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October 7

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Quotes of the day from previous years:

2003
One of the basic tenets of Zen Buddhism is that there is no way to characterize what Zen is. No matter what verbal space you try to enclose Zen in, it resists, and spills over... ~ Douglas Hofstadter in Gödel, Escher, Bach: an Eternal Golden Braid
2004
Every human being, of whatever origin, of whatever station, deserves respect. We must each respect others even as we respect ourselves. ~ U Thant
2005
The opposite of a correct statement is a false statement. But the opposite of a profound truth may well be another profound truth. ~ Niels Bohr (born 7 October 1885)
2006
It is wrong to think that the task of physics is to find out how nature is. Physics concerns what we can say about nature. ~ Niels Bohr
2007
We depend on our words … Our task is to communicate experience and ideas to others. We must strive continually to extend the scope of our description, but in such a way that our messages do not thereby lose their objective or unambiguous character … We are suspended in language in such a way that we cannot say what is up and what is down. The word "reality" is also a word, a word which we must learn to use correctly. ~ Niels Bohr
2008
Chaos needs no allies, for it dwells like a poison in every one of us. ~ Steven Erikson
2009
I am doing it
the it I am doing is
the I that is doing it
the I that is doing it is
the it I am doing
it is doing the I that am doing it
I am being done by the it I am doing
it is doing it
~ Ronald David Laing ~
2010
We must be clear that when it comes to atoms, language can be used only as in poetry. The poet, too, is not nearly so concerned with describing facts as with creating images and establishing mental connections. ~ Niels Bohr
2011
One may think there is a gate to go through
and look a long time for it
without finding it
One may find it and
it may not open
If it opens one may be through it
As one goes through it
one sees that the gate one went through
was the self that went through it
no one went through a gate
there was no gate to go through
no one ever found a gate
no one ever realized there was never a gate
~ Ronald David Laing ~
2012
Can you live without answers? All of you, ask that of yourself. Can you live without answers? Because if you cannot, then most assuredly you will invent your own answers and they will comfort you. And all those who do not share your view will by their very existence strike fear and hatred into your heart. What god blesses this?
~ Steven Erikson ~
2013
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 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 ~
2014
I feel very much like Dirac: the idea of a personal God is foreign to me. But we ought to remember that religion uses language in quite a different way from science. The language of religion is more closely related to the language of poetry than to the language of science. True, we are inclined to think that science deals with information about objective facts, and poetry with subjective feelings. Hence we conclude that if religion does indeed deal with objective truths, it ought to adopt the same criteria of truth as science. But I myself find the division of the world into an objective and a subjective side much too arbitrary. The fact that religions through the ages have spoken in images, parables, and paradoxes means simply that there are no other ways of grasping the reality to which they refer. But that does not mean that it is not a genuine reality. And splitting this reality into an objective and a subjective side won't get us very far.
~ Niels Bohr ~
2015
Forgiveness is an absolute necessity for continued human existence.
~ Desmond Tutu ~
2016
You and I are created for transcendence, laughter, caring. God deliberately did not make the world perfect, for God is looking for you and me to be fellow workers with God.
~ Desmond Tutu ~
2017
The belief of some governments that nuclear weapons are a legitimate and essential source of security is not only misguided, but also dangerous, for it incites proliferation and undermines disarmament. All nations should reject these weapons completely — before they are ever used again.
This is a time of great global tension, when fiery rhetoric could all too easily lead us, inexorably, to unspeakable horror. The specter of nuclear conflict looms large once more. If ever there were a moment for nations to declare their unequivocal opposition to nuclear weapons, that moment is now.
~ ICAN ~
2018
Do not seek to find hope among your leaders. They are the repositories of poison. Their interest in you extends only so far as their ability to control you. For you, they seek duty and obedience, and they will ply you with the language of stirring faith. They seek followers, and woe to those who question, or voice challenge.
Civilization after civilization, it is the same. The world falls to tyranny with a whisper. The frightened are ever keen to bow to a perceived necessity, in the belief that necessity forces conformity, and conformity a certain stability. In a world shaped into conformity, dissidents stand out, are easily branded and dealt with. There is no multitude of perspectives, no dialogue. The victim assumes the face of the tyrant, self-righteous and intransigent, and wars breed like vermin. And people die.
~ Steven Erikson ~
2019
If you are neutral in situations of injustice, you have chosen the side of the oppressor. If an elephant has its foot on the tail of a mouse and you say that you are neutral, the mouse will not appreciate your neutrality.
~ Desmond Tutu ~
2020
A person is a person because he recognizes others as persons.
~ Desmond Tutu ~
2021
I consider those developments in physics during the last decades which have shown how problematical such concepts as "objective" and "subjective" are, a great liberation of thought.
~ Niels Bohr ~
2022
We respect Ukrainians' desire to see their country free, safe and prosperous.
I am confident that true sovereignty of Ukraine is possible only in partnership with Russia. Our spiritual, human and civilizational ties formed for centuries and have their origins in the same sources, they have been hardened by common trials, achievements and victories. Our kinship has been transmitted from generation to generation. It is in the hearts and the memory of people living in modern Russia and Ukraine, in the blood ties that unite millions of our families. Together we have always been and will be many times stronger and more successful. For we are one people.
Today, these words may be perceived by some people with hostility. They can be interpreted in many possible ways. Yet, many people will hear me. And I will say one thing — Russia has never been and will never be "anti-Ukraine". And what Ukraine will be — it is up to its citizens to decide.
~ Vladimir Putin ~
  • proposed by Kalki; Putin's assertions of noble sentiments and charitable intentions, after statements denying Ukraine's genuine independent sovereignty, prior to initiating the 2022 Russian invasion of Ukraine.
2023
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 ~
2024
We are effectively destroying ourselves by violence masquerading as love.
~ Ronald David Laing ~
2025
Rank or add further suggestions…

