Wikiquote:Quote of the day/October 2023

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October 1

There is a remarkable trend toward fundamentalism in all religions — including the different denominations of Christianity as well as Hinduism, Judaism, and Islam. Increasingly, true believers are inclined to begin a process of deciding: "Since I am aligned with God, I am superior and my beliefs should prevail, and anyone who disagrees with me is inherently wrong," and the next step is "inherently inferior." The ultimate step is "subhuman," and then their lives are not significant.
That tendency has created, throughout the world, intense religious conflicts. Those Christians who resist the inclination toward fundamentalism and who truly follow the nature, actions, and words of Jesus Christ should encompass people who are different from us with our care, generosity, forgiveness, compassion, and unselfish love.
It is not easy to do this. It is a natural human inclination to encapsulate ourselves in a superior fashion with people who are just like us — and to assume that we are fulfilling the mandate of our lives if we just confine our love to our own family or to people who are similar and compatible. Breaking through this barrier and reaching out to others is what personifies a Christian and what emulates the perfect example that Christ set for us.

~ Jimmy Carter ~

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October 2

The path of self-purification is hard and steep. To attain to perfect purity one has to become absolutely passion-free in thought, speech and action; to rise above the opposing currents of love and hatred, attachment and repulsion. I know that I have not in me as yet that triple purity, in spite of constant ceaseless striving for it. That is why the world's praise fails to move me, indeed it very often stings me. To conquer the subtle passions seems to me to be harder far than the physical conquest of the world by the force of arms. Ever since my return to India I have had experience of the dormant passions lying hidden with in me. The knowledge of them has made me feel humiliated though not defeated. The experiences and experiments have sustained me and given me great joy. But I know that I have still before me a difficult path to traverse. I must reduce myself to zero. So long as a man does not of his own free will put himself last among his fellow creatures, there is no salvation for him. Ahimsa is the farthest limit of humility.

~ Mahatma Gandhi ~
in
~ The Story of My Experiments with Truth ~

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October 3

What Christ is saying always, what he never swerves from saying, what he says a thousand times and in a thousand different ways, but always with a central unity of belief, is this: "I am my Father’s son, and you are my brothers." And the unity that binds us all together, that makes this earth a family, and all men brothers and the sons of God, is love.

~ Thomas Wolfe ~

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October 4

Change is not merely necessary to life; it is life.

~ Alvin Toffler ~

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October 5

Yes, the universe had a beginning. Yes, the universe continues to evolve. And yes, every one of our body's atoms is traceable to the big bang and to the thermonuclear furnace within high-mass stars. We are not simply in the universe, we are part of it. We are born from it. One might even say we have been empowered by the universe to figure itself out — and we have only just begun.

~ Neil deGrasse Tyson ~

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October 6

Anyone who tries to predict the future is inevitably a fool. Present company included. A prophet without a sense of humor is just stupid.

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October 7

The Norwegian Nobel Committee has decided to award the Nobel Peace Prize for 2023 to Narges Mohammadi for her fight against the oppression of women in Iran and her fight to promote human rights and freedom for all. Her brave struggle has come with tremendous personal costs. Altogether, the regime has arrested her 13 times, convicted her five times, and sentenced her to a total of 31 years in prison and 154 lashes. … In awarding her this year’s Nobel Peace Prize, the Norwegian Nobel Committee wishes to honour her courageous fight for human rights, freedom, and democracy in Iran. This year’s Peace Prize also recognises the hundreds of thousands of people who, in the preceding year, have demonstrated against the theocratic regime’s policies of discrimination and oppression targeting women. Only by embracing equal rights for all can the world achieve the fraternity between nations that Alfred Nobel sought to promote. The award to Narges Mohammadi follows a long tradition in which the Norwegian Nobel Committee has awarded the Peace Prize to those working to advance social justice, human rights, and democracy. These are important preconditions for lasting peace.

~ Norwegian Nobel Committee ~

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October 8

Political extremism involves two prime ingredients: an excessively simple diagnosis of the world's ills, and a conviction that there are identifiable villains back of it all. Such extremism comes easily to men who have doped themselves with delusions of their own overriding virtue and the rascality of others.

~ John W. Gardner ~

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October 9

To everything in this world there comes an end; there even comes an end to the torments suffered in those intermediate states of transition when the last secret tear of one's soul is bitterly swallowed, and the crisis passes, resolving itself into some new sort of phase, which even as it comes into existence is fated in turn to pass away, to disappear in the eternal changing of the times and seasons.

~ Nikolai Bukharin ~

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October 10

We are embarking on a long and difficult war. The war was forced upon us by a murderous attack by Hamas.

~ Benjamin Netanyahu ~

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October 11

In this moment, we must be crystal clear: We stand with Israel. We stand with Israel. And we will make sure Israel has what it needs to take care of its citizens, defend itself, and respond to this attack.
There is no justification for terrorism. There is no excuse.
Hamas does not stand for the Palestinian people’s right to dignity and self-determination. Its stated purpose is the annihilation of the State of Israel and the murder of Jewish people.

