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September 2

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Quotes of the day from previous years:

2003
Ars longa, vita brevis. (Art is long, life is short.) ~ Horace
2004
The reasonable man adapts himself to the world; the unreasonable one persists in trying to adapt the world to himself. Therefore all progress depends on the unreasonable man. ~ George Bernard Shaw
2005
Speak softly and carry a big stick. ~ Theodore Roosevelt
  • proposed by MosheZadka: First public use of the phrase by Roosevelt in a speech at the Minnesota State Fair (2 September 1901)
2006
Before you do anything, think. If you do something to try and impress someone, to be loved, accepted or even to get someone's attention, stop and think. So many people are busy trying to create an image, they die in the process. ~ Salma Hayek (born 2 September 1966)
2007
There is only one thing infamous in love, and that is a falsehood. ~ Paul Bourget (born 2 September 1852)
2008
The first casualty when war comes is truth. ~ Hiram Johnson (born 2 September 1866)
2009
If thinking men are few, they are for that reason all the more powerful. Let no man imagine that he has no influence. Whoever he may be, and wherever he may be placed, the man who thinks becomes a light and a power. ~ Henry George (born 2 September 1839)
2010
To prevent government from becoming corrupt and tyrannous, its organization and methods should be as simple as possible, its functions be restricted to those necessary to the common welfare, and in all its parts it should be kept as close to the people and as directly within their control as may be. ~ Henry George
2011
The great work of the present for every man, and every organization of men, who would improve social conditions, is the work of education — the propagation of ideas. It is only as it aids this that anything else can avail. ~ Henry George
2012
As man is so constituted that it is utterly impossible for him to attain happiness save by seeking the happiness of others, so does it seem to be of the nature of things that individuals and classes can obtain their own just rights only by struggling for the rights of others.
~ Henry George ~
2013
I care nothing for creeds. I am not concerned with any one's religious belief. But I would have men think for themselves. If we do not, we can only abandon one superstition to take up another, and it may be a worse one. It is as bad for a man to think that he can know nothing as to think he knows all.
~ Henry George ~
2014
Whoever becomes imbued with a noble idea kindles a flame from which other torches are lit, and influences those with whom he comes in contact, be they few or many. How far that influence, thus perpetuated, may extend, it is not given to him here to see.
~ Henry George ~
2015
More is given to us than to any people at any time before; and, therefore, more is required of us. We have made, and still are making, enormous advances on material lines. It is necessary that we commensurately advance on moral lines. Civilization, as it progresses, requires a higher conscience, a keener sense of justice, a warmer brotherhood, a wider, loftier, truer public spirit. Falling these, civilization must pass into destruction. It cannot be maintained on the ethics of savagery.
~ Henry George ~
2016
Human thought is like a monstrous pendulum: it keeps swinging from one extreme to the other. Within the compass of five generations we find the Puritan first an uncompromising believer in demonology and magic, and then a scoffer at everything involving the play of fancy.
~ Eugene Field ~
2017
Social reform is not to be secured by noise and shouting; by complaints and denunciation; by the formation of parties, or the making of revolutions; but by the awakening of thought and the progress of ideas. Until there be correct thought, there cannot be right action; and when there is correct thought, right action will follow. Power is always in the hands of the masses of men. What oppresses the masses is their own ignorance, their own short-sighted selfishness.
~ Henry George ~
2018
Free trade consists simply in letting people buy and sell as they want to buy and sell. It is protection that requires force, for it consists in preventing people from doing what they want to do. Protective tariffs are as much applications of force as are blockading squadrons, and their object is the same — to prevent trade. The difference between the two is that blockading squadrons are a means whereby nations seek to prevent their enemies from trading; protective tariffs are a means whereby nations attempt to prevent their own people from trading. What protection teaches us, is to do to ourselves in time of peace what enemies seek to do to us in time of war.
~ Henry George ~
2019
What sin is to the moralist and crime to the jurist so to the scientific man is ignorance. On our plane knowledge and ignorance are the immemorial adversaries.
~ Frederick Soddy ~
2020
There are conditions of blindness so voluntary that they become complicity.
~ Paul Bourget ~
2021
Some day you will know for yourself that it is almost as true to say that one recovers from all things as that there is nothing which does not leave its scar.
~ Paul Bourget ~
2022
I wanted to have a voice, and it was okay if I wasn't going to be so famous or so rich. And this the one thing I learned: How do you recognize what's your true dream and what is the dream that you are dreaming for other people to love you? … The difference is very easy to understand. If you enjoy the process, it's your dream. … If you are enduring the process, just desperate for the result, it's somebody else's dream.
~ Salma Hayek ~
2023
At certain moments, words are nothing; it is the tone in which they are uttered.
~ Paul Bourget ~
2024
As scientific men we have all, no doubt, felt that our work has been put often to base uses, which must lead to disaster. But what sin is to the moralist and crime to the jurist so to the scientific man is ignorance. On our plane knowledge and ignorance are the immemorial adversaries.
Scientific men can hardly escape the charge of ignorance with regard to the precise effect of the impact of modern science upon the mode of living of the people and upon their civilisation. For them, such a charge is worse than that of crime.
~ Frederick Soddy ~
2025
Rank or add further suggestions…

