2019-01-01: "Just how deep do you believe? / Will you bite the hand that feeds? / Will you chew until it bleeds? / Can you get up off your knees? / Are you brave enough to see? / Do you want to change it?" -- Nine Inch Nails ('The Hand That Feeds', 2005)
2019-01-02: "If the sea is where life began - where our ancestors first walked ashore - then who's to say what new life may be developing in its uncharted depths." -- Fox Mulder ('The X-Files', 'Agua Mala', 1999)
2019-01-03: "Some ponder things backward, paying much attention to what matters little and little to what matters much." -- Baltasar Gracián
2019-01-04: "The present is the necessary product of all the past, the necessary cause of all the future." -- Robert G. Ingersoll
2019-01-05: "Wherever, in any country the whole people feel that the happiness of all is dependent upon the happiness of the weakest, there freedom exists." -- Booker T. Washington
2019-01-06: "Complete the pattern, solve the puzzle, turn the key." -- Pinhead ('Hellraiser III: Hell On Earth', 1992)
2019-01-07: "We do not want our world to perish. But in our quest for knowledge, century by century, we have placed all our trust in a cold, impartial intellect which only brings us nearer to destruction. We have heeded no wisdom offering guidance." -- Dora Russell
2019-01-08: "One is tempted to define man as a rational animal who always loses his temper when he is called upon to act in accordance with the dictates of reason." -- Oscar Wilde
2019-01-09: "If the world were perfect, it wouldn't be." -- Yogi Berra
2019-01-10: "If you act as the enemy of life, then life will become your enemy." -- Orson Scott Card ('Xenocide', 1991)
2019-01-11: "Earth. Take a good look. It could be your last." -- Tagline for 'Independence Day' (1996)
2019-01-12: "Very often, all the activity of the human mind is directed not in revealing the truth, but in hiding the truth." -- Leo Tolstoy
2019-01-13: "Unity and complementarity constitute reality." -- Werner Heisenberg
2019-01-14: "Practice what you know, and it will help to make clear what now you do not know." -- Rembrandt
2019-01-15: "Woe, destruction, ruin, and decay; / The worst is death, and death will have his day." -- William Shakespeare ('Richard II', c. 1595)
2019-01-16: "Cassandra in Greek legend, you recall, was condemned to know the future but to be disbelieved when she foretold it." -- Dr. Kathryn Railly ('12 Monkeys', 1995)
2019-01-17: "For every beginning there is an end." -- Tagline For 'Final Destination 2' (2003)
2019-01-18: "The wisest of all, in my opinion, is he who can, if only once a month, call himself a fool — a faculty unheard of nowadays." -- Fyodor Dostoevsky
2019-01-19: "It always seems to me extreme rashness on the part of some when they want to make human abilities the measure of what nature can do." -- Galileo Galilei
2019-01-20: "The foundation of all technology is fire." -- Isaac Asimov
2019-01-21: "The road to wisdom? — Well, it's plain and simple to express: Err and err and err again but less and less and less." -- Piet Hein
2019-01-22: "There is a degree of doubt, and caution, and modesty, which, in all kinds of scrutiny and decision, ought for ever to accompany a just reasoner." -- David Hume
2019-01-23: "Following the path of least resistance is what makes the river crooked!" -- Utah Phillips
2019-01-24: "Those who adhere to the past won't be able to cope with the future." -- Willy Brandt
2019-01-25: "There are people with whom everything they consider a means turns mysteriously into an end." -- Friedrich Schlegel
2019-01-26: "One cannot escape from the facts." -- Agatha Christie
2019-01-27: "However doomed a man may be, he still has the great luxury of freedom of thought that can carry him soaring over the past and the future, the single attribute that can never be taken away by tyrant or circumstance." -- Dmitri Volkogonov
2019-01-28: "Satire's my weapon, but I'm too discreet / To run amuck and tilt at all I meet." -- Alexander Pope
2019-01-29: "Seems to me, it ain't the world that's so bad but what we're doin' to it." -- Louis Armstrong
2019-01-30: "Forward movement is not helpful if what is needed is a change of direction." -- David Fleming
2019-01-31: "Matter and energy seem granular in structure, and so does 'life', but not so mind." -- Erwin Schrödinger
February 2019
2019-02-01: "The world won't listen, and a rain's gonna fall so hard along this way." -- Fatboy ('Way Down Low', 2008)
2019-02-02: "We should never believe anything we have not dared to doubt." -- Christina, Queen of Sweden
2019-02-03: "Everyone's becoming better and better at less and less. Eventually someone's going to be superb, at nothing." -- Kenneth Williams
2019-02-04: "Do not counsel what is most pleasant, but what is best." -- Solon
2019-02-05: "Who dares to teach must never cease to learn." -- John Cotton Dana
2019-02-06: "The beauty of the world which is so soon to perish, has two edges, one of laughter, one of anguish, cutting the heart asunder." -- Virginia Woolf
2019-02-07: "These days, reality is a bummer." -- Wade Watts ('Ready Player One', 2018)
2019-02-08: "Socrates used to call the opinions of the many by the name of Lamiae, bugbears to frighten children." -- Marcus Aurelius
2019-02-09: "I was brought up to believe that there is no virtue in conforming meekly to the dominant opinion of the moment." -- Jane Jacobs
2019-02-10: "People have become robots — zombies — too busy scrambling for day-to-day existence to be able to see they're really victims." -- Anarky
2019-02-11: "Forget being taught and concentrate on learning. When you're sure, question everything." -- Syndicate Wars (1996)
2019-02-12: "That every man should be true to himself, and that there is no world, no star, in which honesty is a crime. Upon that rock I stand." -- Robert G. Ingersoll
2019-02-13: "Flip-flop, hippety-hop, offa your rocker and over the top, life’s a fiction and the world’s a lie, so put on some Creedence and let’s get high." -- Stephen King ('The Dark Tower II: The Drawing Of The Three', 1987)
2019-02-14: "Widespread intellectual and moral docility may be convenient for leaders in the short term, but it is suicidal for nations in the long term." -- Carl Sagan
2019-02-15: "Explorers have ventured into the deeps and the heights. Of these explorers some are scientists, some are mystics. Each is driven by a different purpose. The one thing they share in common is a wish to cross the Borderlands that lie beyond the Outer Limits." -- The Outer Limits ('The Borderland', 1963)
2019-02-16: "Anyone who proposes to do good must not expect people to roll stones out of his way, but must accept his lot calmly if they even roll a few more upon it." -- Albert Schweitzer
2019-02-17: "Bureaucracy defends the status quo long past the time when the quo has lost its status." -- Laurence J. Peter
2019-02-18: "Any real change implies the breakup of the world as one has always known it, the loss of all that gave one an identity, the end of safety." -- James Baldwin
2019-02-19: "If you want a picture of the future, imagine a boot stamping on a human face — forever." -- George Orwell ('Nineteen Eighty-Four', 1949)
2019-02-20: "It is a bad thing for a nation to raise and to admire a false standard of success; and there can be no falser standard than that set by the deification of material well-being in and for itself." -- Theodore Roosevelt
2019-02-21: "The greater the interest involved in a truth the more careful, self-distrustful, and patient should be the inquiry." -- Harriet Beecher Stowe
2019-02-22: "Marx, Hegel, Spengler, Toynbee, and Sorokin, each with his own variation on the theme of time-flow as mechanically patterned fluctuation, predict the future but ignore its dynamic interaction with the past and the present." -- Fred Polak
2019-02-23: "Everybody knows that the best way to learn is under intense life-threatening pressure." -- Spider-Man ('Spider-Man: Into The Spider-Verse', 2018)
2019-02-24: "Each progressive spirit is opposed by a thousand mediocre minds appointed to guard the past." -- Maurice Maeterlinck
2019-02-25: "You can't prepare for where the truth will take you." -- Tagline For '8mm' (1999)
2019-02-26: "But of all environments, that produced by man’s complex technology is perhaps the most unstable and rickety." -- Isaac Asimov
2019-02-27: "We may brave human laws, but we cannot resist natural ones." -- Jules Verne ('Twenty Thousand Leagues Under the Sea', 1870)
2019-02-28: "Who will survive and what will be left of them?" -- Tagline For 'The Texas Chain Saw Massacre' (1974)
March 2019
2019-03-01: "You're drivin' with your eyes closed / You're gonna hit somethin' but that's the way it goes." -- Don Henley ('Drivin' With Your Eyes Closed', 1984)
2019-03-02: "What is the use of having developed a science well enough to make predictions if, in the end, all we're willing to do is stand around and wait for them to come true." -- F. Sherwood Rowland
2019-03-03: "It should never be forgotten that what we call 'catastrophes,' are, in relation to the earth, changes, the equivalents of which would be well represented by the development of a few pimples, or the scratch of a pin on a man's head." -- Thomas Henry Huxley
2019-03-04: "I can not do everything, but I can do something. I must not fail to do the something that I can do." -- Helen Keller
2019-03-05: "Scientific progress on a broad front results from the free play of free intellects, working on subjects of their own choice, in the manner dictated by their curiosity for exploration of the unknown." -- Vannevar Bush
2019-03-06: "Who fastest walks, but walks astray, / Is only furthest from his way." -- Matthew Prior
2019-03-07: "Make yourselves sheep, and the wolves will eat you." -- Benjamin Franklin
2019-03-08: "We all want to see behind the veil, don't we? But once we do, we mostly just close our eyes again and pretend what we saw was never really there." -- Hellblade: Senua's Sacrifice (2017)
2019-03-09: "To become properly acquainted with a truth, we must first have disbelieved it, and disputed against it." -- Novalis
2019-03-10: "It has occasionally been remarked upon that it is as easy to overlook something large and obvious as it is to overlook something small and niggling, and that the large things one overlooks can often cause problems." -- Neil Gaiman
2019-03-11: "Every step of life shows much caution is required." -- Johann Wolfgang von Goethe
2019-03-12: "They're already here." -- Tagline for 'War Of The Worlds' (2005)
2019-03-13: "Life is a tragedy for those who feel, and a comedy for those who think." -- Jean de La Bruyère
2019-03-14: "We're playing with half a deck as long as we tolerate that the cardinals of government and science should dictate where human curiosity can legitimately send its attention and where it can not." -- Terence McKenna
2019-03-15: "I think we have thought too small and have been too afraid." -- Clifford D. Simak
2019-03-16: "Violence creates nothing but violence, no matter what we call it and what the excuse. And so it goes, down all the centuries." -- Michael Moorcock ('The Steel Tsar', 1981)
2019-03-17: "We must develop an absolute priority of humans ahead of profit — any humans ahead of any profit." -- Frank Herbert
2019-03-18: "Reality is always greater — much greater — than what we know, than whatever we can say about it." -- Michael Crichton
2019-03-19: "It is the function of the intellect to discriminate between the true and the false — a distinction which is applicable to all objects of intellectual perception." -- Maimonides
2019-03-20: "The command of a large sum is a dangerous temptation to a national administration. Though accumulated at their expense, the people rarely, if ever profit by it: yet in point of fact, all value, and consequently, all wealth, originates with the people." -- Jean-Baptiste Say
2019-03-21: "Sometimes I have a feeling of doom." -- Jim Maddison ('Day The World Ended', 1955)
2019-03-22: "We make our own luck." -- Thorin Oakenshield ('The Hobbit: The Desolation Of Smaug', 2013)
2019-03-23: "Whoever wants music instead of noise, joy instead of pleasure, soul instead of gold, creative work instead of business, passion instead of foolery, finds no home in this trivial world of ours." -- Herman Hesse ('Steppenwolf', 1927)
2019-03-24: "Every minute of every day we choose. Who we are. Who we forgive. Who we defend and protect. To choose a side or to walk the line. To play the middle. To straddle the fence between what is and what should be." -- Walter Skinner ('The X-Files', 'S.R. 819', 1999)
2019-03-25: "There has to be a united determination to persevere in the struggle, to make sacrifices in the name of enduring truths, to resist the corrupting influences of desire, ill will, ignorance and fear." -- Aung San Suu Kyi
2019-03-26: "The only sane policy for the world is that of abolishing war." -- Linus Pauling
2019-03-27: "Analysis and natural philosophy owe their most important discoveries to this fruitful means, which is called induction." -- Pierre-Simon Laplace
2019-03-28: "You pile up enough tomorrows, and you'll find you're left with nothing but a lot of empty yesterdays." -- Meredith Willson ('The Music Man', 1957)
2019-03-29: "The epidemic psychosis of our time is the lie of believing we have no ethical obligation to our planetary home." -- Theodore Roszak
2019-03-30: "We must use time as a tool, not as a couch." -- John F. Kennedy
2019-03-31: "The actual state of our knowledge is always provisional and there must be, beyond what is actually known, immense new regions to discover." -- Louis de Broglie
April 2019
2019-04-01: "Until I'm six feet under, baby, I don't need a bed / Gonna live while I'm alive, I'll sleep when I'm dead." -- Bon Jovi ('I'll Sleep When I'm Dead', 1992)
2019-04-02: "I’m fed up with everyone being lied to just because the administration thinks it’s in our best interests not to know all the facts." -- Alastair Reynolds ('Absolution Gap', 2003)
2019-04-03: "Be sober, and to doubt prepense, / These are the sinews of good sense." -- Sir William Hamilton, 9th Baronet
2019-04-04: "Technology is so much fun but we can drown in our technology. The fog of information can drive out knowledge." -- Daniel J. Boorstin
2019-04-05: "Great powers agreeing among themselves may indeed hold small powers in check. But who will hold great powers in check when great powers disagree?" -- Charles Evans Hughes
2019-04-06: "Morons don't learn until they die!" -- Faye Valentine ('Cowboy Bebop: The Movie', 2001)
2019-04-07: "An age is called Dark not because the light fails to shine, but because people refuse to see it." -- James A. Michener ('Space', 1982)
2019-04-08: "The great rule of life is to have no schemes but one unalterable purpose. If the will is fixed on the purpose it sets itself to accomplish, then circumstances will suggest the right course; but the schemer finds himself always tripped up by the unexpected." -- Sri Aurobindo
2019-04-09: "There are now many invisible people on stage." -- Eugène Ionesco
2019-04-10: "Controversy equalizes fools and wise men — and the fools know it." -- Oliver Wendell Holmes
2019-04-11: "If philosophy does not resolve any scientific problem, science, in its turn, does not resolve any philosophical problem." -- Nicolás Gómez Davila
2019-04-12: "'Tis not the concern of a day, a year, or an age; posterity are virtually involved in the contest, and will be more or less affected, even to the end of time, by the proceedings now." -- Thomas Paine
2019-04-13: "We believe that the value of any system is measured by the consideration given to all human beings, not just to a favored class: and by that standard, our present system is a miserable failure." -- Damon Knight ('A For Anything', 1959)
2019-04-14: "Would the time ever come when men might realize that the obligation should be to the largest and most encompassing reality of all — mankind?" -- Harry Harrison ('Planet Of The Damned', 1962)
2019-04-15: "There is no more open door by which you can enter into the study of natural philosophy than by considering the physical phenomena of a candle." -- Michael Faraday
2019-04-16: "The conservative has little to fear from the man whose reason is the servant of his passions, but let him beware of him in whom reason has become the greatest and most terrible of passions. These are the wreckers of outworn empires." -- J. B. S. Haldane
2019-04-17: "The only way I can pay back for what fate and society have handed me is to try, in minor totally useless ways, to make an angry sound against injustice." -- Martha Gellhorn
2019-04-18: "We learn only to ask more questions." -- Larry Niven ('The Ringworld Engineers', 1980)
2019-04-19: "Some problems are so complex that you have to be highly intelligent and well informed just to be undecided about them." -- Laurence J. Peter
2019-04-20: "We might get away with it for awhile, but sooner or later this combustible mixture of ignorance and power is going to blow up in our faces." -- Carl Sagan
2019-04-21: "Things have changed, and will change more; and Gaia no longer welcomes us as once she did." -- Auberon
2019-04-22: "Sometimes we can choose the path we follow. Sometimes our choices are made for us. And sometimes we have no choice at all." -- Dream
2019-04-23: "Whosoever studies works of science must, if he wants to find the truth, transform himself into a critic of everything he reads." -- Ibn al-Haytham
2019-04-24: "Big questions get big answers." -- Francis Crick
2019-04-25: "To hang on from day to day and from week to week, spinning out a present that had no future, seemed an unconquerable instinct, just as one's lungs will always draw the next breath so long as there is air available." -- George Orwell ('Nineteen Eighty-Four', 1949)
2019-04-26: "Mother Nature is a serial killer. No one's better." -- Andrew Fassbach ('World War Z', 2013)
2019-04-27: "We can see that a civilization comes into existence, passes through a long experience, and eventually goes out of existence." -- Carroll Quigley
2019-04-28: "My journey took me somewhat further down the rabbit-hole than I'd intended and, though I dirtied my fluffy white tail, I've emerged...enlightened." -- Sherlock Holmes ('Sherlock Holmes', 2009)
2019-04-29: "The people generally get accustomed to the established order of things and begin to tremble at the very idea of a change." -- Bhagat Singh
2019-04-30: "I must confess that I lost faith in the sanity of the world." -- H.G. Wells ('The Island Of Doctor Moreau', 1896)
May 2019
2019-05-01: "Yeah, you don't know my mind, you don't know my kind. / Dark necessities are part of my design." -- Red Hot Chili Peppers ('Dark Necessities', 2016)
2019-05-02: "My major preoccupation is the question, 'What is reality?'" -- Philip K. Dick
2019-05-03: "A hibernation is a covert preparation for a more overt action." -- Ralph Ellison ('Invisible Man', 1952)
2019-05-04: "Let ignorance talk as it will, learning has its value." -- Jean de La Fontaine
2019-05-05: "The fun of discovery will most likely last as long as the human race continues." -- F. J. Duarte
2019-05-06: "Our knowledge is composed not of facts, but of the relations which facts and ideas bear to themselves and to each other; and real knowledge consists not in an acquaintance with facts, which only makes a pedant, but in the use of facts, which makes a philosopher." -- Henry Thomas Buckle
2019-05-07: "Choose your destiny." -- Tagline for 'Mortal Kombat' (1995)
2019-05-08: "It is evident that a great majority of men can be enslaved by a small minority only if the enslaved themselves take part in their own enslavement." -- Leo Tolstoy
2019-05-09: "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." -- A. J. Ayer
2019-05-10: "We are here just for a spell and then pass on. So get a few laughs and do the best you can." -- Will Rogers
2019-05-11: "There is occasions and causes why and wherefore in all things." -- William Shakespeare ('Henry V', c. 1599)
2019-05-12: "Separate we come, and separate we go, / And this be it known, is all that we know." -- Conrad Aiken
2019-05-13: "Progress celebrates Pyrrhic victories over nature." -- Karl Kraus
2019-05-14: "What I’m saying is the planet’s on f#cking fire!" -- Bill Nye
2019-05-15: "Prejudice supports thrones, ignorance altars." -- Marie von Ebner-Eschenbach
2019-05-16: "Frankly, I think the whole society is nuts — and the question is: What does a sane man do in an insane society?" -- Joseph Heller
2019-05-17: "Late in the game as it is, you keep trying." -- John Updike ('Rabbit At Rest', 1990)
2019-05-18: "Happiness is not achieved by the conscious pursuit of happiness; it is generally the by-product of other activities." -- Aldous Huxley
2019-05-19: "It shall all go up in a great fire, and all shall be ended." -- Denethor ('The Return Of The King', 1955)
