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March 22

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Quotes of the day from previous years:

2004
Cowardice asks the question, "Is it safe?" Expediency asks the question, "Is it politic?" And Vanity comes along and asks the question, "Is it popular?" But Conscience asks the question "Is it right?" And there comes a time when one must take a position that is neither safe, nor politic, nor popular, but he must do it because Conscience tells him it is right. ~ Martin Luther King
2005
Do not the most moving moments of our lives find us all without words? ~ Marcel Marceau (born 22 March 1923)
2006
As I understand it, laws, commands, rules and edicts are for those who have not the light which makes plain the pathway. ~ Anne Hutchinson (banished from the Massachusetts Bay Colony, 22 March 1638)
2007
Man’s destiny appears as a thread lost in an endless labyrinth... I have tried to shed some gleams of light on the shadow of man startled by his anguish. ~ Marcel Marceau
2008
Music and silence... combine strongly because music is done with silence, and silence is full of music. ~ Marcel Marceau
2009

I buoyed me on the wings of dream,
Above the world of sense;
I set my thought to sound the scheme,
And fathom the Immense;
I tuned my spirit as a lute
To catch wind-music wandering mute.

Yet came there never voice nor sign;
But through my being stole
Sense of a Universe divine,
And knowledge of a soul
Perfected in the joy of things,
The star, the flower, the bird that sings.

Nor I am more, nor less, than these;
All are one brotherhood;
I and all creatures, plants, and trees,
The living limbs of God;
And in an hour, as this, divine,
I feel the vast pulse throb in mine.
~ Francis William Bourdillon ~

2010
To communicate through silence is a link between the thoughts of man. ~ Marcel Marceau
2011

The Night has a thousand eyes,
And the Day but one;
Yet the light of the bright world dies
With the dying sun.

The mind has a thousand eyes,
And the heart but one;
Yet the light of a whole life dies
When love is done.
~ Francis William Bourdillon

2012
'Tis now the summer of your youth; time has not cropt the roses from your cheek, though sorrow long has washed them. Then use your beauty wisely; and, freed by injuries, fly from the cruellest of men, for shelter with the kindest. ~ Edward Moore
2013
If you please to give me leave I shall give you the ground of what I know to be true.
~ Anne Hutchinson ~
2014
I have spent more than half a lifetime trying to express the tragic moment.
~ Marcel Marceau ~
2015
A knife is sharpened on stone, steel is tempered by fire, but men must be sharpened by men.
~ Louis L'Amour ~
in
~ The Walking Drum ~
2016
There will come a time when you believe everything is finished; that will be the beginning.
~ Louis L'Amour ~
2017
Do not let yourself be bothered by the inconsequential. One has only so much time in this world, so devote it to the work and the people most important to you, to those you love and things that matter. One can waste half a lifetime with people one doesn't really like, or doing things when one would be better off somewhere else.
~ Louis L'Amour ~
2018
Most Americans, in their sweet innocence, think that class has to do with money. But a glance at Donald Trump and Leona Helmsley will indicate that it has very little to do with money. It has to do with taste and style, and it has to do with the development of those features by acts of character.
~ Paul Fussell ~
2019
History is not made only by kings and parliaments, presidents, wars, and generals. It is the story of people, of their love, honor, faith, hope and suffering; of birth and death, of hunger, thirst and cold, of loneliness and sorrow.
~ Louis L'Amour ~
2020
Nobody sings a love song quite like you do
Oh, and nobody else can make me sing along
Nobody else can make me feel things are right
When I know they're wrong,
Nobody sings a love song quite like you.
…
Sing your song sweet music man, I believe in you.
~ Kenny Rogers ~
  • proposed by Kalki, in regard of his recent death.
2021
Up to a point a man’s life is shaped by environment, heredity, and movements and changes in the world about him; then there comes a time when it lies within his grasp to shape the clay of his life into the sort of thing he wishes to be. Only the weak blame parents, their race, their times, lack of good fortune, or the quirks of fate. Everyone has it within his power to say, this I am today, that I shall be tomorrow. The wish, however, must be implemented by deeds.
~ Louis L'Amour ~
2022
In its Order, which has binding effect, the Court indicates the following provisional measures: ... The Russian Federation shall immediately suspend the military operations that it commenced on 24 February 2022 in the territory of Ukraine ... The Russian Federation shall ensure that any military or irregular armed units which may be directed or supported by it, as well as any organizations and persons which may be subject to its control or direction, take no steps in furtherance of the military operations referred to ... Both Parties shall refrain from any action which might aggravate or extend the dispute before the Court or make it more difficult to resolve.
~ International Court of Justice ~
2023
How much of what we do is free will, and how much is programmed in our genes? Why is each people so narrow that it believes that it, and it alone, has all the answers?
In religion, is there but one road to salvation? Or are there many, all equally good, all going in the same general direction?
I have read my books by many lights, hoarding their beauty, their wit or wisdom against the dark days when I would have no book, nor a place to read. I have known hunger of the belly kind many times over, but I have known a worse hunger: the need to know and to learn.
~ Louis L'Amour ~
2024
Most Americans, in their sweet innocence, think that class has to do with money. But a glance at Donald Trump and Leona Helmsley will indicate that it has very little to do with money. It has to do with taste and style, and it has to do with the development of those features by acts of character. That was one of my points: to try to separate class from mercantilism or commercialism.
~ Paul Fussell ~
2025
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[edit]