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Suggestions

[edit]

Vietnam is a country, not a war ~ Le Van Bang, former Vietnamese Ambassador to the United States

  • 3 - for Vietnamese National Day. LordAmeth 18:48, 23 May 2006 (UTC)
  • 2 Kalki 23:58, 1 September 2006 (UTC)
  • 1 Zarbon 21:51, 24 April 2008 (UTC)
  • 2 InvisibleSun 21:54, 1 September 2008 (UTC)

We to a little ale-house on the Bankside, over against the Three Cranes, and there stayed till it was dark almost, and saw the fire grow; and, as it grew darker, appeared more and more, and in corners and upon steeples, and between churches and houses, as far as we could see up the hill of the City, in a most horrid malicious bloody flame, not like the fine flame of an ordinary fire... We stayed till, it being darkish, we saw the fire as only one entire arch of fire from this to the other side the bridge, and in a bow up the hill for an arch of above a mile long: it made me weep to see it. ~ Samuel Pepys (diary entry, September 2, 1666, the first day of the Great Fire of London)

  • 3 InvisibleSun 19:44, 1 September 2007 (UTC)
  • 2 Kalki 22:59, 1 September 2007 (UTC) 2 as it stands, but I would rank it a 3 if it were trimmed to the most essential line: "We stayed till, it being darkish, we saw the fire as only one entire arch of fire from this to the other side the bridge, and in a bow up the hill for an arch of above a mile long: it made me weep to see it."
  • 1 Zarbon 21:51, 24 April 2008 (UTC)

There are some surely whom you like and whom you dislike, for whom you entertain esteem and for whom you feel contempt? Have you not thought that you have some duties toward them, that you can aid them in leading better lives? ~ Paul Bourget

  • 3 Kalki 09:07, 2 September 2007 (UTC) with a very strong lean toward 4.
  • 1 Zarbon 21:51, 24 April 2008 (UTC)
  • 2 InvisibleSun 21:54, 1 September 2008 (UTC)

The forests have taught man liberty. ~ Paul Bourget

  • 3 Kalki 09:07, 2 September 2007 (UTC) with a lean toward 4.
  • 2 Zarbon 21:51, 24 April 2008 (UTC)
  • 3 InvisibleSun 21:54, 1 September 2008 (UTC)

There is no such thing as an age for love … because the man capable of loving — in the complex and modern sense of love as a sort of ideal exaltation — never ceases to love. ~ Paul Bourget

  • 2 Zarbon 04:57, 30 May 2008 (UTC)
  • 3 Kalki 00:24, 1 September 2008 (UTC) with a strong lean toward 4.
  • 3 InvisibleSun 21:54, 1 September 2008 (UTC)

its in rooms like this one with no windows... that we prepare our gestures so that we may best present them frightened in the face of death. -Clarice Starling "Silence of the Lambs"

—This unsigned comment is by 12.109.107.253 (talk • contribs) .

There is iconoclasm in the excessively intellectual, and they delight in destroying their dearest moral or sentimental idols, the better to prove their strength. ~ Paul Bourget

Some of the beliefs and legends bequeathed to us by Antiquity are so universally and firmly established that we have become accustomed to consider them as being almost as ancient as humanity itself. Nevertheless we are tempted to inquire how far the fact that some of these beliefs and legends have so many features in common is due to chance, and whether the similarity between them may not point to the existence of an ancient, totally unknown and unsuspected civilization of which all other traces have disappeared. ~ Frederick Soddy

To dream big doesn't necessarily mean to imagine becoming the biggest movie star in the world. Dreaming big is about taking the simplest thing in life and enjoying it — and seeing it as the biggest thing that can possibly exist. … I work in an industry that is the first to kill this ability because everything is so celebrity oriented. I am part of a cancer. In my world, you have to be so beautiful, so skinny, so rich, so famous — and I don't believe you really have to be any of those things. You simply have to be who you are.
~ Salma Hayek ~


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