Wikiquote:Quote of the day/October 2013

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Today is Tuesday, March 19, 2024; it is now 10:58 (UTC)


October 1
 

Jefferson refused to pin his hopes on the occasional success of honest and unambitious men; on the contrary, the great danger was that philosophers would be lulled into complacence by the accidental rise of a Franklin or a Washington. Any government which made the welfare of men depend on the character of their governors was an illusion.

~ Daniel J. Boorstin ~


 

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October 2
 

Victory attained by violence is tantamount to a defeat, for it is momentary.

~ Mahatma Gandhi ~


 

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October 3

 

We have no elected government, nor are we likely to have one, so I address you with no greater authority than that with which liberty itself always speaks. I declare the global social space we are building to be naturally independent of the tyrannies you seek to impose on us. You have no moral right to rule us nor do you possess any methods of enforcement we have true reason to fear.
Governments derive their just powers from the consent of the governed. You have neither solicited nor received ours. We did not invite you. You do not know us, nor do you know our world. Cyberspace does not lie within your borders.

~ John Perry Barlow ~


 

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October 4

 

General education is the best preventive of the evils now most dreaded. In the civilized countries of the world, the question is how to distribute most generally and equally the property of the world. As a rule, where education is most general the distribution of property is most general.... As knowledge spreads, wealth spreads. To diffuse knowledge is to diffuse wealth. To give all an equal chance to acquire knowledge is the best and surest way to give all an equal chance to acquire property.

~ Rutherford B. Hayes ~


 

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October 5
 

No man has received from nature the right to give orders to others. Freedom is a gift from heaven, and every individual of the same species has the right to enjoy it as soon as he is in enjoyment of his reason.

~ Denis Diderot ~


 

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October 6
 

Space and light and order. Those are the things that men need just as much as they need bread or a place to sleep.

~ Le Corbusier ~


 

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October 7
 

The Letheri are masters at corrupting words, their meanings. They call war peace, they call tyranny liberty. On which side of the shadow you stand decides a word's meaning. Words are the weapons used by those who see others with contempt. A contempt which only deepens when they see how those others are deceived and made into fools because they choose to believe. Because in their naivety they thought the meaning of a word was fixed, immune to abuse.

~ Steven Erikson ~


 

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October 8

 

To know a thing well, know it limits. Only when pushed beyond its tolerances will true nature be seen. Do not depend only on theory if your life is at stake.

~ Frank Herbert ~
in
~ Chapterhouse : Dune ~


 

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October 9


 

We announce the birth of a conceptual country, NUTOPIA.
Citizenship of the country can be obtained by declaration of your awareness of NUTOPIA.
NUTOPIA has no land, no boundaries, no passports, only people.
NUTOPIA has no laws other than cosmic.
All people of NUTOPIA are ambassadors of the country.
As two ambassadors of NUTOPIA, we ask for diplomatic immunity and recognition in the United Nations of our country and our people.

~ John Lennon & Yoko Ono ~


 

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October 10
 

A man who has to be punctually at a certain place at five o'clock has the whole afternoon from one to five ruined for him already.

~ Lin Yutang ~


 

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October 11
 

One of the blessings of age is to learn not to part on a note of sharpness, to treasure the moments spent with those we love, and to make them whenever possible good to remember, for time is short.

~ Eleanor Roosevelt ~


 

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October 12
 

The motive, principle, and end of the religious life is to make an absolute gift of self to God in a self-forgetting love, to end one's own life in order to make room for God's life.

~ Edith Stein ~


 

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October 13
 

When you're weary
Feeling small
When tears are in your eyes
I will dry them all
I'm on your side
When times get rough
And friends just can't be found
Like a bridge over troubled water
I will lay me down.

~ Paul Simon ~


 

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October 14

 

Almost anybody can learn to think or believe or know, but not a single human being can be taught to feel
the moment you feel, you're nobody-but-yourself.
To be nobody-but-yourself-in a world which is doing its best, night and day, to make you everybody else — means to fight the hardest battle which any human being can fight; and never stop fighting.