2019-05-20: "Do what you can, with what you have, where you are." -- Theodore Roosevelt
2019-05-21: "You will find that the truth is often unpopular and the contest between agreeable fancy and disagreeable fact is unequal." -- Adlai Stevenson II
2019-05-22: "Now they know that we know that they know that we know." -- Art Weingartner ('The 'Burbs', 1989)
2019-05-23: "All living souls welcome whatsoever they are ready to cope with; all else they ignore, or pronounce to be monstrous and wrong, or deny to be possible." -- George Santayana
2019-05-24: "The lucky ones die fast." -- Tagline For 'The Hills Have Eyes 2' (2007)
2019-05-25: "Perhaps there is no more important component of character than steadfast resolution." -- Theodore Roosevelt
2019-05-26: "In real life, the hardest aspect of the battle between good and evil is determining which is which." -- George R. R. Martin
2019-05-27: "Survival in a rapidly changing environment depends almost entirely upon being able to identify which of the old concepts are relevant to the demands imposed by the new threats to survival, and which are not." -- Neil Postman
2019-05-28: "Science is the knowledge of many, orderly and methodically digested and arranged, so as to become attainable by one." -- John Herschel
2019-05-29: "Freedom of expression is the matrix, the indispensable condition, of nearly every other form of freedom." -- Benjamin N. Cardozo
2019-05-30: "Time, the devourer of all things." -- Ovid
2019-05-31: "I have always thought the actions of men the best interpreters of their thoughts." -- John Locke
June 2019
2019-06-01: "When the moment of truth arrives, hey, you can run but you can't hide." -- Triumph ('Somebody's Out There', 1986)
2019-06-02: "Though we see the same world, we see it through different eyes." -- Virginia Woolf
2019-06-03: "The ocean is tired. It's throwing back at us what we're throwing in there." -- Frank Lautenberg
2019-06-04: "The science you don't know looks like magic." -- Christopher Moore
2019-06-05: "There is no terror in the bang, only in the anticipation of it." -- Alfred Hitchcock
2019-06-06: "Well, how the world turns. One day cock of the walk, next a feather-duster." -- Aunty Entity ('Mad Max Beyond Thunderdome', 1985)
2019-06-07: "That ignorant confidence in one's self and one's future, which comes in life's first dawn, has a sort of mournful charm in experienced eyes, who know how much it all amounts to." -- Harriet Beecher Stowe
2019-06-08: "Take your own look beneath the surface and don't trust others to look for you." -- Frank B. Jewett
2019-06-09: "The use of plants is all our life long of that universal importance and concern that we can neither live nor subsist with any decency and convenience, or be said, indeed, to live at all without them." -- John Ray
2019-06-10: "Perhaps it is true that the trials of life always teach us something, but it is undeniable that we are not always so eager to learn." -- Fausto Cercignani
2019-06-11: "Mankind has an expiration date." -- Tagline For 'Doomsday' (2008)
2019-06-12: "Throughout all of history and prehistory, human advance has coincided with ecological devastation." -- John Gray
2019-06-13: "Truth stands, even if there be no public support." -- Mahatma Gandhi
2019-06-14: "While a private individual may be bound only by the formal vows that he makes, those who govern should be wholly bound by the truth in thought, word and deed." -- Aung San Suu Kyi
2019-06-15: "A hungry people listens not to reason, nor cares for justice, nor is bent by any prayers." -- Seneca The Younger
2019-06-16: "From the state of the world today, we haven't made much progress." -- Richard Matheson
2019-06-17: "Nothing, of course, begins at the time you think it did." -- Lillian Hellman
2019-06-18: "The carrot and the stick guide scientists and politicians as well as donkeys." -- George Stigler
2019-06-19: "Own the day." -- Klingon Proverb
2019-06-20: "Above all, it's creative thinking that lies at the basis of discoveries." -- Simon van der Meer
2019-06-21: "The recklessness of their own ways destroyed them all." -- Homer ('The Odyssey', c. 8th Century BC)
2019-06-22: "My goal in life is to make people think." -- Charles A. Reich
2019-06-23: "I took one Draught of Life — / I'll tell you what I paid — / Precisely an existence — / The market price, they said." -- Emily Dickinson
2019-06-24: "No member of a crew is praised for the rugged individuality of his rowing." -- Alfred North Whitehead
2019-06-25: "The truth is obtained like gold, not by letting it grow bigger, but by washing off from it everything that isn't gold." -- Leo Tolstoy
2019-06-26: "You better wake up. The world you live in is just a sugar-coated topping." -- Blade ('Blade', 1998)
2019-06-27: "We play out our days as we play out cards, taking them as they come, not knowing what they will be, hoping for a lucky card and sometimes getting one, often getting just the wrong one." -- Samuel Butler
2019-06-28: "Systems can create consequences not intended by any other of their constituent actors." -- Joseph Nye
2019-06-29: "The curious mind cannot be chained." -- The Outer Limits ('Keeper Of The Purple Twilight', 1964)
2019-06-30: "Cursed be he above all others who's enslaved by love of money. Money takes the place of brothers, money takes the place of parents. Money brings us war and slaughter." -- Anacreon
July 2019
2019-07-01: "Tell everybody, we got a funky situation." -- Herbie Hancock ('Tell Everybody', 1979)
2019-07-02: "Some books are undeservedly forgotten; none are undeservedly remembered." -- W. H. Auden
2019-07-03: "Strange that it seems more, not less, urgent to play some part in this struggle, this brief effort of animalcules striving to win for their race some increase of lucidity before the ultimate darkness." -- Olaf Stapledon ('Star Maker', 1937)
2019-07-04: "The principle effort that leads to the discovery of new knowledge is due to abstraction and imagination." -- Ernst Mach
2019-07-05: "I think unless the people are given information about what is happening to them, they will die in ignorance." -- Alice Walker
2019-07-06: "Anxiety prepares the organism badly for an ordeal which even under more favorable circumstances would not be an easy thing to bear." -- Henryk Sienkiewicz
2019-07-07: "Look abroad through Nature's range, / Nature's mighty law is change." -- Robert Burns
2019-07-08: "The beginnings and endings of all human undertakings are untidy, the building of a house, the writing of a novel, the demolition of a bridge, and, eminently, the finish of a voyage." -- John Galsworthy
2019-07-09: "To see ourselves as others see us is a most salutary gift. Hardly less important is the capacity to see others as they see themselves." -- Aldous Huxley
2019-07-10: "He who postpones the hour of living rightly is like the rustic who waits for the river to run out before he crosses." -- Horace ('Epistles', 20 BC)
2019-07-11: "We do have to use our minds as far as they will take us, yet acknowledging that they cannot take us all the way." -- Madeleine L'Engle
2019-07-12: "As the air thickens, the water sours, even the bees' honey takes on the metallic taste of radioactivity. And it just keeps coming, faster and faster. There's no chance to think, to prepare — it's 'buy futures', 'sell futures', when there is no future." -- John Milton ('The Devil's Advocate', 1997)
2019-07-13: "The fundamental cause of the trouble is that in the modern world the stupid are cocksure while the intelligent are full of doubt." -- Bertrand Russell
2019-07-14: "There are many ways of seeing the world." -- Michael Palin
2019-07-15: "People are afraid of all the wrong things." -- Tagline For 'A Walk Among The Tombstones' (2014)
2019-07-16: "When the well's dry, we know the worth of water." -- Benjamin Franklin
2019-07-17: "The man who never doubts never thinks." -- George William Foote
2019-07-18: "What do such machines really do? They increase the number of things we can do without thinking. Things we do without thinking — there's the real danger." -- Frank Herbert ('God Emperor Of Dune', 1981)
2019-07-19: "Knowledge has no enemy except an ignorant man." -- George Puttenham
2019-07-20: "Logic is justly considered the basis of all other sciences, even if only for the reason that in every argument we employ concepts taken from the field of logic, and that ever correct inference proceeds in accordance with its laws." -- Alfred Tarski
2019-07-21: "The true measure of any society is not what it knows but what it does with what it knows." -- Warren Bennis
2019-07-22: "Don't let the sun go down without saying thank you to someone, and without admitting to yourself that absolutely no one gets this far alone." -- Stephen King
2019-07-23: "Times like these, dark times, they do funny things to people." -- Arthur Weasley ('Harry Potter And The Half-Blood Prince', 2009)
2019-07-24: "Who are the fittest: those who are continually at war with each other, or those who support one another?" -- Peter Kropotkin
2019-07-25: "We're all in it together." -- Tagline for 'Brazil' (1985)
2019-07-26: "Let the human mind loose. It must be loose. It will be loose." -- John Adams
2019-07-27: "The food that we eat, the water that we drink, yes, even the very air that we breathe can be contaminated by poisons originating from thousands of miles away." -- Sukarno
2019-07-28: "I've always tried to go a step past wherever people expected me to end up." -- Beverly Sills
2019-07-29: "Nature has no more esteem or care for the seed of man than for the ant." -- Giacomo Leopardi
2019-07-30: "Growth for the sake of growth is a cancerous madness." -- Edward Abbey
2019-07-31: "When a man sits with a pretty girl for an hour, it seems like a minute. But let him sit on a hot stove for a minute and it's longer than any hour. That's relativity." -- Albert Einstein
August 2019
2019-08-01: "And all my friends are skeletons, they beat the rhythm with their bones." -- Soundgarden ('Spoonman', 1994)
2019-08-02: "Reasoning will never make a man correct an ill opinion, which by reasoning he never acquired." -- Jonathan Swift
2019-08-03: "Toward no crimes have men shown themselves so cold-bloodedly cruel as in punishing differences in belief." -- James Russell Lowell
2019-08-04: "The ultimate measure of a man is not where he stands in moments of comfort and convenience, but where he stands at times of challenge and controversy." -- Martin Luther King Jr.
2019-08-05: "Death renders all equal." -- Claudian
2019-08-06: "After all there is but one race — humanity." -- George Moore
2019-08-07: "People see what they want to see." -- Cormac McCarthy ('Blood Meridian', 1985)
2019-08-08: "For what is life but a play in which everyone acts a part until the curtain comes down?" -- Erasmus
2019-08-09: "Human civilization as we know it will end, sometime in the 21st century." -- David Goodstein
2019-08-10: "Since it is Reason which shapes and regulates all other things, it ought not itself to be left in disorder." -- Epictetus
2019-08-11: "When you compound the lies, you compound the consequences." -- Walter Skinner ('The X-Files', 'Redux I', 1997)
2019-08-12: "Governments do not like to face radical remedies; it is easier to let politics predominate." -- Barbara W. Tuchman
2019-08-13: "If you don't believe...you will." -- Tagline For 'Mr. Magorium's Wonder Emporium' (2007)
2019-08-14: "Why, ninety-five percent of the information that reaches you has already been preselected and paid for." -- Haruki Murakami ('A Wild Sheep Chase', 1982)
2019-08-15: "Many consult their reputation; but few their conscience." -- Publilius Syrus
2019-08-16: "In war, science has proven itself an evil genius; it has made war more terrible than it ever was before." -- William Jennings Bryan
2019-08-17: "There is one rule that works in every calamity. Be it pestilence, war, or famine, the rich get richer and poor get poorer. The poor even help arrange it." -- Will Rogers
2019-08-18: "Life seemed to be an educator's practical joke in which you spent the first half learning and the second half learning that everything you learned in the first half was wrong." -- Russell Baker
2019-08-19: "No technical solution can rescue us from the misery of overpopulation." -- Garrett Hardin ('Tragedy Of The Commons', 1968)
2019-08-20: "It's time we were told what it's all about." -- Robert Conway ('Lost Horizon', 1937)
2019-08-21: "To sound the alarm is not to panic but to seek action from an aroused public." -- John F. Kennedy
2019-08-22: "All men should strive to learn before they die what they are running from, and to, and why." -- James Thurber
2019-08-23: "Every great decision creates ripples, like a huge boulder dropped in a lake. The ripples merge and rebound off the banks in unforeseeable ways. The heavier the decision, the larger the waves, the more uncertain the consequences." -- The Doctor ('Doctor Who', 'Remembrance Of The Daleks', 1988)
2019-08-24: "What I’m trying to make you know, not in your forebrain but in your marrow, is that reality never conforms very well to the textbooks, and sometimes it doesn’t conform at all." -- Poul Anderson
2019-08-25: "Wisdom. No match for the troublemaker Curiosity." -- David Brin ('Glory Season', 1993)
2019-08-26: "Our eyes see what they are accustomed to seeing." -- Jorge Luis Borges
2019-08-27: "The fate of all explanation is to close one door only to have another fly wide open." -- Charles Fort
2019-08-28: "Sometimes it takes a stranger’s eyes to see what is clearly before us yet to which we are blind." -- John, The Lord Chamberlain
2019-08-29: "Research is the process of going up alleys to see if they are blind." -- Marston Bates
2019-08-30: "If we vanished tomorrow, no organism on this planet would miss us." -- Thomas Ligotti
2019-08-31: "It is wrong to expect some final satisfaction to come from money or from a computer." -- Tenzin Gyatso, 14th Dalai Lama
September 2019
2019-09-01: "In the dead of night, truth is all around you." -- Krokus ('In The Dead Of Night', 1995)
2019-09-02: "The future announces itself from afar. But most people are not listening." -- John W. Gardner
2019-09-03: "That we have found the tendency to conformity in our society so strong is a matter of concern." -- Solomon Asch
2019-09-04: "Listen widely to remove your doubts and be careful when speaking about the rest and your mistakes will be few." -- Confucius
2019-09-05: "Always be a first-rate version of yourself, instead of a second-rate version of somebody else." -- Judy Garland
2019-09-06: "All theory is against the freedom of the will, all experience for it." -- Samuel Johnson
2019-09-07: "Who is so deaf as he that will not hear?" -- George Herbert
2019-09-08: "Tear apart the walls that imprison you." -- Thurgood Marshall
2019-09-09: "An intelligent man neither allows himself to be controlled nor attempts to control others; he wishes reason alone to rule, and that always." -- Jean de La Bruyère
2019-09-10: "There is no safety. Only varying states of risk." -- Lois McMaster Bujold
2019-09-11: "The wise man guards against future evils as if they were present." -- Publilius Syrus
2019-09-12: "Time's glory is to calm contending kings, to unmask falsehood, and bring truth to light." -- William Shakespeare
2019-09-13: "It is an assumption, which cannot be verified, that we shall not reach a point in our knowledge of nature beyond which the human intellect is unqualified to pass." -- J. B. Bury
2019-09-14: "Experience is what you get while looking for something else." -- Federico Fellini
2019-09-15: "On reflection, it's no surprise that declines of societies tend to follow swiftly on their peaks." -- Jared Diamond
2019-09-16: "I'm curious about everything - even things that don't interest me." -- Alex Trebek
2019-09-17: "The pursuit of philosophy is founded on the belief that knowledge is good, even if what is known is painful." -- Bertrand Russell
2019-09-18: "You don't get to choose how you're going to die. Or when. You can only decide how you're going to live. Now." -- Joan Baez
2019-09-19: "I'm Nobody! Who are you? / Are you — Nobody — Too?" -- Emily Dickinson
2019-09-20: "So much of what appeared to be random events was simply the working out of consequences." -- Michael Swanwick ('The Iron Dragon's Daughter', 1993)
2019-09-21: "Life isn’t divided into genres. It’s a horrifying, romantic, tragic, comical, science-fiction cowboy detective novel. You know, with a bit of pornography if you're lucky." -- Alan Moore
2019-09-22: "Language alone protects us from the scariness of things with no names." -- Toni Morrison
2019-09-23: "All human things hang on a slender thread: the strongest fall with a sudden crash." -- Ovid
2019-09-24: "If the use of leisure time is confined to looking at TV for a few extra hours every day, we will deteriorate as a people." -- Eleanor Roosevelt
2019-09-25: "We thought, because we had power, we had wisdom. We thought the long train would run to the end of Time." -- Stephen Vincent Benét
2019-09-26: "In all debates let truth be thy aim; not victory or an unjust interest; and endeavor to gain rather than to expose thy antagonist." -- William Penn
2019-09-27: "The children have to save themselves these days because the parents have no clue." -- Karen Pommeroy ('Donnie Darko', 2001)
2019-09-28: "It’s always been an exceedingly curious thing to me, just how incurious most people are about all save their own little island of time and place in the world." -- Michael Shea ('Nifft The Lean', 1982)
2019-09-29: "Cease conceiving of education as mere preparation for later life, and make it the full meaning of the present life." -- John Dewey
2019-09-30: "Originality thrives in seclusion free of outside influences beating upon us to cripple the creative mind." -- Nikola Tesla
October 2019
2019-10-01: "Well that stone keeps on rolling, bringing me some real bad news." -- Robin Trower ('Too Rolling Stoned', 1974)
2019-10-02: "Is there a greater tragedy imaginable than that, in our endeavour consciously to shape our future in accordance with high ideals, we should in fact unwittingly produce the very opposite of what we have been striving for?" -- Friedrich Hayek
2019-10-03: "A plausible future requires a factual present." -- Timothy D. Snyder
2019-10-04: "We do not honour our ancestors by the false claim that they are omniscient and had nothing more to learn." -- Jagadish Chandra Bose
2019-10-05: "Compared with what we ought to be, we are only half-awake." -- William James
2019-10-06: "What we obtain too cheap, we esteem too lightly: it is dearness only that gives every thing its value." -- Thomas Paine
2019-10-07: "As the natural systems of the planet broke down, humans would discover conclusively that they were still, after all, just animals in an ecosystem; and as it died back, so did they." -- Stephen Baxter ('Evolution', 2003)
2019-10-08: "In the democracy of the dead all men at last are equal." -- John James Ingalls
2019-10-09: "Everybody feels he has a right to a life of luxury — or at least comfort — so there’s a lot of frustration and resentment when the dream craps out." -- Gregory Benford ('Timescape', 1980)
2019-10-10: "In retrospect, each of the steps toward this abyss seemed irrevocable, and yet they had all been so small!" -- James Blish ('A Case Of Conscience', 1958)
2019-10-11: "There was no sound of fish breaking surface. There were no fish." -- John Brunner ('The Sheep Look Up', 1972)
2019-10-12: "We should be less concerned about adding years to life, and more about adding life to years." -- Arthur C. Clarke
2019-10-13: "The truth hurts, but not as much as the consequences of willful ignorance." -- Charles Stross ('Iron Sunrise', 2004)
2019-10-14: "When a road is very dark it is hard to see the milestones on it." -- Tanith Lee ('Volkhavaar', 1977)
2019-10-15: "There is an inescapable imperative about certain industrial developments. If there is not a safe road of advance, then a dangerous one will invariably be taken." -- Fritz Leiber ('Catch That Zeppelin!', 1975)
2019-10-16: "It had already occurred to him that he would probably never be safe again in his life and he wondered if that was something that you got used to." -- Cormac McCarthy ('No Country For Old Men', 2005)
2019-10-17: "Do you recognize that it is an ascending, accelerating, maybe even exponential curve? It takes hell’s own time to get started, but when it goes it goes like a bomb." -- Frederik Pohl ('Platinum Pohl', 2005)
2019-10-18: "On no other stage are the scenes shifted with a swiftness so like magic as on the great stage of history when once the hour strikes." -- Edward Bellamy ('Looking Backward: 2000–1887', 1888)
2019-10-19: "You cannot take things that exist in the world and try to drive them back into the dream, to hold them inside the dream with walls and pretenses. That is insanity. What is, is." -- Ursula K. Le Guin ('The Word For World Is Forest', 1972)