I find nothing more depressing than optimism. ~ Paul Fussell

  • 3 and lean toward 4. Zarbon 00:33, 15 March 2009 (UTC)
  • 2 the crucial distinction to be made always involves the question "Optimism about what?"

Exploration belongs to the Renaissance, travel to the bourgeois age, tourism to our proletarian moment. … The explorer seeks the undiscovered, the traveler that which has been discovered by the mind working in history, the tourist that which has been discovered by entrepreneurship and prepared for him by the arts of mass publicity. … If the explorer moves toward the risks of the formless and the unknown, the tourist moves toward the security of pure cliché. It is between these two poles that the traveler mediates. ~ Paul Fussell

  • 2 Zarbon 00:33, 15 March 2009 (UTC)
  • 3 Kalki 13:09, 21 March 2009 (UTC)
  • 3 though I would start with "The explorer seeks…" bystander (talk) 19:32, 18 March 2012 (UTC)

And the ideal travel writer is consumed not just with a will to know. He is also moved by a powerful will to teach. Inside every good travel writer there is a pedagogue — often a highly moral pedagogue — struggling to get out. ~ Paul Fussell

  • 2 Zarbon 00:33, 15 March 2009 (UTC)
  • 2 Kalki 13:09, 21 March 2009 (UTC)

Anyone telling about his travels must be a liar, … for if a traveler doesn't visit his narrative with the spirit and techniques of fiction, no one will want to hear it. ~ Paul Fussell

  • 2 Zarbon 00:33, 15 March 2009 (UTC)
  • 3 Kalki 13:09, 21 March 2009 (UTC)

Wars damage the civilian society as much as they damage the enemy. Soldiers never get over it. ~ Paul Fussell

  • 2 Zarbon 00:33, 15 March 2009 (UTC)
  • 3 Kalki 13:09, 21 March 2009 (UTC) I was intending to shift my ranking to a 4 on this, and use it on 2018·03·21, but have not yet been able to source it.

Understanding the past requires pretending that you don't know the present. ~ Paul Fussell

  • 3 and lean toward 4. Zarbon 00:33, 15 March 2009 (UTC)
  • 2 Kalki 13:09, 21 March 2009 (UTC)

Time still, as he flies, brings increase to her truth,
And gives to her mind what he steals from her youth.
~ Edward Moore

  • 3 Zarbon 00:33, 15 March 2009 (UTC)
  • 2 Kalki 13:09, 21 March 2009 (UTC) but perhaps a 3 with more context:
What tho' on her cheeks the rose loses its hue,
Her wit and her humour bloom all the year thro';
Time still, as he flies, adds increase to her truth,
And gives to her mind what he steals from her youth.