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October 12

No one can ever forget what the terrorists did in Israel. Thousands of missiles against peaceful cities. Shooting people in cars on the roads. Men, women, children. No one was spared. Streets covered in blood. Hostages. The terrorists themselves gave the world footage of the atrocities, and were proud of them. Women who were beaten. Elderly people who were kidnapped from their homes. Abducted children. And we do not yet know how many people were captured and brutally taken away by the terrorists. They even tried to humiliate the dead by mocking their bodies.
We saw all of this in Israel.
And the Israelis themselves — Israeli journalists who were here in Ukraine, who were in Bucha, are now saying that they saw the same evil where Russia came. The same evil, and the only difference is that there is a terrorist organization that attacked Israel, and here is a terrorist state that attacked Ukraine. The intentions declared are different, but the essence is the same. You see it. You see the same blood on the streets. You see the same civilian cars shot up. You see the same bodies of people who have been tortured.

~ Volodymyr Zelenskyy ~

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October 13

As many here know, Hamas launched its attack on Simchat Torah. This is the day that Jews celebrate finishing the reading of the Torah. This Saturday, Jews around the world will chant the first words of the book of Genesis. They’ll read that in the beginning, there was darkness; and then there was light. That the first person was alone until a partner joined them.
I’m standing here today alongside our Israeli friends and all those who reject terror to help find the glimmers of light, even in this moment of deep darkness, and to make clear as that as long as there’s a United States, Israel will never be alone.

~ Antony Blinken ~

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October 14

The hand of the aggressor is stayed by strength — and strength alone.

~ Dwight D. Eisenhower ~

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October 15

Few things in life can be so appalling as the difference between a dry antiseptic statement of a principle by a well spoken man in a quiet office, and what happens to people when that principle is put into practice.

~ John Kenneth Galbraith ~

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October 16

A function of free speech under our system of government is to invite dispute. It may indeed best serve its high purposes when it induces a condition of unrest, creates dissatisfaction with conditions as they are, or even stirs people to anger. Speech is often provocative and challenging. It may strike at prejudices and preconceptions and have profound unsettling effects as it presses for acceptance of an idea.

~ William O. Douglas ~

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October 17

Be grateful for the highs — and be grateful for the lows — 'cause it's in the lows where you learn.

~ Suzanne Somers ~

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October 18

Even in his lowest swoop the mountain eagle is still higher than other birds upon the plain, even though they soar.

~ Herman Melville ~
in
~ Moby-Dick ~

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October 19

I would die happy if I knew that on my tombstone could be written these words, "This man was an absolute fool. None of the disastrous things that he reluctantly predicted ever came to pass!"

~ Lewis Mumford ~

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October 20

Well I fought for you;
I fought too hard.
To do it all again babe,
It's gone too far.

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October 21

Every reform, however necessary, will by weak minds be carried to an excess, that itself will need reforming.

~ Samuel Taylor Coleridge ~

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October 22

The universe is an intelligence test.

~ Timothy Leary ~

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October 23

The Book of History is the Bible of Irony.

~ George Saintsbury ~

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October 24

We don't invent our missions, we detect them.

~ Stephen Covey ~

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October 25

We do not protect freedom in order to indulge error. We protect freedom in order to discover truth.

~ Henry Steele Commager ~

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October 26

The anger, the hurt, the — the sense of outrage that the Israeli people are feeling after the brutally inflicted devastation by Hamas is completely understandable.
Israel has the right and, I would add, responsibility to respond to the slaughter of their people. And we will ensure Israel has what it needs to defend itself against these terrorists. That’s a guarantee.
We also have to remember that Hamas does not represent the vast majority of the Palestinian people in the Gaza Strip or anywhere else.
Hamas is hiding behind Palestinian civilians, and it’s despicable and, not surprisingly, cowardly as well.
This also puts an added burden on Israel while they go after Hamas.
But that does not lessen the need for — to operate and align with the laws of war for Israeli — it has to do everything in its power — Israel has to do everything in its power, as difficult as it is, to protect innocent civilians.

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October 27

There are good citizens and bad citizens in every class as in every locality, and the attitude of decent people toward great public and social questions should be determined, not by the accidental questions of employment or locality, but by those deep-set principles which represent the innermost souls of men.

~ Theodore Roosevelt ~

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October 28

Some people are constructive … Others are destructive. It's this diversity in humankind that results in some making positive contributions and some negative contributions. It's necessary to have enough who make positive contributions to overcome the problems of each age.

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October 29

The ground for taking ignorance to be restrictive of freedom is that it causes people to make choices which they would not have made if they had seen what the realization of their choices involved.

~ Alfred Jules Ayer ~

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October 30

The best way I can describe it is: after the show was over, at a party or any — any kind social gathering, if one of us bumped into each other, that was it, that was the end of the night. We just sat with the person all night long — and that was it. You apologized to the people that you were with, but they had to understand you had met somebody special to you, and you were going to talk to that person for the rest of the night. And that's the way it worked. It's certainly the way it worked with all of us. It's just the way it is.

~ Matthew Perry ~

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October 31

In spite of all,
Some shape of beauty moves away the pall
From our dark spirits.

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Today is Saturday, April 27, 2024; it is now 10:31 (UTC)

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