2019-10-20: "We cannot prevent equilibrium from producing its effects." -- Jules Verne ('Twenty Thousand Leagues Under The Sea', 1870)
2019-10-21: "It no longer matters who consider themselves the masters of events. Events no longer obey their masters." -- Dan Simmons ('Hyperion', 1988)
2019-10-22: "Most ignorance is by choice, you know, and so ignorance is very telling about what really matters to people." -- Kim Stanley Robinson ('Red Mars', 1992)
2019-10-23: "What moral obligation do you have to those who willfully refuse to open their eyes and deem you mad for seeing?" -- Norman Spinrad ('The Void Captain's Tale', 1983)
2019-10-24: "Convince a slave that he’s free, and he will fight to maintain his slavery." -- Samuel R. Delany ('The Jewels Of Aptor', 1962)
2019-10-25: "There is no belief, however foolish, that will not gather its faithful adherents who will defend it to the death." -- Isaac Asimov
2019-10-26: "Disaster can strike from innumerable directions, in amazingly diverse ways." -- Fredric Brown ('From These Ashes', 2000)
2019-10-27: "If you wanted to get yourself killed, there was no better way than to think you knew all the tricks. It took experience to make you realize that the universe could always pull another one out of the bag and throw it at you." -- Charles Sheffield ('Resurgence', 2002)
2019-10-28: "Power that is won through deception will evaporate under the hot light of truth." -- Orson Scott Card ('The Call Of Earth', 1992)
2019-10-29: "It is often said that before you die your life passes before your eyes. This is in fact true. It's called living." -- Terry Pratchett
2019-10-30: "An EEG of a person watching TV shows that after about half an hour the brain decides that nothing is happening, and it goes into a hypnoidal twilight state, emitting alpha waves." -- Philip K. Dick
2019-10-31: "People know they are in a society dead or dying." -- Doris Lessing ('The Golden Notebook', 1962)
November 2019
2019-11-01: "Won't you tell me, where have all the good times gone?" -- Van Halen ('Where Have All The Good Times Gone', 1982)
2019-11-02: "What we eventually run up against are the forces of humourlessness, and let me assure you that the humourless as a bunch don't just not know what's funny, they don't know what's serious." -- Martin Amis
2019-11-03: "Markets reduce everything, including human beings and nature, to commodities." -- Marshall Fishwick
2019-11-04: "The earth is going to be much less hospitable to human beings in the future." -- John Bellamy Foster
2019-11-05: "We also underestimated the potential importance of strong feedbacks, such as the thawing of the permafrost to release methane, a powerful greenhouse gas, as well as tipping points beyond which some changes in the climate may become effectively irreversible." -- Nicholas Stern
2019-11-06: "The past has meaning as it lights up the present, and the future as it makes the present richer and more profound." -- Rollo May
2019-11-07: "Good grief." -- Charlie Brown
2019-11-08: "The truth that seems discouraging does in reality only transform the courage of those strong enough to accept it; and, in any event, a truth that disheartens, because it is true, is still of far more value than the most stimulating of falsehoods." -- Maurice Maeterlinck
2019-11-09: "The future was not what it used to be." -- K. A. Bedford ('Time Machines Repaired While-U-Wait', 2008)
2019-11-10: "No, it's not fair. You're in the wrong universe for fair." -- John Scalzi ('The Ghost Brigades', 2006)
2019-11-11: "Political theorists tend to swallow their theories when forced back on pragmatic measures of survival." -- Robert Silverberg ('Hawksbill Station', 1968)
2019-11-12: "Do you remember things that made sense? Things you could count on? Before we all got so lost?" -- Ron Kovic ('Born On The Fourth Of July', 1989)
2019-11-13: "At an ever accelerating rate we are now squandering the capital of metallic ores and fossil fuels accumulated in the earth’s crust during hundreds of millions of years. How long can this spending spree go on?" -- Aldous Huxley
2019-11-14: "Ignorance is an evil weed, which dictators may cultivate among their dupes, but which no democracy can afford among its citizens." -- William Beveridge
2019-11-15: "Ignorance has been our king. Since the death of empire, he sits unchallenged on the throne of Man. His dynasty is age-old. His right to rule is now considered legitimate." -- Walter M. Miller Jr. ('A Canticle For Leibowitz', 1959)
2019-11-16: "The world was changing, and it wouldn’t change back." -- Jack Cady
2019-11-17: "You can be screamingly blind to the obvious if you don’t realize that you have not opened up all the doors of your mind." -- Glen Cook ('Water Sleeps', 1999)
2019-11-18: "Anybody not wearing 2 million sunblock is gonna have a real bad day." -- Sarah Connor ('Terminator 2: Judgment Day', 1991)
2019-11-19: "We must all obey the great law of change." -- Edmund Burke
2019-11-20: "Enter freely and of your own free will!" -- Count Dracula ('Dracula', 1897)
2019-11-21: "The present is big with the future." -- Gottfried Wilhelm Leibniz
2019-11-22: "If you rest, you rust." -- Helen Hayes
2019-11-23: "Too often we underestimate the power of a touch, a smile, a kind word, a listening ear, an honest compliment, or the smallest act of caring, all of which have the potential to turn a life around." -- Leo Buscaglia
2019-11-24: "The unfinished character of human beings and the transformational character of reality necessitate that education be an ongoing activity." -- Paulo Freire ('Pedagogy Of The Oppressed', 1968)
2019-11-25: "My limited experience of such things told me that you get closest to the truth by not giving it advance warning that you're coming after it." -- Michael Marshall Smith
2019-11-26: "There is no moral precept that does not have something inconvenient about it." -- Denis Diderot
2019-11-27: "We all have ability. The difference is how we use it." -- Stevie Wonder
2019-11-28: "This is a wonderful day. I've never seen this one before." -- Maya Angelou
2019-11-29: "Deep ecological awareness recognizes the fundamental interdependence of all phenomena and the fact that, as individuals and societies we are all embedded in (and ultimately dependent on) the cyclical process of nature." -- Fritjof Capra
2019-11-30: "He is a fool who only sees the mischiefs that are past." -- Homer ('The Iliad', c. 8th Century BC)
December 2019
2019-12-01: "Running short on time, still they can't decide, but we already know / That we are here to go, we are here to go." -- Devo ('Here To Go', 1984)
2019-12-02: "It is better for a man to die at peace with himself than to live haunted by an evil conscience." -- James Fenimore Cooper ('The Last Of The Mohicans', 1826)
2019-12-03: "It's happening. No blame. Happening and on the rise it would appear. What can we do to delay it? Probably zilch. To stop it? Likely less." -- Ken Kesey
2019-12-04: "Every man should refuse to increase the misery of this world." -- Robert G. Ingersoll
2019-12-05: "It's my rule never to lose me temper till it would be detrimental to keep it." -- Seán O'Casey
2019-12-06: "The future has not been written. There is no fate but what we make for ourselves. I wish I could believe that." -- John Connor ('Terminator 3: Rise Of The Machines', 2003)
2019-12-07: "No matter who wins or loses, trouble always comes around." -- Nick Fury ('Avengers: Age of Ultron', 2015)
2019-12-08: "It’s not like they didn’t warn us." -- Tagline For 'Signs' (2002)
2019-12-09: "There really wasn’t much in a man’s life that mattered. But those few things mattered terribly." -- Poul Anderson ('The Star Fox', 1965)
2019-12-10: "Any property that's open to common use gets destroyed. Because everyone has incentive to use it to the max, but no one has incentive to maintain it." -- Neal Stephenson ('Zodiac', 1988)
2019-12-11: "Let’s face it, air isn’t very glamorous, no matter how you look at it. I mean, I’d hate to be without it, but it’s invisible and so long as it behaves itself it can be taken for granted and pretty much ignored." -- Roger Zelazny ('Isle Of The Dead', 1969)
2019-12-12: "It’s what a man thinks is true which controls his actions, not what is really true." -- Michael Kurland ('Tomorrow Knight', 1976)
2019-12-13: "To be aware of limitations is already to be beyond them." -- Georg Wilhelm Friedrich Hegel
2019-12-14: "Only a fool walks into the future backwards." -- Terry Goodkind ('Stone Of Tears', 1996)
2019-12-15: "The present is no more, by the time you have said, This is present." -- Henry Harland
2019-12-16: "Of all the horrid, hideous notes of woe, / Sadder than owl-songs or the midnight blast; / Is that portentous phrase, 'I told you so.'" -- Lord Byron ('Don Juan', 1818–1824)
2019-12-17: "Scientific discovery consists in the interpretation for our own convenience of a system of existence which has been made with no eye to our convenience at all." -- Norbert Wiener
2019-12-18: "Welcome to your worst nightmare." -- Tagline For 'Leviathan' (1989)
2019-12-19: "They say a little knowledge is a dangerous thing, but it is not one half so bad as a lot of ignorance." -- Terry Pratchett ('Equal Rites', 1987)
2019-12-20: "It is error only, and not truth, that shrinks from inquiry." -- Thomas Paine
2019-12-21: "If one learns from others but does not think, one is still at a loss. If, on the other hand, one thinks but does not learn from others, one is in peril." -- Confucius
2019-12-22: "Time to me this truth has taught, / ('Tis a treasure worth revealing) / More offend from want of thought / Than from any want of feeling." -- Charles Swain
2019-12-23: "No nightmare will prepare you for it!" -- Tagline For 'Razorback' (1984)
2019-12-24: "Knowledge is simply a terrible ocean we must cross, and hope that wisdom lies on the other side." -- Paolo Bacigalupi
2019-12-25: "I think I'm ready to die. There's just one last thing I wanna do: drink a live forever potion." -- Roger ('American Dad', 2019)
2019-12-26: "It used to be said, that in places like this, nature eventually failed to support man. The truth is exactly the reverse, here man failed to support nature." -- David Attenborough
2019-12-27: "Orwell feared that the truth would be concealed from us. Huxley feared the truth would be drowned in a sea of irrelevance." -- Neil Postman
2019-12-28: "Justice does not require that men must stand idly by while others destroy the basis of their existence." -- John Rawls ('A Theory Of Justice', 1971)
2019-12-29: "Is it not unsettling to consider the blind unlikelihoods that shape one’s fate?" -- Michael Shea
2019-12-30: "The stars are dimly seen among the shadows of the bay, / And lights that win are seen in strife with lights that die away." -- Arthur O'Shaughnessy
2019-12-31: "The year is going, let him go; / Ring out the false, ring in the true." -- Alfred, Lord Tennyson
January 2020
2020-01-01: "Sharing horizons that are new to us / Watching the signs along the way." -- The Carpenters ('We've Only Just Begun', 1970)
2020-01-02: "Remorse sleeps during a prosperous period but wakes up in adversity." -- Jean-Jacques Rousseau
2020-01-03: "Secrecy, censorship, dishonesty, and blocking of communication threaten all the basic needs." -- Abraham Maslow
2020-01-04: "Sometimes the questions are complicated and the answers are simple." -- Dr. Seuss
2020-01-05: "We are here to add what we can to, not to get what we can from, Life." -- William Osler
2020-01-06: "I had to learn early on to be comfortable with insecurity and to trust my own judgement on key issues." -- Eric Kandel
2020-01-07: "Beyond all conscious lying and falsifying, there is a deeper 'organic mendacity.' Here the falsification is not formed in consciousness, but at the same stage of the mental process as the impressions and value feelings themselves: on the road of experience into consciousness. There is 'organic mendacity' whenever a man’s mind admits only those impressions which serve his 'interest' or his instinctive attitude." -- Max Scheler
2020-01-08: "It is perfectly true, as the philosophers say, that life must be understood backwards. But they forget the other proposition, that it must be lived forwards." -- Søren Kierkegaard
2020-01-09: "You blight the soil and poison the rivers. You raze the vegetation till you cannot even feed your own kind. And then you boast of man's triumph over nature. Fools. If nature were to shrug or raise an eyebrow then you should all be gone." -- Swamp Thing
2020-01-10: "When the questions are dangerous, the answers can be deadly." -- Tagline For 'Q&A' (1990)
2020-01-11: "We have become eager accessories to the great hoaxes of the age. These are the hoaxes we play on ourselves." -- Daniel J. Boorstin
2020-01-12: "What's done cannot be undone." -- William Shakespeare ('Macbeth', c. 1605)
2020-01-13: "We can never see past the choices we don't understand." -- The Oracle ('The Matrix Reloaded', 2003)
2020-01-14: "Since before recorded time, it had swung through the universe in an elliptical orbit so large that its very existence remained a secret of time and space." -- Narrator ('Night Of The Comet', 1984)
2020-01-15: "Fearing no insult, asking for no crown, receive with indifference both flattery and slander, and do not argue with a fool." -- Alexander Pushkin
2020-01-16: "At this point we find ourselves confronted by a very disquieting question: Do we really wish to act upon our knowledge?" -- Aldous Huxley ('Brave New World Revisited', 1958)
2020-01-17: "Science is not a subject, it's a method. And the method can be applied to anything. Anybody can be a scientist." -- Lawrence Rocks
2020-01-18: "Life is under no obligation to give us what we expect." -- Margaret Mitchell
2020-01-19: "There was only one thing of which he could be certain now. Boredom would not be a serious problem for a considerable time to come." -- Arthur C. Clarke ('The City And The Stars', 1956)
2020-01-20: "Fair fortune may conceal foul." -- Anzû ('Lugalbanda And The Anzud Bird', 21st Century BC)
2020-01-21: "Men repent speaking ten times, for once that they repent keeping silence." -- James Burgh
2020-01-22: "Oh, soon we'll be out amid the cold world's strife. Soon we'll be sliding down the razor blade of life." -- Tom Lehrer
2020-01-23: "Questions don't change the truth. But they give it motion." -- Giannina Braschi
2020-01-24: "As for man, his days are numbered, whatever he may do, it is but wind." -- Gilgamesh ('Epic Of Gilgamesh', c. 2100 BC)
2020-01-25: "One, avoid the infected at all costs. Their breath is highly contagious. Two, disinfect anything they've touched in the last 24 hours. Three, the sick are already dead, they can't be saved. You break the rules, you die. You follow them, you live. Maybe." -- Danny Green ('Carriers', 2009)
2020-01-26: "The more I know, the more sure I am I know so little. The eternal paradox." -- Andre Delambre ('The Fly', 1958)
2020-01-27: "What I wouldn't give for a different nightmare." -- Phillip Dimitrius ('Tempest', 1982)
2020-01-28: "Never before have so many people understood so little about so much." -- James Burke
2020-01-29: "The human race, whose intelligence dates back only a single tick of the astronomical clock, could hardly hope to understand so soon what it all means." -- James Jeans
2020-01-30: "Progress has subordinated the purpose of life to the means of subsistence and turned us into the nuts and bolts for our tools." -- Karl Kraus
2020-01-31: "It is obvious to my trained eye that there is much more going on here than meets the ear." -- Inspector Clouseau ('The Pink Panther Strikes Again', 1976)
February 2020
2020-02-01: "Now that I know, not really diggin' this! " -- Nickelback ('Diggin' This', 1998)
2020-02-02: "Choose the course which you adopt with deliberation; but when you have adopted it, then persevere in it with firmness." -- Bias Of Priene
2020-02-03: "Then rose the seed of Chaos, and of Night, / To blot out order and extinguish light." -- Alexander Pope ('The Dunciad', 1728-1743)
2020-02-04: "We're all leading lives that are different and yet the same." -- Anne Frank ('The Diary Of A Young Girl', 1942-1944)
2020-02-05: "It is well that there is no one without a fault; for he would not have a friend in the world." -- William Hazlitt
2020-02-06: "The fire which seems extinguished often slumbers beneath the ashes." -- Pierre Corneille
2020-02-07: "Any A.I. smart enough to pass a Turing test is smart enough to know to fail it." -- Ian McDonald ('River Of Gods', 2004)
2020-02-08: "In these days of upheaval and violent change, when the basic values of today are the vain and shattered dreams of tomorrow, there is much to be said for a philosophy which aims at living a full life while the opportunity offers." -- Eric Shipton
2020-02-09: "If you want a happy ending, that depends, of course, on where you stop your story." -- Orson Welles
2020-02-10: "Anyone who is wise and has lived long enough to witness the changes of fashion and morals and politics through the rise and fall of three generations should be perfectly satisfied to rise from his seat and go away saying, 'It was a good show,' when the curtain falls." -- Lin Yutang
2020-02-11: "We don't get to choose our time." -- The Ancient One ('Doctor Strange', 2016)
2020-02-12: "Pick an apocalypse, any apocalypse. A sea of black oil and dead things. No wind. No light. Nothing stirring, not even an ant, a spider. A silent universe. Such is the end of the flicker of time, the brief hot fuse of events and ideas set off, accidentally, and snuffed out, accidentally, by man." -- John Gardner ('Grendel', 1971)
2020-02-13: "If all printers were determined not to print anything till they were sure it would offend nobody, there would be very little printed." -- Benjamin Franklin
2020-02-14: "If you think education is expensive -- try ignorance." -- Ann Landers
2020-02-15: "So comes a reck'ning when the banquet's o'er, / The dreadful reck'ning, and men smile no more." -- John Gay
2020-02-16: "You think your world is safe? It is an illusion, a comforting lie told to protect you." -- Khan ('Star Trek Into Darkness', 2013)
2020-02-17: "Live as long as you please, you will strike nothing off the time you will have to spend dead." -- Michel de Montaigne
2020-02-18: "I had rather be shut up in a very modest cottage with my books, my family and a few old friends, dining on simple bacon, and letting the world roll on as it liked, than to occupy the most splendid post, which any human power can give." -- Thomas Jefferson
2020-02-19: "It's better to act and to regret than to regret not to have acted." -- Mellin de Saint-Gelais
2020-02-20: "You don't know what hand you're gonna get dealt next. You learn to take life as it comes at you, to make each day count." -- Jack Dawson ('Titanic', 1997)
2020-02-21: "The common curse of mankind — folly and ignorance." -- William Shakespeare ('Troilus And Cressida', c. 1602)
2020-02-22: "But what if the last anchor-cable parts when no one knows it, and the drift has already begun?" -- R. A. Lafferty ('Archipelago', 1979)
2020-02-23: "Stop behaving like a human!" -- Tagline For 'Bad Cat' (2016)
2020-02-24: "Tell the truth so as to puzzle and confound your adversaries." -- Henry Wotton
2020-02-25: "The only difference between me and most people is that I'm perfectly aware that all my important decisions are made for me by my subconscious. My frontal lobes are just kidding themselves that they decide anything at all. All they do is think up reasons for the decisions that are already made." -- Rex Stout
2020-02-26: "It will take more time for the change we have to effect, but we don't have more time." -- Bill Nye
2020-02-27: "Broken highways, bankrupt cities, collapsing bridges, failed schools, the unemployed, the underpaid and the uninsured: all suggest a collective failure of will." -- Tony Judt
2020-02-28: "Perhaps the day may arrive when money won't mean anything, not to you...nor anyone." -- Dr. Emery Bronson ('When Worlds Collide', 1951)
2020-02-29: "Time wounds all heels." -- Groucho Marx
March 2020
2020-03-01: "Riding the night, searching for what is gone. / Never reaching the end, so you must travel on." -- Electric Light Orchestra ('Nightrider', 1975)
2020-03-02: "Ragnarok comes. Our world ends." -- Robert A. Heinlein ('Job: A Comedy of Justice', 1984)
2020-03-03: "Whence this sneaking admiration we all have for bullies and prize-fighters? Whence the self-congratulation of 'dominant' races, as if 'dominant' meant 'righteous' and carried with it a title to inherit the earth? Whence the scorn of so-called weak or unwarlike races and individuals, and the very comfortable assurance that it is their manifest destiny to be wiped out as vermin before this advancing civilization?" -- Anna J. Cooper
2020-03-04: "Upon our just or erroneous comprehension then, of the laws of nature, must depend our adaptation of art for the right improvement or for the ignorant deterioration of Nature's works." -- Frances Wright