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Suggestions

[edit]

Quoth the Raven, "Nevermore." ~ Edgar Allan Poe (death date)

  • —This unsigned comment is by Inhuman14 (talk • contribs) .
  • 3 Kalki 23:31, 6 October 2005 (UTC) When good quotes by someone have been found, I generally prefer to to use them on birth dates rather than death dates, though Poe's death date seems one good case for an exception. Though I have some desire to see this used, as it does refer to the act of quotation, there are many other passages of Poe I would prefer, including "Is all that we see or seem but a dream within a dream?" - even though this is very similar to another line from the same poem that has already been used.
  • 1 Zarbon 04:05, 25 April 2008 (UTC)
  • 2 InvisibleSun 23:20, 6 October 2008 (UTC)
  • 4 This quote will only appeal to those who have read the poem though. It made me happy! N6n 15:55, 21 September 2010 (UTC)

I'll be back. ~ Arnold Schwarzenegger (became governor that day)

  • 4 ~ MosheZadka (Talk) 23:09, 5 October 2005 (UTC)
  • 1 Kalki 11:49, 6 October 2007 (UTC) 2 Kalki 23:31, 6 October 2005 (UTC) I think this could be used in some context in the future, but don't feel an urgency to use it at this time... I'm sure it will be back...
  • 1 Zarbon 04:05, 25 April 2008 (UTC)
  • 1 InvisibleSun 23:20, 6 October 2008 (UTC)
  • 2 (I like it.) DanielTom (talk) 03:08, 16 January 2014 (UTC)

When I was on my way to the podium a gentleman stopped me and said I was as good a politician as I was an actor. What a cheap shot. ~ Arnold Schwarzenegger (became governor that day)

This is a page of glory in our history, which has never been written and is never to be written.... ~ Heinrich Himmler (born October 7)

  • 3 Zarbon 04:04, 18 April 2008 (UTC)
  • 1 Kalki 19:27, 2 October 2008 (UTC)
  • 1 InvisibleSun 23:20, 6 October 2008 (UTC)
  • 0 N6n 15:55, 21 September 2010 (UTC)

The best political weapon is the weapon of terror. Cruelty commands respect. Men may hate us. But, we don't ask for their love; only for their fear. ~ Heinrich Himmler (born October 7)

