind, God, Being, One, Truth, Destiny, Reason, Order.

~ Giordano Bruno ~

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February 18

Tongue-suicide is not only the choice of children. It is common among the infantile heads of state and power merchants whose evacuated language leaves them with no access to what is left of their human instincts for they speak only to those who obey, or in order to force obedience. The systematic looting of language can be recognized by the tendency of its users to forgo its nuanced, complex, mid-wifery properties for menace and subjugation. Oppressive language does more than represent violence; it is violence; does more than represent the limits of knowledge; it limits knowledge. Whether it is obscuring state language or the faux-language of mindless media; whether it is the proud but calcified language of the academy or the commodity driven language of science; whether it is the malign language of law-without-ethics, or language designed for the estrangement of minorities, hiding its racist plunder in its literary cheek — it must be rejected, altered and exposed. It is the language that drinks blood, laps vulnerabilities, tucks its fascist boots under crinolines of respectability and patriotism as it moves relentlessly toward the bottom line and the bottomed-out mind. Sexist language, racist language, theistic language — all are typical of the policing languages of mastery, and cannot, do not permit new knowledge or encourage the mutual exchange of ideas.

~ Toni Morrison ~

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February 19

Crossing that bridge,
With lessons I've learned.
Playing with fire,
And not getting burned.
I may not know what you're going through.
But time is the space,
Between me and you.
Life carries on... it goes on.

~ Seal ~

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February 20

Remember, stay ahead of them. Keep the mystery, always mystery. Excess within control.

~ Richard Matheson ~
in
~ Somewhere in Time ~

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February 21

One handles truths like dynamite. Literature is one vast hypocrisy, a giant deception, treachery. All writers have concealed more than they revealed.
But paradoxically, we create fiction out of human concern for the victims of the revelations. This concern is at the root of literature.

~ Anaïs Nin ~

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February 22

A slender acquaintance with the world must convince every man, that actions, not words, are the true criterion of the attachment of his friends, and that the most liberal professions of good will are very far from being the surest marks of it. I should be happy that my own experience had afforded fewer examples of the little dependence to be placed upon them.

~ George Washington ~

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February 23

Either the United States will destroy ignorance or ignorance will destroy the United States.
And when we call for education we mean real education. We believe in work. We ourselves are workers, but work is not necessarily education. Education is the development of power and ideal. We want our children trained as intelligent human beings should be, and we will fight for all time against any proposal to educate black boys and girls simply as servants and underlings, or simply for the use of other people. They have a right to know, to think, to aspire.

~ W. E. B. Du Bois ~

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February 24

Do you want to spend the rest of your life selling sugared water or do you want a chance to change the world?

~ Steve Jobs ~

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February 25

More noise occurs from a single man shouting than a hundred thousand who are quiet.

~ José de San Martín ~

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February 26

I wear the black for the poor and the beaten down,
Livin' in the hopeless, hungry side of town,
I wear it for the prisoner who has long paid for his crime,
But is there because he's a victim of the times.

~ Johnny Cash ~

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February 27

In every bit of honest writing in the world … there is a base theme. Try to understand men, if you understand each other you will be kind to each other. Knowing a man well never leads to hate and nearly always leads to love. There are shorter means, many of them. There is writing promoting social change, writing punishing injustice, writing in celebration of heroism, but always that base theme. Try to understand each other.

~ John Steinbeck ~

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February 28

I want to first of all, thank you. I know that this has been hard. I know that you face a lot. I know that you are worried about your family — but this is part of your destiny. And, hopefully, this portion of your destiny will lead to a better — a better, a better Michael Cohen, a better Donald Trump, a better United States of America and a better world.
And I mean that from the depths of my heart.
When we’re dancing with the angels, the question will be asked: "In 2019, what did we do to make sure we kept our democracy intact?" Did we stand on the sidelines and say nothing? … Come on, now — we can do more than one thing. And we have got to get back to normal.

~ Elijah Cummings ~

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Today is Sunday, December 22, 2024; it is now 12:31 (UTC)