2020-03-05: "Nothing's so hard but search will find it out." -- Robert Herrick
2020-03-06: "Even a worm turns against the foot that crushes it." -- Mikhail Bakunin
2020-03-07: "Many first possess wealth, and are then possessed by it." -- Ludwig Klages
2020-03-08: "It is only through the immediate dictate of our consciousness that we know that this world exists. And that consciousness may to a certain degree be called a special sense." -- Max Planck
2020-03-09: "We think our castles of sand are the ramparts of the universe." -- John Buchan
2020-03-10: "If there be only hours, at least learn what there is time to learn." -- Vernor Vinge ('A Fire Upon The Deep', 1992)
2020-03-11: "The individual has always had to struggle to keep from being overwhelmed by the tribe." -- Friedrich Nietzsche
2020-03-12: "Slowly, slowly the Avenger comes, but comes surely." -- Ralph Waldo Emerson
2020-03-13: "Recognizing and respecting differences in others, and treating everyone like you want them to treat you, will help make our world a better place for everyone." -- Kim Peek
2020-03-14: "Where eldest Night and Chaos, ancestors of nature, hold eternal anarchy, amidst the noise of endless wars, and by confusion stand." -- John Milton ('Paradise Lost', 1667)
2020-03-15: "My duty is to speak out; I do not wish to be an accomplice in this travesty." -- Émile Zola
2020-03-16: "All of humanity's problems stem from man's inability to sit quietly in a room alone." -- Blaise Pascal
2020-03-17: "I'll stay here and be in charge of 'not dying'." -- Bender ('Futurama', 'The Inhuman Torch', 2013)
2020-03-18: "You never find yourself until you face the truth." -- Pearl Bailey
2020-03-19: "We've tried ignorance for a thousand years. It's time we try education." -- Joycelyn Elders
2020-03-20: "Cautious, careful people, always casting about to preserve their reputation and social standing, never can bring about a reform. Those who are really in earnest must be willing to be anything or nothing in the world's estimation." -- Susan B. Anthony
2020-03-21: "Once to every man and nation comes the moment to decide, / In the strife of Truth with Falsehood, for the good or evil side." -- James Russell Lowell
2020-03-22: "Time takes everybody out; time's undefeated." -- Rocky Balboa ('Creed', 2015)
2020-03-23: "In the face of the idea that truth might afford the opposite of satisfaction and turn out to be completely shocking to humanity at any given historical moment, the fathers of pragmatism made the satisfaction of the subject the criterion of truth." -- Max Horkheimer ('Eclipse Of Reason', 1947)
2020-03-24: "The future can ever promise but one thing and one thing only: surprises." -- Steven Erikson ('House Of Chains', 2002)
2020-03-25: "Whoever is careless with truth in small matters cannot be trusted in important affairs." -- Albert Einstein
2020-03-26: "Not only can you not step into the same river twice; it is not even the same you who can’t step into the same river twice. Everything modifies everything." -- Robert Sheckley ('The Robot Who Looked Like Me', 1978)
2020-03-27: "Now, it is true that the nature of society is to create, among its citizens, an illusion of safety; but it is also absolutely true that the safety is always necessarily an illusion." -- James Baldwin
2020-03-28: "Curiously, aerosol pollution of the northern hemisphere reduces global warming by reflecting sunlight back to space. This 'global dimming' is transient and could disappear in a few days like the smoke that it is, leaving us fully exposed to the heat of the global greenhouse." -- James Lovelock
2020-03-29: "It’s better to know the truth." -- Ricky Gervais
2020-03-30: "Out of pollution's depths it slithers, breathing poison, leaving a wake of deadly slime, destroying all in its path!" -- Tagline For 'Godzilla vs. Hedorah' (1971)
2020-03-31: "Beyond a critical point within a finite space, freedom diminishes as numbers increase. This is as true of humans as it is of gas molecules in a sealed flask. The human question is not how many can possibly survive within the system, but what kind of existence is possible for those who so survive." -- Frank Herbert ('Dune', 1965)
April 2020
2020-04-01: "If you don't like what you see, why don't you fight it? / If you know there's something wrong, why don't you right it?" -- Trooper ('Raise A Little Hell', 1978)
2020-04-02: "At the subatomic level, matter does not exist with certainty at definite places, but rather shows 'tendencies to exist,' and atomic events do not occur with certainty at definite times and in definite ways, but rather show 'tendencies to occur.'" -- Fritjof Capra
2020-04-03: "I am very sorry to be right in this instance." -- Jane Austen ('Emma', 1815)
2020-04-04: "Man is the animal who weeps and laughs — and writes. If the first Prometheus brought fire from heaven in a fennel-stalk, the last will take it back — in a book." -- John Cowper Powys
2020-04-05: "O purblind race of miserable men, how many among us at this very hour do forge a life-long trouble for ourselves, by taking true for false, or false for true." -- Alfred, Lord Tennyson ('Idylls Of The King', 1859-1885)
2020-04-06: "We can never add more truth to what is true already, nor make that true which is false." -- Bernard Le Bovier de Fontenelle
2020-04-07: "Research can be undertaken in any kind of environment, as long as you have the interest." -- Sumio Iijima
2020-04-08: "Nothing like a little healthy paranoia." -- Inspector Frank Bumstead ('Dark City', 1998)
2020-04-09: "No great deed is done by falterers who ask for certainty." -- George Eliot
2020-04-10: "Where all think alike, no one thinks very much." -- Walter Lippmann
2020-04-11: "The world is a perpetual caricature of itself; at every moment it is the mockery and the contradiction of what it is pretending to be." -- George Santayana
2020-04-12: "Truth isn’t like a baked fish, where you can eat the flesh and leave the bones and skin. You have to eat it all." -- Kage Baker ('Sky Coyote', 1999)
2020-04-13: "To each according to his threat advantage does not count as a principle of justice." -- John Rawls ('A Theory Of Justice', 1971)
2020-04-14: "The understanding of things must be based, not on sentiment, but on reason." -- Henri Barbusse
2020-04-15: "Because we don't know when we will die, we get to think of life as an inexhaustible well. Yet everything happens only a certain number of times, and a very small number really." -- Paul Bowles ('The Sheltering Sky', 1949)
2020-04-16: "It can be a real adventure having a life." -- Jenny Fields ('The World According To Garp', 1982)
2020-04-17: "Obviously the subject of death was in the air, but more as something to be avoided than harped upon." -- Douglas Adams ('The Restaurant At The End Of The Universe', 1980)
2020-04-18: "He who rejects change is the architect of decay." -- Harold Wilson
2020-04-19: "A bacterium weighs as little as 0.00000000001 gram. A blue whale weighs about 100,000,000 grams. Yet a bacterium can kill a whale." -- Bernard Dixon
2020-04-20: "We have seen better days." -- William Shakespeare ('Timon Of Athens', 1623)
2020-04-21: "A man who had never known suffering, either in greater or less degree, would scarcely possess consciousness of himself." -- Miguel de Unamuno
2020-04-22: "The good and honest people are ignored, while spineless flatterers are advanced." -- Zhuang Zhou ('Zhuangzi', 3rd Century BC)
2020-04-23: "The final game now begins." -- The Tall Man ('Phantasm IV: Oblivion', 1998)
2020-04-24: "Must the citizen ever for a moment, or in the least degree, resign his conscience to the legislator? Why has every man a conscience, then?" -- Henry David Thoreau ('Civil Disobedience', 1849)
2020-04-25: "The worldwide dangers of war, famine, cults of personality, and bureaucracy — these are perils for all of mankind." -- Andrei Sakharov
2020-04-26: "Space extends to infinity outwards; the mind stretches to infinity inwards." -- Colin Wilson
2020-04-27: "If you compute the years in which all this has happened, it is but a little while; if you number the vicissitudes, it seems an age." -- Pliny The Younger
2020-04-28: "In the really hard cases you're choosing between the disastrous and the catastrophic, and it's hard to tell someone which one is which." -- John Kenneth Galbraith
2020-04-29: "Do you really think this world is real? You'd have to be an idiot not to notice all the sloppy details." -- Rick Sanchez ('Rick And Morty', 'M. Night Shaym-Aliens!', 2014)
2020-04-30: "There are only nine meals between mankind and anarchy." -- Alfred Henry Lewis
May 2020
2020-05-01: "But I'm not concerned, what I see, what I hear, it's all bought and sold. / I just believe what I want to believe, because the truth is yet to be told." -- Sammy Hagar ('What They Gonna Say Now', 1987)
2020-05-02: "This year, the past, the present and the future will all meet at the crossroads of hell." -- Tagline For 'Hellraiser IV: Bloodline' (1996)
2020-05-03: "Had the price of looking been blindness, I would have looked." -- Ralph Ellison ('Invisible Man', 1952)
2020-05-04: "I will ride my luck on occasion, but I like to pick the occasion." -- Rex Stout
2020-05-05: "Life sure is full of surprises." -- Chucky ('Bride Of Chucky', 1998)
2020-05-06: "No man can walk out on his own story." -- Spirit Of The West ('Rango', 2011)
2020-05-07: "In adversity, remember to keep an even mind." -- Horace
2020-05-08: "Like men condemn'd to thunder-bolts, / Who, ere the blow, become mere dolts." -- Samuel Butler ('Hudibras', 1684)
2020-05-09: "For through violence you may murder a murderer but you can't murder murder. Through violence you may murder a liar but you can't establish truth. Through violence you may murder a hater, but you can't murder hate. Darkness cannot put out darkness. Only light can do that." -- Martin Luther King Jr.
2020-05-10: "Be willing to face life squarely and get down beneath the surface of life where the verities and realities are to be found." -- Peace Pilgrim
2020-05-11: "I never know whether to pity or congratulate a man on coming to his senses." -- William Makepeace Thackeray ('The Virginians', 1857)
2020-05-12: "Good day for the crows." -- Agamemnon ('Troy', 2004)
2020-05-13: "Sometimes we're on a collision course, and we just don't know it. Whether it's by accident or by design, there's not a thing we can do about it." -- Benjamin Button ('The Curious Case Of Benjamin Button', 2008)
2020-05-14: "Under a tyranny, most friends are a liability. One quarter of them turn 'reasonable' and become your enemies, one quarter are afraid to speak, and one quarter are killed and you die with them. But the blessed final quarter keep you alive." -- Sinclair Lewis ('It Can't Happen Here', 1935)
2020-05-15: "You’re guaranteed a past, but not a future." -- Ron English
2020-05-16: "But thus the malice of our fate commands, / And nothing great to long duration stands." -- Lucan ('Pharsalia', 61-65 AD)
2020-05-17: "It was difficult to sustain the illusion that education was of value for kids who would not live long enough to use it." -- Neal Stephenson ('Seveneves', 2015)
2020-05-18: "Necessity makes a joke of civilization." -- Isaac Asimov
2020-05-19: "He had long since learned that when something unusual was going on, something that was part of someone else's plan and not his own, he would find out more information by waiting than by asking." -- Orson Scott Card ('Ender's Game', 1985)
2020-05-20: "I have one lifetime, and I will not spend it for greed and profiteering and lies." -- Ursula K. Le Guin ('The Dispossessed', 1974)
2020-05-21: "He who exerts his mind to the utmost knows his nature." -- Mencius
2020-05-22: "Ignorance and obscurantism have never produced anything other than flocks of slaves for tyranny." -- Emiliano Zapata
2020-05-23: "Life was such a wheel that no man could stand upon it for long. And it always, at the end, came round to the same place again." -- Stephen King ('The Stand', 1978)
2020-05-24: "Once I have gotten into a problem, I find it extremely helpful to get a complete perspective, to learn what earlier scientists thought about it." -- Eric Kandel
2020-05-25: "But since the affairs of men rest still incertain, let's reason with the worst that may befall." -- William Shakespeare ('Julius Caesar', c. 1599)
2020-05-26: "Science is the topography of ignorance." -- Oliver Wendell Holmes Sr.
2020-05-27: "It’s what you’re called on to do that makes you great. We haven’t been called on to do anything but buy shit and get fat." -- Louis C.K.
2020-05-28: "EXISTENCE, n. A transient, horrible, fantastic dream, / Wherein is nothing yet all things do seem: / From which we're wakened by a friendly nudge / Of our bedfellow Death, and cry: 'O fudge!'" -- Ambrose Bierce ('The Devil's Dictionary', 1911)
2020-05-29: "One does not cross a river without getting wet." -- South African Proverb
2020-05-30: "I rarely end up where I was intending to go, but often I end up somewhere I needed to be." -- Douglas Adams ('The Long Dark Tea-Time Of The Soul', 1988)
2020-05-31: "When death, the great Reconciler, has come, it is never our tenderness that we repent of, but our severity." -- George Eliot
June 2020
2020-06-01: "Take a step outside the planet / Turn around and around / Take a look at where you are / It's pretty scary!" -- Devo ('Turnaround', 1980)
2020-06-02: "Maybe in order to understand mankind, we have to look at the word itself. Basically, it's made up of two separate words — 'mank' and 'ind.' What do these words mean? It's a mystery, and that's why so is mankind." -- Jack Handey
2020-06-03: "But, for various reasons, it is impossible for the matter-energy system to sustain exponential growth for more than a few tens of doublings, and this phase is by now almost over." -- M. King Hubbert
2020-06-04: "Race hate isn't human nature; race hate is the abandonment of human nature." -- Orson Welles
2020-06-05: "Peace cannot be kept by force. It can only be achieved by understanding." -- Albert Einstein
2020-06-06: "I am merely a seeker after knowledge, taking the world for my province, for it seems all knowledge is interrelated, and each science is dependent to some extent on the others." -- Louis L'Amour ('The Walking Drum', 1984)
2020-06-07: "A moment's insight is sometimes worth a life's experience." -- Thomas Fuller
2020-06-08: "Everything can be taken from a man but one thing; the last of the human freedoms — to choose one's attitude in any given set of circumstances, to choose one's own way." -- Viktor Frankl ('Man's Search For Meaning', 1946)
2020-06-09: "Our problem is not machines acting like humans -- it’s humans acting like machines." -- John Twelve Hawks
2020-06-10: "We all tend to be greedy end-gainers, paying no attention to our means whereby." -- F. Matthias Alexander
2020-06-11: "Next stop: Armageddon, the River Styx, Hades... and all points in between! All aboard!" -- 'Postal' (1997)
2020-06-12: "There is a fundamental error in separating the parts from the whole, the mistake of atomizing what should not be atomized." -- Werner Heisenberg
2020-06-13: "Humans are such fragile, goopy things." -- Invader Zim ('Invader Zim: Enter the Florpus', 2019)
2020-06-14: "And come he slow, or come he fast, / It is but Death who comes at last." -- Walter Scott
2020-06-15: "No matter what he does, every person on earth plays a central role in the history of the world. And normally he doesn't know it." -- Paulo Coelho
2020-06-16: "Base eight is just like base ten really — if you're missing two fingers." -- Tom Lehrer
2020-06-17: "It’s my belief that the study of history should be our preparation for understanding the present, rather than an escape from it." -- Elizabeth Kostova ('The Historian', 2005)
2020-06-18: "A cloud was on the mind of men, and wailing went the weather." -- G. K. Chesterton ('The Man Who Was Thursday', 1908)
2020-06-19: "When I hear somebody sigh that 'Life is hard,' I am always tempted to ask, 'Compared to what?'" -- Sydney J. Harris
2020-06-20: "On this showing, the nature of the breakdowns of civilizations can be summed up in three points: a failure of creative power in the minority, an answering withdrawal of mimesis on the part of the majority, and a consequent loss of social unity in the society as a whole." -- Arnold J. Toynbee
2020-06-21: "While in theory randomness is an intrinsic property, in practice, randomness is incomplete information." -- Nassim Nicholas Taleb ('The Black Swan', 2007)
2020-06-22: "The most difficult thing is the decision to act. The rest is merely tenacity." -- Amelia Earhart
2020-06-23: "The world does so well without me, that I am moved to wish that I could do equally well without the world." -- Robertson Davies
2020-06-24: "It is to be expected that advances in physiology and psychology will give governments much more control over individual mentality than they now have even in totalitarian countries." -- Bertrand Russell
2020-06-25: "What are the works of men if not a momentary respite, a hiding place soon to be discovered by catastrophe?" -- R. Scott Bakker ('The Darkness That Comes Before', 2004)
2020-06-26: "We have an economy where we steal the future, sell it in the present, and call it GDP." -- Paul Hawken
2020-06-27: "The mind is sharper and keener in seclusion and uninterrupted solitude. No big laboratory is needed in which to think." -- Nikola Tesla
2020-06-28: "Bloodcurdling suspense! A thousand thrill-maddening horrors!" -- Tagline for 'The Maze' (1953)
2020-06-29: "People's beliefs don't exist in isolation. Everyone's firmly held beliefs exert an enormous pressure on everyone else." -- Orson Scott Card ('Treason', 1988)
2020-06-30: "They saw the end coming, he thought, looking down the file of awful figures. But they were dead wrong about the reasons why." -- David Brin ('Earth', 1990)
July 2020
2020-07-01: "And the earth becomes my throne / I adapt to the unknown / Under wandering stars I've grown / By myself but not alone." -- Metallica ('Wherever I May Roam', 1991)
2020-07-02: "When I was young, the old regarded me as an outrageous young fellow, and now that I'm old the young regard me as an outrageous old fellow." -- Fred Hoyle
2020-07-03: "He believed in facts, and in altering your viewpoint to fit them, no matter what they were." -- Damon Knight ('A For Anything', 1959)
2020-07-04: "Man is born free; and everywhere he is in chains." -- Jean-Jacques Rousseau
2020-07-05: "Welcome to the worst nightmare of all...REALITY!" -- Pinhead ('Hellraiser VI: Hellseeker', 2002)
2020-07-06: "If company managers, city governments, the human population do not choose and enforce their own limits to keep growth within the capacity of the supporting environment, then the environment will choose and enforce limits." -- Donella Meadows
2020-07-07: "Just when things look darkest, they go black." -- Paul Newman
2020-07-08: "There is no Plan B." -- Tagline For 'The A-Team' (2010)
2020-07-09: "Now at the moment the world is suffering from large numbers of people who have no purpose in life — for whom there is no opportunity — and that's sad." -- Jonas Salk
2020-07-10: "Whenever one tries to suppress doubt, there is tyranny." -- Simone Weil
2020-07-11: "Never underestimate the power of human stupidity." -- Robert A. Heinlein
2020-07-12: "Things persisted in not being what they seemed." -- Frank Herbert ('Dune', 1965)
2020-07-13: "Knowledge will forever govern ignorance: And a people who mean to be their own governors must arm themselves with the power which knowledge gives." -- James Madison
2020-07-14: "Are you ready for the truth?" -- Tagline For 'Unbreakable' (2000)
2020-07-15: "Cease, Man, to mourn, to weep, to wail; enjoy thy shining hour of sun; / We dance along Death's icy brink, but is the dance less full of fun?" -- Richard Francis Burton
2020-07-16: "When the Iroqouis needed to make a decision they thought of the implications of the seventh generation to come after them." -- F. David Peat
2020-07-17: "Let us suffer absurdities, for this is only to suffer one another." -- Hilaire Belloc
2020-07-18: "One of the strangest disparities of history lies between the sense of abundance felt by older and simpler societies and the sense of scarcity felt by the ostensibly richer societies of today." -- Richard M. Weaver
2020-07-19: "I would unite with anybody to do right; and with nobody to do wrong." -- Frederick Douglass
2020-07-20: "At no time in the past could anybody have known that what they were doing then would end up like this now." -- James Burke
2020-07-21: "It is ironic that the accumulation of arms is one of the few expanding industries in a period of economic depression and gloom." -- Javier Pérez de Cuéllar
2020-07-22: "If there's more than one way to do a job and one of those ways will end in disaster, then somebody will do it that way." -- Edward A. Murphy Jr.