  • 4 because fear has always been a powerful weapon. The spreading of fear allows for the highest amount of respect to be given, a respect dominated strongly by the will to survive. A very similar quotation is said by Darth Maul in Star Wars and is one of my favorites. Both in fiction and history, this ideology is powerful and enigmatic. Zarbon 04:39, 18 April 2008 (UTC)
    • SOURCE: Visions of Reality - A Study of Abnormal Perception and Behavior By Alberto Rivas -Psychology - 2007 - Page 162
  • 1 Kalki 19:27, 2 October 2008 (UTC)
  • 1 InvisibleSun 23:20, 6 October 2008 (UTC)
  • 1 N6n 15:55, 21 September 2010 (UTC)

An army that waits is soon an army at war with itself. ~ Steven Erikson

Death cannot be struggled against, brother. It ever arrives, defiant of every hiding place, of every frantic attempt to escape. Death is every mortal's shadow, his true shadow, and time is its servant, spinning that shadow slowly round, until what stretched before one now stretched before him. ~ Steven Erikson

People are always teaching us democracy but the people who teach us democracy don't want to learn it themselves. ~ Vladimir Putin

Whoever does not miss the Soviet Union has no heart. Whoever wants it back has no brain. ~ Vladimir Putin

...we also need to build our home and make it strong and well protected. We see, after all, what is going on in the world. The Comrade Wolf knows who to eat, as the saying goes. It knows who to eat and is not about to listen to anyone. ~ Vladimir Putin

Insanity - a perfectly rational adjustment to an insane world. ~ Ronald David Laing

Creative people who can't help but explore other mental territories are at greater risk, just as someone who climbs a mountain is more at risk than someone who just walks along a village lane. ~ Ronald David Laing

  • 2 Zarbon 05:19, 2 July 2008 (UTC)
  • 3 Kalki 19:27, 2 October 2008 (UTC) but this needs sourcing and I would prefer it to be extended for context, and I probably won't have time to seek this myself today ~ Kalki 20:44, 6 October 2009 (UTC)
  • 3 InvisibleSun 23:20, 6 October 2008 (UTC)

You don't choose your family. They are God’s gift to you, as you are to them. ~ Desmond Tutu

God has such a deep reverence for our freedom that he'd rather let us freely go to Hell than be compelled to go to Heaven. ~ Desmond Tutu

  • 2 Zarbon 05:19, 2 July 2008 (UTC)
  • 3 Kalki 19:27, 2 October 2008 (UTC) with a lean toward 4.
  • 3 InvisibleSun 23:20, 6 October 2008 (UTC)
  • 3 N6n 15:55, 21 September 2010 (UTC)

We may be surprised at the people we find in heaven. God has a soft spot for sinners. His standards are quite low. ~ Desmond Tutu

  • 2 Zarbon 05:19, 2 July 2008 (UTC)
  • 3 Kalki 19:27, 2 October 2008 (UTC) with a lean toward 4.
  • 3 InvisibleSun 23:20, 6 October 2008 (UTC)

We who advocate peace are becoming an irrelevance when we speak peace. The government speaks rubber bullets, live bullets, tear gas, police dogs, detention, and death. ~ Desmond Tutu

Destiny is a lie. Destiny is justification for atrocity. It is the means by which murderers armour themselves against reprimand. It is a word intended to stand in place of ethics, denying all moral context. ~ Steven Erikson

  • 3 Kalki 20:44, 6 October 2009 (UTC)
  • 3 N6n 15:55, 21 September 2010 (UTC)
  • 3 bystander (talk) 20:43, 2 October 2012 (UTC)

The great extension of our experience in recent years has brought light to the insufficiency of our simple mechanical conceptions and, as a consequence, has shaken the foundation on which the customary interpretation of observation was based. ~ Niels Bohr

  • 3 Kalki 20:44, 6 October 2009 (UTC)

Some subjects are so serious that one can only joke about them. ~ Niels Bohr

  • 3 Kalki 20:44, 6 October 2009 (UTC)

The requirement of the present, the failure of the past, is the same: to provide a thoroughly self-conscious and self-critical human account of man. ~ Ronald David Laing