~ E. E. Cummings ~


 

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October 15

 

Facilis descensus Averni:
noctes atque dies patet atri ianua Ditis;
sed revocare gradum superasque evadere ad auras.
hoc opus, hic labor est.

The gates of hell are open night and day;
Smooth the descent, and easy is the way:
But to return, and view the cheerful skies,
In this the task and mighty labor lies.

~ Virgil ~
with translation by
~ John Dryden ~


 

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October 16
 

None of us can help the things life has done to us. They're done before you realize it, and once they're done they make you do other things until at last everything comes between you and what you'd like to be, and you've lost your true self forever.

~ Eugene O'Neill ~


 

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October 17
 

The job is to ask questions — it always was — and to ask them as inexorably as I can. And to face the absence of precise answers with a certain humility.

~ Arthur Miller ~


 

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October 18
 

Where lies the final harbor, whence we unmoor no more? In what rapt ether sails the world, of which the weariest will never weary? Where is the foundling’s father hidden? Our souls are like those orphans whose unwedded mothers die in bearing them: the secret of our paternity lies in their grave, and we must there to learn it.

~ Herman Melville ~
in
~ Moby-Dick ~



 

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October 19
 

I intend no Monopoly but a Community in Learning: I study not for my own sake only, but for theirs that study not for themselves.

~ Thomas Browne ~



 

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October 20
 

A society which is mobile, which is full of channels for the distribution of a change occurring anywhere, must see to it that its members are educated to personal initiative and adaptability. Otherwise, they will be overwhelmed by the changes in which they are caught and whose significance or connections they do not perceive.

~ John Dewey ~


 

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October 21
 

It is good to have an end to journey towards, but it is the journey that matters in the end.
~ Ursula K. Le Guin ~



 

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October 22
 

Political correctness is the natural continuum from the party line. What we are seeing once again is a self-appointed group of vigilantes imposing their views on others. It is a heritage of communism, but they don't seem to see this.

~ Doris Lessing ~


 


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October 23
 

Nothing is more curious than the almost savage hostility that Humour excites in those who lack it.

~ George Saintsbury ~

 

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October 24


 


the poet, his presence
ursine and kind, shifting his weight in a chair too small
for him,
quietly says, and shyly: "The Poet
never must lose despair."
Then our eyes indeed
meet and hold.
All of us know, smiling
in common knowledge
even the palest spirit among us, burdened
as he is with weight of abstractions
all of us know he means
we mustn't, any of us, lose touch with the source,
pretend it's not there, cover over
the mineshaft of passion...

~ Denise Levertov ~




 


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October 25
 

Those who compare the age in which their lot has fallen with a golden age which exists only in imagination, may talk of degeneracy and decay; but no man who is correctly informed as to the past, will be disposed to take a morose or desponding view of the present.

~ Thomas Macaulay ~


 

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October 26
 

The greatest achievements of men, were at first, nothing but dreams of the minds of men who knew that dreams are the seedlings of all achievements. A burning desire, to be and to do, is the starting point, from which the dreamer must take off.

~ Napoleon Hill ~


 

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October 27
 

Our words must be judged by our deeds; and in striving for a lofty ideal we must use practical methods; and if we cannot attain all at one leap, we must advance towards it step by step, reasonably content so long as we do actually make some progress in the right direction.

~ Theodore Roosevelt ~


 

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October 28
 

I see the triumph of good over evil as a manifestation of the error-correcting process of evolution.

~ Jonas Salk ~


 

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October 29
 

There never comes a point where a theory can be said to be true. The most that one can claim for any theory is that it has shared the successes of all its rivals and that it has passed at least one test which they have failed.

~ Alfred Jules Ayer ~




 

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October 30
 

The Revolution was effected before the war commenced. The Revolution was in the minds and hearts of the people; a change in their religious sentiments, of their duties and obligations... This radical change in the principles, opinions, sentiments, and affections of the people was the real American Revolution.

~ John Adams ~


 

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October 31
 

The imagination may be compared to Adam's dream — he awoke and found it truth.

~ John Keats ~




 

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Today is Tuesday, March 19, 2024; it is now 10:58 (UTC)