He that loves a rosy cheek,
Or a coral lip admires,
Or from star-like eyes doth seek
Fuel to maintain his fires,—
As old Time makes these decay,
So his flames must waste away.
~ Thomas Carew

  • 2 Zarbon 00:49, 15 March 2009 (UTC)
  • 2 Kalki 13:09, 21 March 2009 (UTC) with a lean toward 3.
  • 2 InvisibleSun 21:53, 21 March 2009 (UTC)

Science walks forward on two feet, namely theory and experiment. ~ Robert Millikan (born 1868-03-22)

I would not sit waiting for some vague tomorrow, nor for something to happen. One could wait a lifetime, and find nothing at the end of the waiting. I would begin here, I would make something happen. ~ Louis L'Amour (dob)

  • 3 bystander (talk) 04:03, 22 March 2014 (UTC) with a lean toward 4
  • 3 ♞☤☮♌︎Kalki ⚚⚓︎⊙☳☶⚡ 23:11, 21 March 2015 (UTC) This is good, but I have not yet sourced this definitely.
My real speciality is the mathematical analysis of Hilbert Space operators. But this was no time to come on like an ivory-tower idealist.
~ Rudy Rucker ~
I'm a pacifist about certain things. I'm a pacifist in the way I define national interest. I use this example frequently: If the Mexicans decided to cross the Texas border with firearms, I would be down there in a moment with a rifle and a whistle to direct the troops to repel them. If the United States is attacked, I will defend it.
My problem is the United States' defending the interests of the Union Oil Company or the United Fruit Company. Those are not American interests. They're private-money interests, and that bothers me a great deal.
~ Paul Fussell ~
As a former soldier, what struck me is the absolutely heartless way that war was being pursued by the Americans, partly I think because of the race problem. The Vietnamese to us were not merely communists, they were nasty little yellow people without souls. It didn't matter how we blew them up or how we bombed them or how we burned their villages and so on. I was very struck by that. And one thing I was trying to do in The Great War and Modern Memory was to awaken a sort of civilian sympathy for the people who suffer on the ground in wartime, and that's really an act that I've been performing, oh, ever since 1945, I suppose.
~ Paul Fussell ~
War is about survival and it's about mass killing and it's about killing or being killed — that is, in the infantry — and it is extremely unpleasant. One realizes that a terrible mistake has been made somewhere, either by the optimistic eighteenth century or by mechanistic twentieth century. The two don't fit together somehow, and that creates, obviously, irony.
~ Paul Fussell ~
"Those who fought know a secret about themselves, and it is not very nice." … They have experienced secretly and privately their natural human impulse toward sadism and brutality. As I say in this new book of mine, not merely did I learn to kill with a noose of piano wire put around somebody's neck from behind, but I learned to enjoy the prospect of killing that way. It's those things that you learn about yourself that you never forget. You learn that you have much wider dimensions than you had imagined before you had to fight a war. That's salutary. It's well to know exactly who you are so you can conduct the rest of your life properly.
~ Paul Fussell ~
Irony is a great help in helping to penetrate fraudulent language. In the Second War especially, the language became virtually identical with the language of advertising. It was seen through by the troops, who knew what the truth was. It helped to sustain civilian support for the war, which was its purpose, after all. … And euphemism has remained, of course. It's a large part of the tone of public discourse. … It's now practiced on so wide and so official a scale that it's grown out of all proportion to what it was in the war.
~ Paul Fussell ~
One of my favorite quotes is from Hemingway, who said, "Never persuade yourself that war, no matter how necessary, is not a crime." … It is. Sometimes it's necessary, but it's always awful, and that's my point.
~ Paul Fussell ~


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