  • 3 Kalki 20:44, 6 October 2009 (UTC) with a very strong lean toward 4.
  • 3 N6n 15:55, 21 September 2010 (UTC)

Long before a thermonuclear war can come about, we have had to lay waste our own sanity. We begin with the children. It is imperative to catch them in time. Without the most thorough and rapid brainwashing their dirty minds would see through our dirty tricks. Children are not yet fools, but we shall turn them into imbeciles like ourselves, with high I.Q.s if possible.
From the moment of birth, when the Stone Age baby confronts the twentieth-century mother, the baby is subjected to these forces of violence, called love, as its mother and father, and their parents and their parents before them, have been. These forces are mainly concerned with destroying most of its potentialities, and on the whole this enterprise is successful. ~ Ronald David Laing

  • 3 Kalki 20:44, 6 October 2009 (UTC) with a very strong lean toward 4.
  • 3 tending to 4 N6n 15:55, 21 September 2010 (UTC)

Society highly values its normal man. It educates children to lose themselves and to become absurd, and thus to be normal. Normal men have killed perhaps 100,000,000 of their fellow normal men in the last fifty years. ~ Ronald David Laing

  • 3 Kalki 20:44, 6 October 2009 (UTC)
  • 3 N6n 15:55, 21 September 2010 (UTC)
Religion helps to make social life more harmonious; its most important task is to remind us, in the language of pictures and parables, of the wider framework within which our life is set.
~ Niels Bohr ~
In mathematics we can take our inner distance from the content of our statements. In the final analysis mathematics is a mental game that we can play or not play as we choose. Religion, on the other hand, deals with ourselves, with our life and death; its promises are meant to govern our actions and thus, at least indirectly, our very existence. We cannot just look at them impassively from the outside. Moreover, our attitude to religious questions cannot be separated from our attitude to society. Even if religion arose as the spiritual structure of a particular human society, it is arguable whether it has remained the strongest social molding force through history, or whether society, once formed, develops new spiritual structures and adapts them to its particular level of knowledge.
~ Niels Bohr ~
I can quite understand why we cannot speak about the content of religion in an objectifying language. The fact that different religions try to express this content in quite distinct spiritual forms is no real objection. Perhaps we ought to look upon these different forms as complementary descriptions which, though they exclude one another, are needed to convey the rich possibilities flowing from man's relationship with the central order.
~ Niels Bohr ~
Nowadays, the individual seems to be able to choose the spiritual framework of his thoughts and actions quite freely, and this freedom reflects the fact that the boundaries between the various cultures and societies are beginning to become more fluid. But even when an individual tries to attain the greatest possible degree of independence, he will still be swayed by the existing spiritual structures — consciously or unconsciously.
~ Niels Bohr ~

We are not smart enough to leave things to the market. ~ Ha-Joon Chang

I am not interested in picking up crumbs of compassion thrown from the table of someone who considers himself my master. I want the full menu of rights.
~ Desmond Tutu ~
I don't preach a social gospel; I preach the Gospel, period. The gospel of our Lord Jesus Christ is concerned for the whole person. When people were hungry, Jesus didn't say, "Now is that political or social?" He said, "I feed you." Because the good news to a hungry person is bread.
~ Desmond Tutu ~
The most important of all of the rights, really the foundation of all rights, are the rights to private property. But the right to private property is a right for each individual human being to own himself.
~ Harry V. Jaffa ~
The origin of all constitutional rights, according to Lincoln, was the right that a man had to own himself, and therefore to own the product of his own labor. Government exists to protect that right, and to regulate property only to make it more valuable to its possessors.
~ Harry V. Jaffa ~
There is not now, and never has been any such difference between one human being and another human being, or whatever race or color, such that one is by nature the ruler of the other, as any human being is by nature the ruler of any dog or any horse. For this reason, legitimate political authority can arise only by the consent of the governed, and consent can never be given for any reason other than the equal protection of the rights of the governed. Hence equal protection is the foundation of all constitutionalism.
~ Harry V. Jaffa ~



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