2020-07-23: "Suppose no one asked a question, what would be the answer." -- Gertrude Stein
2020-07-24: "Open your eyes." -- Tagline For 'Vanilla Sky' (2001)
2020-07-25: "People are curious. A few people are. They will be driven to find things out, even trivial things." -- Alice Munro
2020-07-26: "It's one world, pal. We're all neighbors." -- Frank Sinatra
2020-07-27: "Suffering? You haven't seen anything yet..." -- Tagline For 'Saw III' (2006)
2020-07-28: "We next to never know when we are well off: but this cuts two ways -- for if we did, we should perhaps know better when we are ill off also; and I have sometimes thought that there are as many ignorant of the one as of the other." -- Samuel Butler
2020-07-29: "Insanity is relative. It depends on who has who locked in what cage." -- Ray Bradbury
2020-07-30: "Some people hope and die with their song still in them." -- Patsy Cline
2020-07-31: "There can be no gradualist, ecomodernist answer to the dire ecological problems we face, because when looking at the human effect on the planet there is nothing gradual about it; it is a Great Acceleration and a rift in the Earth system." -- John Bellamy Foster
August 2020
2020-08-01: "Hey, hey, baby, no more lies / Hey, hey, baby, this is the big goodbye." -- Great White ('Big Goodbye', 1992)
2020-08-02: "If the house is to be demolished tomorrow anyhow, people seem to feel, we may as well burn the furniture today." -- Arthur C. Clarke
2020-08-03: "Ask not what your country's done for you...ask what your country's done to you." -- Sam ('Uncle Sam', 1997)
2020-08-04: "I would feel more optimistic about a bright future for man if he spent less time proving that he can outwit Nature and more time tasting her sweetness and respecting her seniority." -- E. B. White
2020-08-05: "I'm gonna be a new kind of clown. I'm gonna stand in the middle of the ring and laugh at the folks." -- Harper Lee ('To Kill A Mockingbird', 1960)
2020-08-06: "Few individuals of any race murder for pleasure. There are perfectly adequate reasons to kill, though, reasons which might satisfy any philosopher. But, once accepted, there are more reasons, and more and more. And murder, once accepted, is hard to stop. It leads irresistibly to war and, from there, to annihilation." -- Robert Sheckley ('Citizen In Space', 1955)
2020-08-07: "No satisfaction based upon self-deception is solid, and, however unpleasant the truth may be, it is better to face it once and for all, to get used to it, and to proceed to build your life in accordance with it." -- Bertrand Russell
2020-08-08: "It is not now as it hath been of yore — turn wheresoe'er I may, by night or day, the things which I have seen I now can see no more." -- William Wordsworth ('Ode: Intimations of Immortality', 1804)
2020-08-09: "Thinking doesn't guarantee that we won't make mistakes. But not thinking guarantees that we will." -- Leslie Lamport
2020-08-10: "Too close a view may interfere with one's grasp of an overall problem or concept." -- Stafford Beer
2020-08-11: "One must not let oneself be overwhelmed by sadness." -- Jacqueline Kennedy Onassis
2020-08-12: "What a man believes may be ascertained, not from his creed, but from the assumptions on which he habitually acts." -- George Bernard Shaw
2020-08-13: "Seems to me the place you fight cruelty is where you find it, and the place you give help is where you see it needed." -- Philip Pullman ('The Subtle Knife', 1997)
2020-08-14: "Do we care that, according to overwhelming information, we are doing some careless, powerfully bad things to the environment?" -- Mike Shinoda
2020-08-15: "There is a way to escape the inference of superluminal speeds and spooky action at a distance. But it involves absolute determinism in the universe, the complete absence of free will." -- John Stewart Bell
2020-08-16: "The function of music is to release us from the tyranny of conscious thought." -- Thomas Beecham
2020-08-17: "The days of peace and slumberous calm are fled." -- John Keats ('Hyperion', 1818)
2020-08-18: "Whatever we might think of this measureless theater to which we've got reserved tickets, but tickets whose lifespan is laughably short, bounded as it is by two arbitrary dates; whatever else we might think of this world — it is astonishing." -- Wislawa Szymborska
2020-08-19: "Every silver lining obscures a cloud." -- Ron English
2020-08-20: "To the man of humour, there is the sardonic delight of spying out pretensions and incongruities of life." -- H. P. Lovecraft
2020-08-21: "It is too late to avoid soaring temperatures, scarce water, and extreme weather." -- John Bellamy Foster
2020-08-22: "You know I am not born to tread in the beaten track — the peculiar bent of my nature pushes me on." -- Mary Wollstonecraft
2020-08-24: "The dense and tangled web of life - the interconnected nature of reality - now reveals itself on a daily basis." -- Meg Wheatley
2020-08-25: "The infant runs toward it with its eyes closed, the adult is stationary, the old man approaches it with his back turned." -- Denis Diderot
2020-08-25: "Necessity is the theme and the inventress, the eternal curb and law of nature." -- Leonardo da Vinci
2020-08-26: "Astronomy is perhaps the science whose discoveries owe least to chance, in which human understanding appears in its whole magnitude, and through which man can best learn how small he is." -- Georg Christoph Lichtenberg
2020-08-27: "You can't scream if you can't breathe." -- Tagline For 'Anaconda' (1997)
2020-08-28: "If one looks with a cold eye at the mess man has made of history, it is difficult to avoid the conclusion that he has been afflicted by some built-in mental disorder which drives him towards self-destruction." -- Arthur Koestler ('The Ghost In The Machine', 1967)
2020-08-29: "It is perhaps the saddest, most hopeless thing we can say about our culture that it is a culture of distraction. 'Attention deficit' is a cultural disorder, a debasement of spirit, before it is an ailment in our children to be treated with Ritalin." -- Curtis White
2020-08-30: "We, at the height, are ready to decline." -- William Shakespeare ('Julius Caesar', c. 1599)
2020-08-31: "Truth is much more terrible than fiction." -- The Mirror Queen ('The Brothers Grimm', 2005)
September 2020
2020-09-01: "Your trip is short." -- Phish ('Martian Monster', 2014)
2020-09-02: "While food yields shrink, the world's population grows 90 million a year and the planet's life support systems move closer to catastrophe. An ever expanding capitalism and a fragile, finite ecology appear to be on a calamitous collision course." -- Michael Parenti
2020-09-03: "The only problem with capitalism is that it destroys the planet, and that it’s based on growth. I mean apart from those two little details it’s got a lot to be said in its favour." -- David Fleming
2020-09-04: "The history of our time calls to mind those cartoon characters who rush madly over the edge of a cliff without seeing it: the power of their imagination keeps them suspended in midair, but as soon as they look down and see where they are, they fall." -- Raoul Vaneigem
2020-09-05: "And I will die, and you will die, and we all will die, and even the stars will fade out one after another in time." -- Jack Kerouac ('Desolation Angels', 1965)
2020-09-06: "The coast is toast." -- Tagline For 'Volcano' (1997)
2020-09-07: "A person of ordinary intelligence who acquires power, of whatever kind, tends to develop an exaggerated view of his own capabilities. Sycophants gather. There is little or no criticism of decisions. As his ability to disrupt the lives of others advances, these tendencies become stronger. Eventually you end with Louis the Fourteenth, who thinks he’s done a good job for France, although the country he left behind was ruined." -- Jack McDevitt ('Infinity Beach', 2000)
2020-09-08: "I can't help feeling wary when I hear anything said about the masses. First you take their faces from 'em by calling 'em the masses and then you accuse 'em of not having any faces." -- J. B. Priestley
2020-09-09: "Some days you can’t see the forest for the fire." -- Ron English
2020-09-10: "Strictly speaking it may even be said that nearly all our knowledge is problematical; and in the small number of things which we are able to know with certainty, even in the mathematical sciences themselves, the principal means for ascertaining truth — induction and analogy — are based on probabilities." -- Pierre-Simon Laplace
2020-09-11: "Science invites us to let the facts in, even when they don’t conform to our preconceptions." -- Carl Sagan
2020-09-12: "The markets make a good servant but a bad master, and a worse religion." -- Amory Lovins
2020-09-13: "With infinite complacence, people went to and fro over the Earth about their little affairs, serene in the assurance of their dominion over this small spinning fragment of solar driftwood which by chance or design man has inherited out of the dark mystery of time and space." -- Orson Welles ('The War Of The Worlds', 1938)
2020-09-14: "As distrust, in some sense, is the mother of safety, so security is the gate of danger." -- Thomas Brooks
2020-09-15: "The wonder of the world is o'er: / The magic from the sea is gone: / There is no unimagined shore, / No islet yet to venture on." -- George William Russell ('The Twilight Of Earth', 1913)
2020-09-17: "Will people ever be wise enough to refuse to follow bad leaders or to take away the freedom of other people?" -- Eleanor Roosevelt
2020-09-18: "It's not a certain society that seems ridiculous to me, it's mankind." -- Eugène Ionesco
2020-09-19: "The bulk of mankind is as well equipped for flying as thinking." -- Jonathan Swift
2020-09-20: "I don't have the answers. I only know that a darkness is rising." -- John Constantine
2020-09-21: "Conquer anger with love, evil with good, meanness with generosity, and lies with truth." -- Gautama Buddha
2020-09-22: "I have grown entirely to rely on the workings of the mind. Perhaps they are weak supports to rely upon, but, search as I will, I can see no better ones." -- Jawaharlal Nehru
2020-09-23: "A better day was dawning at the close of the Mesozoic Era. There were some little warm-blooded animals around which had been stealing and eating the eggs of the Dinosaurs, and they were gradually learning to steal other things, too. Civilization was just around the corner." -- Will Cuppy ('How To Become Extinct', 1941)
2020-09-24: "On the banks of the river of Time, the sad procession of human generations is marching slowly to the grave." -- Bertrand Russell
2020-09-25: "Unseen, in the background, Fate was quietly slipping the lead into the boxing-glove." -- P. G. Wodehouse
2020-09-26: "Everybody's a mad scientist, and life is their lab. We're all trying to experiment to find a way to live, to solve problems, to fend off madness and chaos." -- David Cronenberg
2020-09-27: "I have learned yet again (this has been going on all my life) what folly it is to take any thing for granted without examining it skeptically." -- Jane Jacobs
2020-09-28: "Fear the sky." -- Tagline For 'Stealth' (2005)
2020-09-29: "The human problem cannot be solved by simply throwing money at it." -- General Thade ('Planet Of The Apes', 2001)
2020-09-30: "Experience is the best of schoolmasters, only the school-fees are heavy." -- Thomas Carlyle
October 2020
2020-10-01: "Come on the risin' wind, / We're goin' up around the bend." -- Creedence Clearwater Revival ('Up Around The Bend', 1970)
2020-10-02: "Truth, beaten down, may well rise again. But there’s a reason it gets beaten down. Usually, we don’t like it very much." -- Jack McDevitt ('Odyssey', 2006)
2020-10-03: "Contempt for the natural world implies contempt for life." -- Edward Abbey
2020-10-04: "Men have never wearied of political justice; they have wearied of waiting for it." -- G. K. Chesterton ('What's Wrong With The World', 1910)
2020-10-05: "Great events turn on small hinges." -- Stephen King ('The Institute', 2019)
2020-10-06: "We make our own beds. Seems beneath our dignity to whine when we're forced to sleep in them." -- Liv Moore ('iZombie', 2016)
2020-10-07: "We are doomed to repeat the mistakes of the past, and no amount of education gleaned from our propensity for self-destruction and misguided thinking ever teaches us anything." -- Terry Brooks ('Bearers Of The Black Staff', 2010)
2020-10-08: "The Nation that destroys its soil destroys itself." -- Franklin D. Roosevelt
2020-10-09: "I was a peaceful sedentary man, a lover of a quiet life, with no appetite for perils and commotions. But I was beginning to realise that I was very obstinate." -- John Buchan ('The Power-House', 1916)
2020-10-10: "Where is the wisdom we have lost in knowledge? Where is the knowledge we have lost in information?" -- T. S. Eliot
2020-10-11: "One element, however, tends to go flagrantly missing in even the most vivid conspiracy theories about the banking system, let alone in official accounts: that is, the role of military power. There's a reason why the wizard has such a strange capacity to create money out of nothing. Behind him there is a man with a gun." -- David Graeber ('Debt: The First 5000 Years', 2011)
2020-10-12: "We drink our morning coffee with a drop of fear." -- John Twelve Hawks
2020-10-13: "For every action, there’s an infinity of outcomes. Countless trillions are possible, many milliards are likely, millions might be considered probable, several occur as possibilities to us as observers — and one comes true." -- China Miéville ('The Scar', 2002)
2020-10-14: "Nature's curriculum cannot be changed." -- Martin Lewis Perl
2020-10-15: "A person’s a person, no matter how small!" -- Dr. Seuss ('Horton Hears A Who!', 1955)
2020-10-16: "Change is the essential process of all existence." -- Spock ('Star Trek', 'Let That Be Your Last Battlefield', 1969)
2020-10-17: "The vessel, though her masts be firm, beneath her copper bears a worm." -- Henry David Thoreau
2020-10-18: "They say when something bad happens, you have three choices. Let it define you, destroy you, or strengthen you." -- Columbus ('Zombieland: Double Tap', 2019)
2020-10-19: "The science of probability gives mathematical expression to our ignorance, not to our wisdom." -- Samuel R. Delany ('Time Considered As A Helix Of Semi-Precious Stones', 1968)
2020-10-20: "Aha! As I anticipated, things have gone wildly beyond my control." -- Professor Nebulous ('Nebulous', 2005)
2020-10-21: "Some, in getting ahead of everyone, are winning themselves the desert." -- Antonio Porchia
2020-10-22: "Would you rather be happy and dead, or scared and alive?" -- Alastair Reynolds ('Revelation Space', 2000)
2020-10-23: "Nobody on this planet is going to be untouched by the impacts of climate change." -- Rajendra K. Pachauri
2020-10-24: "Somebody left the door open and the wrong dogs came home." -- The Stranger ('High Plains Drifter', 1973)
2020-10-25: "We have already transgressed the limit of safety, and the present disorders of our time are but precursors of other and imminent dangers." -- Felix Adler
2020-10-26: "Usually, terrible things that are done with the excuse that progress requires them are not really progress at all, but just terrible things." -- Russell Baker
2020-10-27: "All progress is based upon a universal innate desire on the part of every organism to live beyond its income." -- Samuel Butler
2020-10-28: "For anyone trying to discern what to do with their life: pay attention to what you pay attention to. That's pretty much all the info you need." -- Amy Krouse Rosenthal
2020-10-29: "It is not because men's desires are strong that they act ill; it is because their consciences are weak." -- John Stuart Mill
2020-10-30: "There is always more goodness in the world than there appears to be, because goodness is of its very nature modest and retiring." -- Evelyn Beatrice Hall
2020-10-31: "I am a member of a party of one, and I live in an age of fear." -- E. B. White
November 2020
2020-11-01: "It's the new Mother Nature takin' over, it's the new splendid lady come to call. / It's the new Mother Nature takin' over. She's gettin' us all, she's gettin' us all." -- The Guess Who ('No Sugar Tonight / New Mother Nature', 1970)
2020-11-02: "Life isn't about finding yourself, it's about creating yourself." -- George Bernard Shaw
2020-11-03: "Yeah, the war's over and the future won. The past never had a chance, man." -- Homer Simpson ('The Simpsons', 'American History X-cellent', 2010)
2020-11-04: "The test of our progress is not whether we add more to the abundance of those who have much; it is whether we provide enough for those who have too little." -- Franklin D. Roosevelt
2020-11-05: "Right now we are facing a man-made disaster of global scale, our greatest threat in thousands of years: climate change. If we don’t take action, the collapse of our civilisations and the extinction of much of the natural world is on the horizon." -- David Attenborough
2020-11-06: "What one does when faced with the truth is more difficult than you think." -- Wonder Woman ('Wonder Woman', 2017)
2020-11-07: "These struggling tides of life that seem / In wayward, aimless course to tend, / Are eddies of the mighty stream / That rolls to its appointed end." -- William Cullen Bryant
2020-11-08: "Few persons care to study logic, because everybody conceives himself to be proficient enough in the art of reasoning already." -- Charles Sanders Peirce
2020-11-09: "I believe that either Jupiter has life or it doesn't. But I neither believe that it does, nor do I believe that it doesn't." -- Raymond Smullyan
2020-11-10: "We appear to have lost the capacity to question the present, much less offer alternatives to it." -- Tony Judt
2020-11-11: "Calculating risks does not mean taking a gamble. It is more than figuring the odds. It is not reducible to a formula." -- Ernest King
2020-11-12: "When you have a child, the world has a hostage." -- Ernest Hemingway
2020-11-13: "Reality is merely an illusion, albeit a very persistent one." -- Albert Einstein
2020-11-14: "The universe doesn't like secrets; it conspires to reveal the truth to lead you to it." -- Lisa Unger
2020-11-15: "The mystery of human existence lies not in just staying alive but in finding something to live for." -- Fyodor Dostoyevsky
2020-11-16: "Dread it, run from it, destiny arrives all the same. And now it's here." -- Thanos ('Avengers: Infinity War', 2018)
2020-11-17: "Adversity is like a strong wind. It tears from us all but the things that cannot be torn, so that we see ourselves as we really are." -- Arthur Golden
2020-11-18: "The spirits of our foolish deeds haunt us, with or without repentance." -- Gilbert Parker
2020-11-19: "Let your heart feel for the affliction and distress of everyone." -- George Washington
2020-11-20: "Now what else is the whole life of mortals, but a sort of comedy in which the various actors, disguised by various costumes and masks, walk on and play each ones part until the manager walks them off the stage?" -- Erasmus
2020-11-21: "All changes, even the most longed for, have their melancholy; for what we leave behind us is a part of ourselves; we must die to one life before we can enter another." -- Anatole France
