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Thought-of-the-Day
October 2004 Archive

Previous Archives

DATE THOUGHT OF THE DAY
10/01/04"Success is never final, failure is never fatal, it's courage that counts." - Winston Churchill
10/02/04"The more I study religions the more I am convinced that man never worshipped anything but himself." - Richard Francis Burton
10/03/04"I can't understand why people are frightened of new ideas. I'm frightened of the old ones." - John Cage
10/04/04"There is no connection between the political ideas of our educated class and the deep places of the imagination." - Lionel Trilling
10/05/04"We do not choose to be born. We do not choose our parents. We do not choose our historical epoch, or the country of our birth, or the immediate circumstances of our upbringing. We do not, most of us, choose to die; nor do we choose the time or conditions of our death. But within all this realm of choicelessness, we do choose how we shall live: courageously or in cowardice, honorably or dishonorably, with purpose or adrift. We decide what is important and what is trivial in life. We decide that what makes us significant is either what we do or what we refuse to do. But no matter how indifferent the universe may be to our choices and decisions, these choices and decisions are ours to make. We decide. We choose. And as we decide and choose, so are our lives formed. In the end, forming our own destiny is what ambition is about." - Joseph Epstein
10/06/04"I have no particular talent. I am merely inquisitive." - Albert Einstein
10/07/04"There is nothing more frightful than ignorance in action." - Johann Wolfgang von Goethe
10/08/04"One today is worth two tomorrows." - Benjamin Franklin
10/09/04"The worst sin towards our fellow creatures is not to hate them, but to be indifferent to them; that's the essence of inhumanity." - George Bernard Shaw
10/10/04"History seems to us an arena of instincts and fashions, of appetite, avarice, and craving for power, of blood lust, violence, destruction, and wars, of ambitious ministers, venal generals, bombarded cities, and we too easily forget that this is only one of its many aspects. Above all we forget that we ourselves are a part of history, that we are the product of growth and are condemned to perish if we lose the capacity for further growth and change. We are ourselves history and share the responsibility for world history and our position in it. But we gravely lack awareness of this responsibility." - Hermann Hesse
10/11/04"Extraordinary claims require extraordinary evidence." - Carl Sagan
10/12/04"A debate before 70 million people is in fact a distorting glass, a fun-house mirror in which wrinkles look like canyons and hesitation like an attack of amnesia." - Peter Goldman
10/13/04"Wear a smile and have friends; wear a scowl and have wrinkles. What do we live for if not to make the world less difficult for each other?" - George Eliot
10/14/04"Live in the active voice, rather than in the passive. Think more about what you make happen than what is happening to you." - William De Witt Hyde
10/15/04"Dante once said that the hottest places in hell are reserved for those who in a period of moral crisis maintain their neutrality." - John Fitzgerald Kennedy
10/16/04"To love someone deeply gives you strength. Being loved by someone deeply gives you courage." - Lao-Tzu
10/17/04"The wise are instructed by reason, average minds by experience, the stupid by necessity and the brute by instinct." - Marcus Tullius Cicero
10/18/04"To be capable of steady friendship or lasting love, are the two greatest proofs, not only of goodness of heart, but of strength of mind." - William Hazlitt
10/19/04"He prints balderdash because he doesn't know how to get anything better - perhaps, in many cases, because he doesn't know that anything better exists . . . It is not that he is dishonest, but that he is stupid - and, being stupid, a coward. The resourcefulness, enterprise and bellicosity that his job demands are simply not in him. He doesn't wear himself out trying to get the news, as romance has it; he slides supinely into the estate and dignity of a golf player. American journalism suffers from too many golf players." - H.L. Mencken
10/20/04"Everyone thinks of changing the world, but no one thinks of changing himself."- Leo Tolstoy
10/21/04"A free America, democratic in the sense that our forefathers intended it to be, means just this: individual freedom for all, rich or poor, or else this system of government we call democracy is only an expedient to enslave man to the machine and make him like it." - Frank Lloyd Wright
10/22/04"All the taxes paid over a lifetime by the average American are spent by the government in less than a second." - Jim Fiebig
10/23/04"It is preoccupation with possessions, more than anything else, that prevents us from living freely and nobly." - Bertrand Russell
10/24/04"If there is no struggle there is no progress. Those who profess to favor freedom and yet deprecate agitation, are men who want crops without plowing up the ground, they want rain without thunder and lightning. They want the ocean without the awful roar of its many waters. This struggle may be a moral one, or it may be a physical one, and it may be both moral and physical, but it must be a struggle. Power concedes nothing without a demand. It never did and it never will." - Frederick Douglass
10/25/04"There are seven sins in the world: wealth without work, pleasure without conscience, knowledge without character, commerce without morality, science without humanity, worship without sacrifice, and politics without principle." - Mohandas Gandhi
10/26/04"People are like stained glass windows. They sparkle and shine when the sun is out, but when the darkness sets in, their true beauty is revealed only if there is a light from within." - Elisabeth Kubler-Ross
10/27/04"Character is the result of the cultivation of the highest and noblest qualities in human nature, and putting these qualities to practical use." - Ella Wheeler Wilcox
10/28/04"Baseball is the only field of endeavor where a man can succeed three times out of ten and be considered a good performer." - Ted Williams
10/29/04"It is inaccurate to say I hate everything. I am strongly in favor of common sense, common honesty, and common decency. This makes me forever ineligible for public office." - H.L. Mencken
10/30/04"Imagination and fiction make up more than three quarters of our life." - Simone Weil
10/31/04"The world is divided into two kinds of people, those who spend a great deal of time saving money, and those who spend a great deal of money saving time." - Peter Cochrane


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