2020-11-22: "Money constitutes no proper basis of civilization." -- Eugene V. Debs
2020-11-23: "Questions about the nature of reality have puzzled scientists and philosophers for millennia. Like most people, I think that there is something real out there, entirely independent of us and our models, as the Earth is independent of our maps. But this is because I can’t help believing in an objective reality, not because I have good arguments for it." -- Steven Weinberg
2020-11-24: "The carrot and the stick guide scientists and politicians as well as donkeys." -- George Stigler
2020-11-25: "Now we live in the empire of oil and money — the rest is disguise." -- José Saramago
2020-11-26: "End, begin, all the same. Big change. Sometimes good, sometimes bad." -- Aughra ('The Dark Crystal', 1982)
2020-11-27: "Always be comic in a tragedy. What the deuce else can you do?" -- G. K. Chesterton ('The Man Who Was Thursday', 1908)
2020-11-28: "Join humankind's most treacherous battle for survival!" -- Tagline For 'The Mysterians' (1957)
2020-11-29: "Great is the art of beginning, but greater the art is of ending." -- Henry Wadsworth Longfellow ('In the Harbor / Elegiac Verse', 1879)
2020-11-30: "I don't care if you're the Pope of Rome, President of the United States, or even Man of the Year — something can always go wrong." -- Loren Visser ('Blood Simple', 1984)
December 2020
2020-12-01: "Time keeps on slippin' slippin' slippin' into the future." -- Steve Miller Band ('Fly Like An Eagle', 1976)
2020-12-02: "He is a weak ruler who needs religion to uphold his government." -- Mustafa Kemal Atatürk
2020-12-03: "Fortunate indeed is the man who has found wisdom and who is full of that discretion which is better than all the acquiring, trafficking, and possession of gold and silver." -- Philibert de l'Orme
2020-12-04: "Success is abhorrent if attained by the sacrifice of the fundamental principles of morality." -- Theodore Roosevelt
2020-12-05: "Reasonable men make the mistake of thinking everyone else is reasonable." -- John, The Lord Chamberlain
2020-12-06: "The majority of men never turn their attention from the outside world to examine themselves. They go through life drawn hither and thither by outside happenings, with scarcely any originality, or without any more control of their direction than have the leaves which are whirled about by the autumn wind." -- Jules Payot
2020-12-07: "Out of primordial depths to destroy the world!" -- Tagline For 'It Came From Beneath the Sea' (1955)
2020-12-08: "It is better to speak the truth, and lose, than to win by lying." -- Bernardo Dovizi
2020-12-09: "As the world changes the forms of corruption also gradually become more cunning, more difficult to point out — but they certainly do not become better." -- Søren Kierkegaard
2020-12-10: "Our world does not stand halfway between heaven and hell; it seems much closer to hell." -- Stanislaw Lem
2020-12-11: "If we fail to anticipate the unforeseen or expect the unexpected in a universe of infinite possibilities, we may find ourselves at the mercy of anyone or anything that cannot be programmed, categorized or easily referenced." -- Fox Mulder ('The X-Files: Fight The Future', 1998)
2020-12-12: "They would be our worst enemy who would wish us to live only on the glories of the past and die off from the face of the earth in sheer passivity." -- Jagadish Chandra Bose
2020-12-13: "From a wild weird clime that lieth, sublime, / Out of SPACE — out of TIME." -- Edgar Allan Poe ('Dream-Land', 1844)
2020-12-14: "I could a tale unfold whose lightest word would harrow up thy soul." -- William Shakespeare ('Hamlet', c. 1600)
2020-12-15: "The unwanting soul sees what's hidden, and the ever-wanting soul sees only what it wants." -- Laozi ('Tao Te Ching', 6th Century BC)
2020-12-16: "Causality can only explain later events by earlier events, but it can never explain the beginning." -- Werner Heisenberg
2020-12-17: "The smallest worm will turn being trodden on, and doves will peck in safeguard of their brood." -- William Shakespeare ('Henry VI, Part 3', 1591)
2020-12-18: "Can it be we are not free? It might be worth looking into." -- Samuel Beckett ('Molloy', 1951)
2020-12-19: "The Universe has shouted itself alive. We are one of the shouts." -- Ray Bradbury
2020-12-20: "I like my world as coherent and consistent as possible." -- H. G. Wells
2020-12-21: "Mother Nature is a brutal bitch, red in tooth and claw, who destroys what she creates." -- Sam Keen
2020-12-22: "Whenever somebody tells me to do something my instinct's always to do the opposite." -- John Updike ('Rabbit At Rest', 1990)
2020-12-23: "Professional opinion is almost inevitably against changes." -- Robert Cecil
2020-12-24: "Consult your conscience, rather than popular opinion." -- Publilius Syrus
2020-12-25: "No theory, no ready-made system, no book that has ever been written will save the world. I cleave to no system. I am a true seeker." -- Mikhail Bakunin
2020-12-26: "There is no force more potent in the modern world than stupidity fueled by greed." -- Edward Abbey
2020-12-27: "All I can do is be me. Whoever that is." -- Tagline for 'I'm Not There' (2007)
2020-12-28: "The price of training is always a certain 'trained incapacity': the more we know how to do something, the harder it is to learn to do it differently." -- Abraham Kaplan
2020-12-29: "Can there be joy and laughter when always the world is ablaze? Enshrouded in darkness should you not seek a light?" -- Gautama Buddha ('Dhammapada')
2020-12-30: "Liberty is, to the lowest rank of every nation, little more than the choice of working or starving." -- Samuel Johnson
2020-12-31: "An optimist stays up until midnight to see the New Year in. A pessimist stays up to make sure the old year leaves." -- William E. Vaughan
January 2021
2021-01-01: "Should know better but you keep turning up the heat." -- Peter Gabriel ('Burn You Up Burn You Down', 2003)
2021-01-02: "We live in a time which has created the art of the absurd." -- Norman Mailer
2021-01-03: "The universe is a joint product of the observer and the observed." -- Gloria Steinem
2021-01-04: "The darker the subject, the more light you must try to shed on the matter." -- Alan Ayckbourn
2021-01-05: "Beware of assuming the sterile attitude of a spectator, for life is not a spectacle, a sea of miseries is not a proscenium, a man screaming is not a dancing bear." -- Aimé Césaire
2021-01-06: "We don’t live in order to die, we live in order to live." -- Ursula K. Le Guin
2021-01-07: "No one changes anything by playing it safe." -- Tagline For 'The Soloist' (2009)
2021-01-08: "The real problem of humanity is the following: we have paleolithic emotions; medieval institutions; and god-like technology." -- E. O. Wilson
2021-01-09: "Everyone was warned, but no one listened. A rise in temperature. Ocean patterns changed. And ice caps melted. They called it extreme weather. They didn't know what 'extreme' was." -- Hannah Lawson ('Geostorm', 2017)
2021-01-10: "Circumstance is a factory of tears." -- Purushottam Laxman Deshpande
2021-01-11: "Be careful what you wish for." -- Tagline for 'Coraline' (2009)
2021-01-12: "Primeval man stumbled along with peering eyes, and slow, uncertain footsteps. Now we walk briskly towards our unknown goal." -- Arthur Conan Doyle
2021-01-13: "Bad things happen, darkness descends." -- John Laroche ('Adaptation', 2002)
2021-01-14: "Greed is a bottomless pit which exhausts the person in an endless effort to satisfy the need without ever reaching satisfaction." -- Erich Fromm
2021-01-15: "We are in a fool's climate, accidentally kept cool by smoke, and before this century is over billions of us will die and the few breeding pairs of people that survive will be in the Arctic where the climate remains tolerable." -- James Lovelock
2021-01-16: "There are problems in this universe for which there are no answers." -- Paul Atreides ('Dune Messiah', 1969)
2021-01-17: "Strange as it may seem, no amount of learning can cure stupidity, and formal education positively fortifies it." -- Stephen Vizinczey
2021-01-18: "The place where there is no darkness was the imagined future, which one would never see..." -- George Orwell ('Nineteen Eighty-Four', 1949)
2021-01-19: "It is a very serious consideration, which should deeply impress our minds, that millions yet unborn may be the miserable sharers of the event." -- Samuel Adams
2021-01-20: "Nae man can tether time or tide." -- Robert Burns
2021-01-21: "Everything tends towards catastrophe and collapse." -- Winston Churchill
2021-01-22: "The brain's a colloid, a very complicated machine. We don't know much about its potentialities." -- Lewis Padgett ('Mimsy Were The Borogoves', 1943)
2021-01-23: "Every trail has its end, and every calamity brings its lesson!" -- James Fenimore Cooper ('The Last Of The Mohicans', 1826)
2021-01-24: "Have you ever considered that too many answers are the same as no answer at all?" -- Tyrion Lannister ('A Clash Of Kings', 1998)
2021-01-25: "The truth is that man's horror of the skeleton is not horror of death at all. It is man's eccentric glory that he has not, generally speaking, any objection to being dead, but has a very serious objection to being undignified." -- G. K. Chesterton
2021-01-26: "Only by living at the edge of death can you understand the indescribable joy of life." -- James Clavell ('Shogun', 1975)
2021-01-27: "In general terms, satisfied states extend commitments abroad when they must, not when they can. They are motivated by necessity rather than opportunity. Rising states extend commitments abroad when they can, not when they must. They are motivated by opportunity rather than necessity." -- Charles A. Kupchan ('The End Of The American Era', 2002)
2021-01-28: "You think it'll last forever: people and cars and concrete. But it won't. One day, it's all gone." -- Doctor Who ('The End Of The World', 2005)
2021-01-29: "Even people who have all the money and power in the universe want more to protect what they already have." -- J. M. McDermott
2021-01-30: "You know the greatest danger facing us is ourselves, an irrational fear of the unknown. But there's no such thing as the unknown -- only things temporarily hidden, temporarily not understood." -- James T. Kirk ('Star Trek', 'The Corbomite Maneuver', 1966)
2021-01-31: "The more we know, the more we feel our ignorance; the more we feel how much remains unknown." -- Humphry Davy
February 2021
2021-02-01: "I was feeling part of the scenery / I walked right out of the machinery." -- Peter Gabriel ('Solsbury Hill', 1977)
2021-02-03: "A gram of experience is worth a ton of theory." -- Robert Gascoyne-Cecil
2021-02-04: "People have been known to kill the messenger who waltzes in with a new version of the truth." -- Joe Dawson ('Highlander: The Series', 1992-1998)
2021-02-05: "If you plan on being anything less than you are capable of being, you will probably be unhappy all the days of your life." -- Abraham Maslow
2021-02-06: "Books! lighthouses built on the sea of time! Books! by whose sorcery the whole pageantry of the world's history moves in solemn procession before our eyes. From their pages great souls look down in all their grandeur, undimmed by the faults and follies of earthly existence, consecrated by time." -- Edwin Percy Whipple
2021-02-07: "A time traveler from the year 1899 would be continually amazed by our advanced technology—our cars and airplanes, our skyscraper cities, our TV, radio, computers, and communication abilities. Probably the traveler would be most shaken by our science, from astronomy to zoology. The only place in which this visitor would be comfortably at home is in most of our high schools." -- Leon M. Lederman
2021-02-08: "A bridge does not abandon its first shore when it grows out in spans towards the further one." -- R. A. Lafferty
2021-02-09: "Things are going to go wrong, and I think we are false to life if we don't portray it." -- James A. Michener
2021-02-10: "Fear is the enemy of logic." -- Frank Sinatra
2021-02-11: "The consequences of our actions take us by the scruff of the neck, altogether indifferent to the fact that we have 'improved' in the meantime." -- Friedrich Nietzsche
2021-02-12: "People smell all kinds of ways before they have burned, but only one way afterwards." -- Neal Stephenson ('Cryptonomicon', 1999)
2021-02-13: "There is one kind of prison where the man is behind bars, and everything that he desires is outside; and there is another kind where the things are behind the bars, and the man is outside." -- Upton Sinclair ('The Jungle', 1906)
2021-02-14: "The language of science is universal, and is a powerful force in bringing the peoples of the world closer together." -- Arthur Compton
2021-02-15: "You can't outrun Death forever, but you can make the bastard work for it." -- Gene Roddenberry ('Andromeda', 2000-2005)
2021-02-16: "Nowadays, the absence of catastrophic news is great news." -- David Levy
2021-02-17: "The palace is not safe, when the cottage is not happy." -- Benjamin Disraeli
2021-02-18: "Truly wealth, which men spend their lives in acquiring, is a valueless thing at the last." -- H. Rider Haggard ('King Solomon's Mines', 1885)
2021-02-19: "Life is bristling with thorns, and I know no other remedy than to cultivate one's garden." -- Voltaire
2021-02-20: "The truth about us is endless. As are the lies." -- Philip Roth ('The Human Stain', 2000)
2021-02-21: "The Three Bs, meaning the Bus, the Bath, and the Bed. That is where the greatest discoveries are made in science." -- Pinky Carruthers ('The Adventures Of Buckaroo Banzai Across The 8th Dimension', 1984)
2021-02-22: "Anxiety grew, the fear that always comes when an established pattern falters." -- Tanith Lee ('The Birthgrave', 1975)
2021-02-23: "Try to remain calm." -- Tagline For 'Outbreak' (1995)
2021-02-24: "What I do know for certain is that what is regarded as success in a rational materialistic society only impresses superficial minds. It amounts to nothing and will not help us rout the destructive forces threatening us today." -- Patrick White
2021-02-25: "A civilization is complicated, in the first place, because it is dynamic; that is, it is constantly changing in the passage of time, until it has perished." -- Carroll Quigley
2021-02-26: "War is mankind's most tragic and stupid folly; to seek or advise its deliberate provocation is a black crime against all men." -- Dwight D. Eisenhower
2021-02-27: "You really want to know what it feels like to be the clown at midnight? Where there's only ever one joke and it's always on you? Well, here you are." -- The Joker
2021-02-28: "We have had a glorious past — but a glorious past is bitterness for a child with a hopeless future." -- John Wyndham ('Stowaway To Mars', 1936)
March 2021
2021-03-02: "You can see the future best through peripheral vision." -- Nicholas Negroponte
2021-03-03: "Life is the art of drawing sufficient conclusions from insufficient premises." -- Samuel Butler
2021-03-04: "Man's greatest advances these last few generations have been made by the application of human intelligence to the management of matter. Now we are confronted by a more difficult problem, the application of intelligence to the management of human relations. Unless we can advance in that field also, the very instruments that man's intelligence has created may be the instruments of his destruction." -- Norman Angell
2021-03-05: "In fact, science can accomplish nothing by the consideration of individual facts; from time to time it must cast its glance at the world as a whole." -- Ernst Mach
2021-03-06: "The weak have one weapon: the errors of those who think they are strong." -- Georges Bidault
2021-03-07: "The cosmos is within us. We are made of star-stuff. We are a way for the universe to know itself." -- Carl Sagan
2021-03-08: "An infinity of excuses can always be found for non-action." -- Theodore Roosevelt
2021-03-09: "At first glance, everything looked the same. It wasn't." -- Dr. Miles Bennell ('Invasion Of The Body Snatchers', 1956)
2021-03-10: "It is through science that we prove, but through intuition that we discover." -- Henri Poincaré
2021-03-11: "Your time is limited, so don't waste it living someone else's life." -- Steve Jobs
2021-03-12: "It is a great mortification to the vanity of man, that his utmost art and industry can never equal the meanest of nature's productions, either for beauty or value." -- David Hume
2021-03-13: "Whether or not Big Brother is watching us, we certainly have to watch him, which may be even worse." -- Wilfrid Sheed
2021-03-14: "The problem with Destiny, of course, is that she is often not careful where she puts her finger." -- Terry Pratchett ('Men At Arms', 1993)
2021-03-15: "As we speak cruel time is fleeing." -- Horace
2021-03-16: "We have all a better guide in ourselves, if we would attend to it, than any other person can be." -- Jane Austen ('Mansfield Park', 1814)
2021-03-17: "Only in the last few decades have people suspected that their window on the world has a glass that gives a distorted view." -- Peter Farb
2021-03-18: "The game of life is the game of boomerangs. Our thoughts, deeds and words return to us sooner or later, with astounding accuracy." -- Florence Scovel Shinn
2021-03-19: "It is perfectly clear that hate begets hate, force is met with force, and cruelty can become so common that its contemplation brings pleasure, when it should produce pain." -- Clarence Darrow
2021-03-20: "Nature always uses the simplest means to accomplish its effects." -- Pierre Louis Maupertuis
2021-03-21: "We had no idea what was precious, what wasn't." -- Eli ('The Book Of Eli', 2010)
2021-03-22: "Questioning the status quo can result in banishment, imprisonment, ridicule or being burned at the stake, depending on your era, your locale, and the sacred cows you wish to butcher." -- Gene Spafford
2021-03-23: "Whichever way you turn, Fate sticks out a foot to trip you." -- Al Roberts ('Detour', 1945)
2021-03-24: "The probability of a train derailment was infinitesimal. That meant it was only a matter of time." -- N. K. Jemisin
2021-03-25: "When they’re not actually out slaughtering each other they’re inventing ingenious new ways to massacre each other more efficiently in the future, and when they’re not doing that they’re committing speciescide, from the Amazon to Borneo... or filling the seas with shit, or the air, or the land." -- Iain Banks ('The State Of The Art', 1991)
2021-03-26: "There is only one sky, and one has to worry because if it becomes sick, everything will be finished." -- Davi Kopenawa Yanomami ('The Falling Sky', 2013)
2021-03-27: "Myself not ignorant of woe, / Compassion I have learned to show." -- John Conington
2021-03-28: "Iron rusts from disuse; stagnant water loses its purity and in cold weather becomes frozen; even so does inaction sap the vigor of the mind." -- Leonardo da Vinci
2021-03-29: "Life consists not simply in what heredity and environment do to us but in what we make out of what they do to us." -- Harry Emerson Fosdick
2021-03-30: "We all of us live too much in a circle." -- Benjamin Disraeli ('Sybil', 1845)
2021-03-31: "The scale and impact of human activities now affects a great portion of the global resources important to human welfare." -- Henry Way Kendall
April 2021
2021-04-01: "Long arm looking for a fingerprint, trying to find the mystery clue." -- AC/DC ('What's Next To The Moon', 1978)
2021-04-02: "This is only a foretaste of what is to come, and only the shadow of what is going to be." -- Alan Turing
2021-04-03: "Some days you're the pigeon, some days you're the statue." -- Bruce Dickinson
2021-04-04: "The main interest in life and work is to become someone else that you were not in the beginning." -- Michel Foucault
2021-04-05: "As with all quantum devices, a qubit is a delicate flower. If you so much as look at it, you destroy it." -- Hans Christian von Baeyer
2021-04-06: "As instruments of global climatic change, we humans now rival such cataclysmic events as supercontinent breakups and asteroid impacts." -- Shawna Vogel
2021-04-07: "But nothing is so hard for those who abound in riches, as to conceive how others can be in want." -- Jonathan Swift
2021-04-08: "Everything in the future is a wave. Everything in the past is a particle." -- Lawrence Bragg
2021-04-09: "Fate is a dog, well able to bite." -- Sumerian Proverb
2021-04-10: "This is it. The moment we should have trained for." -- Leela ('Futurama', 'In-A-Gadda-Da-Leela', 2010)
2021-04-11: "Read not to contradict and confute, nor to believe and take for granted, nor to find talk and discourse, but to weigh and consider." -- Francis Bacon
2021-04-12: "The most important thing – and I am sure I am right – is to maintain an active, alert interest in everything going on about you." -- Nile Kinnick
2021-04-13: "Nations should have a pillory for whoever stirs up useless hate, and another for whoever fails to tell them the truth in time." -- José Martí
2021-04-14: "The quantum principle shows that there is a sense in which what the observer will do in the future defines what happens in the past — even in a past so remote that life did not then exist, and shows even more, that 'observership' is a prerequisite for any useful version of 'reality'." -- John Archibald Wheeler
2021-04-15: "No matter which way you turn, fate can stick out a foot and trip you." -- Tina Belcher ('Bob's Burgers', 'Fingers-Loose', 2021)
2021-04-16: "The possibility that empathy resides in parts of the brain so ancient that we share them with rats should give pause to anyone comparing politicians with those poor, underestimated creatures." -- Frans de Waal
2021-04-17: "There are some things that time cannot mend." -- Frodo Baggins ('The Lord of the Rings: The Return of the King', 2003)
2021-04-18: "There are years that ask questions and years that answer." -- Zora Neale Hurston
2021-04-19: "The present moment is ever the critical time." -- Robert Barr
2021-04-20: "An animal may be ferocious and cunning enough, but it takes a real man to tell a lie." -- H.G. Wells ('The Island Of Doctor Moreau', 1896)
2021-04-21: "Once a day, especially in the early years of life and study, call yourselves to an account what new ideas, what new proposition or truth you have gained, what further confirmation of known truths, and what advances you have made in any part of knowledge; and let no day, if possible, pass away without some intellectual gain." -- Isaac Watts
2021-04-22: "We are terrorized and flattened by trivialities, we are eaten up by nothing." -- Charles Bukowski
2021-04-23: "I'm not young enough to know everything." -- J. M. Barrie
2021-04-24: "You've gotta stop looking to other people to tell you who you are." -- Sam 'The Falcon' Wilson ('The Falcon And The Winter Soldier', 'Truth', 2021)
2021-04-25: "When bad fortune occurs, the unresourceful, unimaginative man looks about him to attach the blame to someone else; the resolute accepts misfortune and endeavors to survive, mature, and improve because of it." -- Anne McCaffrey ('Moreta: Dragonlady Of Pern', 1983)
2021-04-26: "Ask no questions, and you'll be told no lies." -- Charles Dickens ('Great Expectations', 1860)
2021-04-27: "The abundance of organisms in nature varies with their size." -- John Tyler Bonner
2021-04-28: "You'll never know what bit you." -- Tagline for 'Lake Placid' (1999)
2021-04-29: "I know full well the hand of time, while it may miss a man at one reaping, will get him at the next." -- Clifford D. Simak
2021-04-30: "We cannot prevent equilibrium from producing its effects." -- Jules Verne ('Twenty Thousand Leagues Under The Sea', 1870)
May 2021
2021-05-01: "Luck is a lady whose smile is as cold as a stone / She'll bring you things, many things you might never have known. / But when your die is cast, she'll have the final laugh at you." -- Styx ('Queen Of Spades', 1978)
2021-05-02: "You won't believe how it ends." -- Tagline For 'Saw V' (2008)
2021-05-03: "It is by presence of mind in untried emergencies that the native metal of a man is tested." -- James Russell Lowell
2021-05-04: "Remember, tomorrow is promised to no one." -- Luther Whitney ('Absolute Power', 1997)
2021-05-05: "More industries, more mines, more businesses, more employment, and more consumer goods do not always mean more well-being because all these also mean more destruction of our natural resources and despoilation of our surroundings." -- Martin Gerhard Giesbrecht
2021-05-06: "This is one of the two great labyrinths into which human minds are drawn: the question of free will versus predestination. The other is the composition of the continuum, or: what is space?" -- Neal Stephenson ('Quicksilver', 2003)
2021-05-07: "It always feels tragic to see people labouring to saw off the branch they are sitting on." -- Asger Jorn
2021-05-08: "Fretting about a dearth of randomness seems like worrying that humanity might use up its last reserves of ignorance." -- Brian Hayes
2021-05-09: "There is real utility in the process of deduction, which goes from the general to the general, or from the general to the particular, as well as in the process of induction, which goes from the particular to the particular, or from the particular to the general." -- Bertrand Russell ('The Problems Of Philosophy', 1912)
2021-05-10: "Something further may follow of this Masquerade." -- Herman Melville ('The Confidence-Man', 1857)
2021-05-11: "The best advice about getting older? Just be thankful you're not dead!" -- Chadwick Boseman
2021-05-12: "Determined ignorance is the hastiest kind of oblivion." -- Philip Wylie
2021-05-13: "Most men and women, by birth or nature, lack the means to advance in wealth and power, but all have the ability to advance in knowledge." -- Pythagoras
2021-05-14: "When one is considering systems it's always wise to raise questions about the most obvious and simple assumptions." -- C. West Churchman
2021-05-15: "I'll take the bad, so long as I remember the good." -- Agent Doggett ('The X-Files', 'John Doe', 2002)
2021-05-16: "The world’s overcrowded. Men, women, children, a boiling mob wherever you look." -- Harry Harrison ('Planet Of The Damned', 1962)
2021-05-17: "Most of the world's scientific community and many people in the environmental movement are aware of the gravity of the problems." -- Henry Way Kendall
2021-05-18: "If the mind is to emerge unscathed from this relentless struggle with the unforeseen, two qualities are indispensable: first, an intellect that, even in the darkest hour, retains some glimmerings of the inner light which leads to truth; and second, the courage to follow this faint light wherever it may lead." -- Carl von Clausewitz
2021-05-19: "Life was a funny thing that happened to me on the way to the grave." -- Quentin Crisp ('The Naked Civil Servant', 1968)
2021-05-20: "It's deeds we need, not words." -- Vasil Levski
2021-05-21: "What you leave behind is not what is engraved in stone monuments, but what is woven into the lives of others." -- Pericles
2021-05-22: "The inescapable fact is that when we build a society based on greed, selfishness, and ruthless competition, the fruits we can expect to reap are economic insecurity at home and international discord abroad." -- Tommy Douglas
2021-05-23: "All things, man included, are parts of one great whole." -- Richard Maurice Bucke
2021-05-24: "It may be expedient but it is not just that some should have less in order that others may prosper." -- John Rawls ('A Theory Of Justice', 1971)
2021-05-25: "All that you know is at an end." -- Silver Surfer ('Fantastic Four: Rise Of The Silver Surfer', 2007)
2021-05-26: "We understand human mental processes only slightly better than a fish understands swimming." -- John McCarthy
2021-05-27: "It's a poor sort of memory that only works backwards." -- Lewis Carroll ('Through the Looking-Glass', 1871)
2021-05-28: "Sometimes I suspect that our own civilization is not altogether perfect." -- Robert G. Ingersoll
2021-05-29: "The view that machines cannot give rise to surprises is due, I believe, to a fallacy to which philosophers and mathematicians are particularly subject. This is the assumption that as soon as a fact is presented to a mind all consequences of that fact spring into the mind simultaneously with it. It is a very useful assumption under many circumstances, but one too easily forgets that it is false." -- Alan Turing
2021-05-30: "How slow the Shadow creeps: but when 'tis past, / How fast the Shadows fall. How fast! How fast!" -- Hilaire Belloc
2021-05-31: "One thing that's good about procrastination is that you always have something planned for tomorrow." -- Gladys Bronwyn Stern
June 2021
2021-06-01: "I'm the nightwatchman, I make the rounds / I'm the nightwatchman, gotta keep my nose to the ground." -- Tom Petty ('Nightwatchman', 1981)
2021-06-02: "Nothing can come of nothing." -- William Shakespeare ('King Lear', c. 1608)
2021-06-03: "To bear children into this world is like carrying wood into a burning house." -- Peter Wessel Zapffe
2021-06-04: "Today, with the weapons of mass destruction at man’s disposal, the human race itself is in imminent danger of being destroyed." -- Rajendra Prasad
2021-06-05: "Note to self: don't die." -- Raya ('Raya And The Last Dragon', 2021)
2021-06-06: "Silence! and Desolation! and dim Night! I feel ye now — I feel ye in your strength." -- Edgar Allan Poe
2021-06-07: "Is not every meanest day the confluence of two eternities?" -- Thomas Carlyle
2021-06-08: "You can withdraw from the sufferings of the world, but perhaps that withdrawal is the only suffering you might be able to avoid." -- Franz Kafka ('The Zürau Aphorisms', 1917-1918)
2021-06-09: "Were I to pray for a taste which should stand me in stead under every variety of circumstances, and be a source of happiness and cheerfulness to me during life, and a shield against its ills, however things might go amiss and the world frown upon me, it would be a taste for reading." -- John Herschel
2021-06-11: "I have deliberately chosen the uncertain path whenever I had the chance." -- Emily Hahn
2021-06-12: "We are it. It is up to us. It is up to you." -- Marian Wright Edelman
2021-06-13: "The world today is not what it was one week ago. What will it be one week from now? One month from now?" -- Abraham Setrakian ('The Strain', 2014-2017)
2021-06-14: "Hispanics have a long tradition of defiance against authority. Come to that, the Irish and Italians and Jews also have a long tradition of defiance against authority. Thinking it over, everybody has a long tradition of defiance against authority." -- Donald E. Westlake
2021-06-15: "Regardless of what may happen, I have to go forward." -- Bastian Balthazar Bux ('The Neverending Story', 1979)
2021-06-16: "So what if we break our chains? What do we do then?" -- Mario Ruoppolo ('Il Postino: The Postman', 1994)
2021-06-17: "Heat and animosity, contest and conflict, may sharpen the wits, although they rarely do; they never strengthen the understanding, clear the perspicacity, guide the judgment, or improve the heart." -- Walter Savage Landor
2021-06-18: "Mortal danger is an effective antidote for fixed ideas." -- Erwin Rommel
2021-06-19: "Dark days are upon us. The pendulum of civilization trembles, as if to swing back to the inglorious twilight of the past." -- J. Howard Moore
2021-06-20: "A thousand goals have existed hitherto, for a thousand people existed. But the fetter for the thousand necks is still lacking, the one goal is still lacking. Humanity has no goal yet. But tell me, I pray, my brethren: if the goal be lacking to humanity, is not humanity itself lacking?" -- Friedrich Nietzsche ('Thus Spoke Zarathustra', 1883-1885)
2021-06-21: "As the temperature rises, the suspense begins." -- Tagline For 'Body Heat' (1981)
2021-06-22: "It was so hot today I saw a pigeon walking in the shadow of Orson Welles." -- Johnny Carson
2021-06-23: "Every time you decide, you kill off infinite other lives you could have lived." -- Arryn Diaz ('Dresden Codak', 'Onald Creely, The Professional Ghost Story', 2009)
2021-06-24: "In any case, we do not advance the human cause by refusing to consider ideas that make us frightened." -- Carl Sagan ('Broca's Brain', 1979)
2021-06-25: "There is a sense in which we are all each other's consequences." -- Wallace Stegner
2021-06-26: "Man emerged as the dominant type on earth about a million years ago, but has only been really effective as a psychosocial organism for under ten thousand years. In that mere second of cosmic time, he has produced astonishing achievements — but has also been guilty of unprecedented horrors and follies." -- Julian Huxley
2021-06-27: "Behind every man now alive stand 30 ghosts, for that is the ratio by which the dead outnumber the living." -- Arthur C. Clarke ('2001: A Space Odyssey', 1968)
2021-06-28: "Here and there are seen swimmers in the vast abyss." -- Virgil ('The Aeneid', 29-19 BC)
2021-06-29: "This planet is dying. The human race is killing it." -- Klaatu ('The Day the Earth Stood Still', 2008)
2021-06-30: "I try to live in the moment without regrets." -- Willie Nelson
July 2021
2021-07-01: "It didn't turn out the way you wanted it to. It didn't turn out the way you wanted it, did it?' -- Nine Inch Nails ('The Wretched', 1999)
2021-07-02: "It's an important and popular fact that things are not always what they seem." -- Douglas Adams ('The Hitchhiker's Guide To The Galaxy', 2005)
2021-07-03: "I have occasionally had the exquisite thrill of putting my finger on a little capsule of truth, and heard it give the faint squeak of mortality under my pressure." -- E. B. White
2021-07-04: "Lesson one: never drop your fucking guard." -- Oenomaus ('Spartacus: Gods Of The Arena', 2011)
2021-07-05: "In making war with nature, there was risk of loss in winning." -- John McPhee
2021-07-06: "Everyone knows not to stare into the sun; it's something your mother tells you when you're a kid. 'Don't look at the sun or you'll go blind.' But sometimes you want to understand something so badly that you'll risk going blind for just a glimpse of what it might all be about." -- Allie Keys ('Taken', 2002)
2021-07-07: "He who does not increase his knowledge decreases it." -- Hillel The Elder
2021-07-08: "There is no safety this side of the grave." -- Robert A. Heinlein ('Stranger In A Strange Land', 1961)
2021-07-09: "It is infinitely difficult to know when and where one should stop, and for all but one in thousands the goal of their thinking is the point at which they have become tired of thinking." -- Gotthold Ephraim Lessing
2021-07-10: "Don’t believe anyone who says that since nature is based on a struggle for life, we need to live like this as well. Many animals survive not by eliminating each other or by keeping everything for themselves, but by cooperating and sharing." -- Frans de Waal
2021-07-11: "They are ill discoverers that think there is no land, when they can see nothing but sea." -- Francis Bacon
2021-07-12: "Science knows it doesn't know everything; otherwise, it'd stop. But just because science doesn't know everything doesn't mean you can fill in the gaps with whatever fairy tale most appeals to you." -- Dara Ó Briain
2021-07-13: "These are the halls of the dead where spiders spin and the great circuits fall quiet, one by one." -- Stephen King ('The Dark Tower III: The Waste Lands', 1991)
2021-07-14: "The mind sees what it chooses to see." -- Robert Langdon ('The Da Vinci Code', 2006)
2021-07-15: "That man is prudent who neither hopes nor fears anything from the uncertain events of the future." -- Anatole France
2021-07-16: "That what we call blue is actually something that absorbs all other energy frequencies and rejects blue. Our eyes see the frequencies cast off as blue and we call it blue. I wondered, are we defined by the things we are, or the things we reject?" -- Stephen Tobolowsky
2021-07-17: "Over us human beings there hangs an awful sword of justice." -- Halldór Laxness
2021-07-18: "To live is the rarest thing in the world. Most people exist, that is all." -- Oscar Wilde
2021-07-19: "The sea will be the sea, whatever the drop's philosophy." -- Attar Of Nishapur
2021-07-20: "I can keep silent when it seems best to do so, and when I speak I can, and do usually, quit when I am done." -- Rutherford B. Hayes
2021-07-21: "In the long run, we shape our lives and we shape ourselves. The process never ends until we die." -- Eleanor Roosevelt
2021-07-22: "Mind control is the process by which individual or collective freedom of choice and action is compromised by agents or agencies that modify or distort perception, motivation, affect, cognition and/or behavioral outcomes. It is neither magical nor mystical, but a process that involves a set of basic social psychological principles." -- Benjamin Zablocki
2021-07-23: "Confusion and panic usually appear wherever there is no adequate organization or appropriate leadership at a time of grim trials." -- Georgy Zhukov
2021-07-24: "Things are fine! There is no problem we can't address with vague promises of incremental reform." -- Tom Tomorrow
2021-07-25: "Is there an indelible line dividing sanity from insanity, or do they change, one into the other, at the slightest turn of events? We'll find out, soon enough, that the world itself is insane." -- Vincent Volaju ('Cowboy Bebop: The Movie', 2001)
2021-07-26: "ACCIDENT, n. An inevitable occurrence due to the action of immutable natural laws." -- Ambrose Bierce ('The Devil's Dictionary', 1911)
2021-07-27: "The ancient Egyptians considered it good luck to meet a swarm of bees on the road. What they considered bad luck I couldn't say." -- Will Cuppy
2021-07-28: "An ant has no quarrel with a boot." -- Loki ('The Avengers', 2012)
2021-07-29: "Any one of a million things could fail and cause our complex civilization to collapse for an hour, for a day, or however long." -- James Burke
2021-07-30: "For all things there is a toll. We pay in breaths, and our purse is soon empty." -- R. Scott Bakker ('The Warrior Prophet', 2005)
2021-07-31: "The problem is that no one gives much of a shit about the future until it actually happens." -- Nina Allan
August 2021
2021-08-01: "So I walk up on high, and I step to the edge, to see my world below." -- Collective Soul ('The World I Know', 1995)
2021-08-02: "That evolution has accomplished much that is splendid and admirable, it would be ungrateful to deny. That the means it has employed have often been ruthlessly harsh is a proposition to which every compassionate person will attest." -- Alexander Skutch
2021-08-03: "'Tis surprising to see how rapidly a panic will sometimes run through a country." -- Thomas Paine
2021-08-04: "Everybody has plans until they get hit." -- Mike Tyson
2021-08-05: "Anything that can go wrong with armed men in the light can go twice as wrong in the dark." -- Ben Aaronovitch ('Moon Over Soho', 2011)
2021-08-06: "Every great crisis of human history is a pass of Thermopylae, and there is always a Leonidas and his three hundred to die in it, if they can not conquer." -- George William Curtis
2021-08-07: "The sentence 'Snow is white' is true if and only if snow is white." -- Alfred Tarski
2021-08-09: "The changes are not going to stop. They are going to continue and accelerate. Like it or not." -- Madeleine L'Engle
2021-08-10: "In every Paradise, there have been wars. But in the Polar cold, in the Sahara, in all inhospitable lands where men wrench a dangerous living from the hostile elements, there is comradeship in unity against the Enemy older than man, the universe in which he dwells." -- Henry Kuttner ('The Fairy Chessmen', 1951)
2021-08-11: "I myself have known adversity, and know it still. But for that, do I turn cynic? No, no: it is small beer that sours." -- Herman Melville ('The Confidence-Man', 1857)
2021-08-12: "The beginning has just started." -- Tagline For 'Alien Resurrection' (1997)
2021-08-13: "We have more possibilities available in each moment than we realize." -- Thích Nhat Hanh
2021-08-14: "I'm old enough to know when life is coming at me with its pants down." -- Aunt Dorothy ('Krampus', 2015)
2021-08-15: "We may win when we lose, if we have done what we can; for by so doing we have made real at least some part of that finished product in whose fabrication we are most concerned: ourselves." -- Learned Hand
2021-08-16: "The universe seems neither benign nor hostile, merely indifferent." -- Carl Sagan
2021-08-17: "For all of nature's wonder and beauty, it is also hostile and unpredictable." -- Liam Neeson
2021-08-18: "The end approaches, but the apocalypse is long lived." -- Jacques Derrida
2021-08-19: "Our society, which seems so sturdily built out of concrete and custom, is just a temporary resting place, a hotel our civilization checked into a couple hundred years ago and must one day check out of." -- Neil Strauss
2021-08-20: "Not doing more than the average is what keeps the average down." -- William Lyon Phelps
2021-08-21: "While we are postponing, life speeds by." -- Seneca The Younger
2021-08-22: "The extinctions ongoing worldwide promise to be at least as great as the mass extinction that occurred at the end of the age of dinosaurs." -- E. O. Wilson
2021-08-23: "Of the four billion life forms which have existed on this planet, three billion, nine hundred and sixty million are now extinct." -- P. D. James
2021-08-24: "More than any other time in history, mankind faces a crossroads. One path leads to despair and utter hopelessness. The other, to total extinction. Let us pray we have the wisdom to choose correctly." -- Woody Allen
2021-08-25: "We have created an ecological holocaust. Our very health and survival are at stake, yet we act as if we have plenty of time to respond." -- David Suzuki
2021-08-26: "This may be the ultimate final exam." -- Joel Garreau
2021-08-27: "Common man has at long last got himself so far out of gear with nature and his environment that he is beginning to see the shape of extinction, whether he recognizes it as such or not." -- Philip Wylie
2021-08-28: "To dismiss the current extinction wave on the grounds that extinctions are normal events is like ignoring a genocidal massacre on the grounds that every human is bound to die at some time anyway." -- Jared Diamond
2021-08-29: "Apocalypses don't happen very often. They tend to be separated by tens or even hundreds of millions of years." -- Dale Jamieson
2021-08-30: "Everyday, I think about dying. About disease, starvation, violence, terrorism, war, the end of the world. It helps keep my mind off things." -- Roger McGough
2021-08-31: "It's only the end for us. The world will go on just the same, only we shan't be in it. I dare say it will get along all right without us." -- Nevil Shute ('On The Beach', 1957)
September 2021
2021-09-01: "Running through the deep, gonna find the backwoods." -- Nickelback ('Deep', 1998)
2021-09-02: "The doom is impending, all right; no one can be an ecologist, even an amateur one, without seeing it. But do people mend their ways for fear of calamity? I doubt it." -- Aldo Leopold
2021-09-03: "Protecting the biosphere should be our highest priority or else we sicken and die." -- David Suzuki
2021-09-04: "We would do well to ask why governments seem to find it so easy to raise the money required to wreck the biosphere, and so difficult to raise the money required to save it." -- George Monbiot
2021-09-05: "Look not mournfully into the past. It comes not back again." -- Henry Wadsworth Longfellow
2021-09-06: "The difference between a good life and a bad life is how well you walk through the fire." -- Carl Jung
2021-09-07: "Our species currently turns row upon row of environmental knobs, without much regard to long-term consequences." -- Neil deGrasse Tyson
2021-09-08: "We don't have as much time as we think. Oowee." -- Mr. Poopybutthole ('Rick And Morty', 'Rickmurai Jack', 2021)
2021-09-09: "We're going through the 6th great extinction and the large mammals are going first and, you know what - we're large mammals!" -- Yvon Chouinard
2021-09-10: "No magic bullet, not even the Internet, can save us from population explosion, deforestation, climate disruption, poison by pollution, and wholesale extinction of plant and animal species." -- Joanna Macy
2021-09-11: "Reducing the diversity of life, we narrow our options for the future and render our own survival more precarious." -- Cary Fowler
2021-09-12: "The two most important days in your life are the day you are born and the day you find out why." -- Mark Twain
2021-09-13: "How long until climate change renders this planet unliveable? Two generations? One?" -- Will Traeger ('The Predator', 2018)
2021-09-14: "One planet, one experiment." -- E. O. Wilson
2021-09-15: "The action we take in the next few years will impact the Earth hundreds of millions of years from now." -- Louie Psihoyos
2021-09-16: "Once you've arrived at the end of the world, it hardly matters which route you took." -- Isaac Marion
2021-09-17: "Climate change is not going to be prevented. It's not even going to be mitigated to the degree a rational person would want." -- Dale Jamieson
2021-09-18: "Speed is irrelevant if you are going in the wrong direction." -- Mahatma Gandhi
2021-09-19: "I dwell in possibility." -- Emily Dickinson
2021-09-20: "The supreme irony of life is that hardly anyone gets out of it alive." -- Robert A. Heinlein
2021-09-21: "The easiest way to solve a problem is to deny it exists." -- Isaac Asimov
2021-09-22: "Reality cannot be ignored except at a price; and the longer the ignorance is persisted in, the higher and more terrible becomes the price that must be paid." -- Aldous Huxley
2021-09-23: "When facts speak, the wise man listens." -- Stephen King
2021-09-24: "The mass extinction we feared has already begun. And we are the cause." -- Dr. Emma Russell ('Godzilla King Of The Monsters', 2019)
2021-09-25: "The beginning of knowledge is the discovery of something we do not understand." -- Frank Herbert
2021-09-26: "We cannot solve our problems with the same thinking we used when we created them." -- Albert Einstein
2021-09-27: "We're in a giant car heading towards a brick wall and everyone's arguing over where they're going to sit." -- David Suzuki
2021-09-28: "We've been given a warning by science, and a wake-up call by nature; it is up to us now to heed them." -- Bill McKibben
2021-09-29: "Men argue. Nature acts." -- Voltaire
2021-09-30: "Climate is an angry beast and we are poking at it with sticks." -- Wallace Smith Broecker
October 2021
2021-10-01: "Won't you follow me into the jungle?" -- X Ambassadors ('Jungle', 2016)
2021-10-02: "Global warming is a deadly threat precisely because it fails to trip the brain's alarm, leaving us soundly asleep in a burning bed." -- Daniel Gilbert
2021-10-03: "Climate change is not going away. It will only get more extreme and more dangerous with time. There is no hiding from it." -- Mark Ruffalo
2021-10-04: "Climate change is the sine qua non of continued civilization. We either solve this, or it's lights out." -- Margaret D. Klein
2021-10-05: "I don't think even people who are worried about climate change quite understand the scale and speed with which we're now shifting the planet." -- Bill McKibben
2021-10-06: "To him who will find it, there is always a road." -- D. J. MacHale
2021-10-07: "If you hunt for a needle in a haystack you don't find it. If you don't give a darn whether you ever see the needle or not it runs into you the first time you lean against the stack." -- P. G. Wodehouse
2021-10-08: "Our knowledge is a little island in a great ocean of nonknowledge." -- Isaac Bashevis Singer
2021-10-09: "One thorn of experience is worth a whole wilderness of warning." -- James Russell Lowell
2021-10-10: "The bent of our time is towards science, towards knowing things as they are." -- Matthew Arnold
2021-10-11: "Knowledge is an unending adventure at the edge of uncertainty." -- Jacob Bronowski
2021-10-12: "I consider that a man's brain originally is like a little empty attic, and you have to stock it with such furniture as you choose." -- Arthur Conan Doyle
2021-10-13: "The difference between what the most and the least learned people know is inexpressibly trivial in relation to that which is unknown." -- Albert Einstein
2021-10-14: "I ain't one of those who believe that a half knowledge of a subject is useless, but it has been my experience that when a fellow has that half knowledge he finds it's the other half which would really come in handy." -- George Horace Lorimer
2021-10-15: "All that happens means something; nothing you do is ever insignificant." -- Aldous Huxley
2021-10-16: "Events, circumstances, etc., have their origin in ourselves. They spring from seeds which we have sown." -- Henry David Thoreau
2021-10-17: "The world, that understandable and lawful world, was slipping away." -- William Golding ('Lord Of The Flies', 1954)
2021-10-18: "Human foresight often leaves its proudest possessor only a choice of evils." -- Charles Caleb Colton
2021-10-19: "Knowledge is an excellent drug; but no drug has virtue enough to preserve itself from corruption and decay, if the vessel be tainted and impure wherein it is put to keep." -- Michel de Montaigne
2021-10-20: "The failure to read good books both enfeebles the vision and strengthens our most fatal tendency - the belief that the here and now is all there is." -- Allan Bloom
2021-10-21: "At one time we had wisdom, but little knowledge. Now we have a great deal of knowledge, but do we have enough wisdom to deal with that knowledge?" -- Jonas Salk
2021-10-22: "There may be things that are completely unknowable to us, so we must be careful not to treat the limits of our knowledge as sure guides to the limit of what there is." -- Daniel Dennett
2021-10-23: "Someone should be studying the whole system, however crudely that has to be done, because no gluing together of partial studies of a complex nonlinear system can give a good idea of the behavior of the whole." -- Murray Gell-Mann
2021-10-24: "To understand matters rightly we should understand their details; and as that knowledge is almost infinite, our knowledge is always superficial and imperfect." -- Francois de La Rochefoucauld
2021-10-25: "Science has to be understood in its broadest sense, as a method for apprehending all observable reality, and not merely as an instrument for acquiring specialized knowledge." -- Alexis Carrel
2021-10-26: "It is impossible to say any fragment of knowledge, however insignificant or remote from one's ordinary pursuits, may not some day be turned to account." -- Thomas Huxley
2021-10-27: "Our big problems are going to be energy supplies and food supplies. This is not a right-left issue. It's a people issue, and it cuts across all our categories." -- Margaret Atwood
2021-10-28: "Make no small plans, dream mighty things." -- Bill Nye
2021-10-29: "I don't want to achieve immortality through my work. I want to achieve it through not dying." -- Woody Allen
2021-10-30: "You can't have everything. Where would you put it?" -- Steven Wright
2021-10-31: "I felt myself on the edge of the world; peering over the rim into a fathomless chaos of eternal night." -- H. P. Lovecraft
November 2021
2021-11-01: "I feel it slipping away." -- Stabbing Westward ('Slipping Away', 1996)
2021-11-02: "Creation destroys as it goes, throws down one tree for the rise of another." -- D. H. Lawrence
2021-11-03: "The scientific attitude of mind involves a sweeping away of all other desires in the interest of the desire to know." -- Bertrand Russell
2021-11-04: "Humor is by far the most significant activity of the human brain." -- Edward de Bono
2021-11-05: "What is really amazing, and frustrating, is mankind's habit of refusing to see the obvious and inevitable until it is there, and then muttering about unforeseen catastrophes." -- Isaac Asimov
2021-11-06: "The wilderness is pushed back, man is everywhere. Solitude, so vital to the individual man, is almost nowhere." – Ansel Adams
2021-11-07: "Before life on Earth becomes finally merely impossible, it will for a long time before have become completely unbearable." -- Tony Kushner
2021-11-08: "There is no cosmic rule that grants you immunity from the details just because you have come face-to-face with a catastrophe." -- Jodi Picoult
2021-11-09: "What degree of proof about the human catastrophe from global climate change do we need, before we are motivated to act to prevent it?" -- Eric Chivian
2021-11-10: "It saddens me to observe the plight of our own species; we appear to be incapable of solving our problems." -- Yvon Chouinard
2021-11-11: "Do we want to be remembered as the generation that saved the banks and let the biosphere collapse?" -- George Monbiot
2021-11-12: "We can't leave everything to the free market. In fact, climate change is, I would argue, the greatest single free-market failure. This is what happens when you don't regulate corporations and you allow them to treat the atmosphere as an open sewer." -- Naomi Klein
2021-11-13: "I’ve starred in a lot of science fiction movies and let me tell you something, climate change is not science fiction, this is a battle in the real world, it is impacting us right now." -- Arnold Schwarzenegger
2021-11-14: "I think it is important for people to understand that there are real serious economic costs and real serious economic damages associated with inaction on climate change." -- Naomi Oreskes
2021-11-15: "I would hate for climate change to be accepted simply because everyone was dying." -- Chuck Klosterman
2021-11-16: "Many problems that challenge us today can be traced back to a profound tension between what is good and desirable for society as a whole and what is good and desirable for an individual. That conflict can be found in global problems such as climate change, pollution, resource depletion, poverty, hunger, and overpopulation." -- Martin Nowak
2021-11-17: "'Smart growth' destroys the environment. 'Dumb growth' destroys the environment. The only difference is that 'smart growth' does it with good taste. It's like booking passage on the Titanic. Whether you go first-class or steerage, the result is the same." -- Albert Allen Bartlett
2021-11-18: "We have become a plague upon ourselves and upon the Earth. It is cosmically unlikely that the developed world will choose to end its orgy of fossil energy consumption, and the Third World its suicidal consumption of landscape." -- David Graeber
2021-11-19: "If we do not save the environment, then whatever we do in civil rights will be of no meaning, because then we will have the equality of extinction." -- James L. Farmer, Jr.
2021-11-20: "Man has lost the capacity to foresee and to forestall. He will end by destroying the earth." -- Albert Schweitzer
2021-11-21: "This civilization is rapidly passing away, however. Let us rejoice or else lament the fact as much as everyone of us likes; but do not let us shut our eyes to it." -- Joseph A. Schumpeter
2021-11-22: "Man — despite his artistic pretensions, his sophistication, and his many accomplishments — owes his existence to a six inch layer of topsoil and the fact that it rains." -- Paul Harvey
2021-11-23: "Civilization as it is known today could not have evolved, nor can it survive, without an adequate food supply." -- Norman Borlaug
2021-11-24: "Civilization in its present form hasn't got long." -- James Lovelock
2021-11-25: "We often take for granted the very things that most deserve our gratitude." -- Cynthia Ozick
2021-11-26: "Every civilization depends upon the quality of the individuals it produces." -- Frank Herbert ('Children Of Dune', 1976)
2021-11-27: "Even if this is the end of humankind, we dare not take away the chances some other life-form might have to succeed where we failed." -- Theodore Sturgeon
2021-11-28: "There's hardly a river, stream, or brook that isn't contaminated with the runoff from human misuse, whether industrial effluents, agricultural pesticides and herbicides, or worse." -- Marq de Villiers
2021-11-29: "That even an apocalypse can be made to seem part of the ordinary horizon of expectation constitutes an unparalleled violence that is being done to our sense of reality, to our humanity." -- Susan Sontag
2021-11-30: "Truth is weirder than any fiction I've seen." -- Hunter S. Thompson
December 2021
2021-12-01: "A house on fire burning all the past away." -- How To Destroy Angels ('How Long', 2013)
2021-12-02: "Power does not corrupt men; fools, however, if they get into a position of power, corrupt power." -- George Bernard Shaw
2021-12-01: "A house on fire burning all the past away." -- How To Destroy Angels ('How Long', 2013)
2021-12-02: "Power does not corrupt men; fools, however, if they get into a position of power, corrupt power." -- George Bernard Shaw
2021-12-03: "Life doesn't run away from nobody. Life runs at people." -- Joe Frazier
2021-12-04: "I can be changed by what happens to me. But I refuse to be reduced by it." -- Maya Angelou
2021-12-05: "No one was prepared for this storm." -- Tagline For 'The Perfect Storm' (2000)
2021-12-06: "The media is the thought-form of the technological society, and it finds nothing it does to be laughable, a sure sign that it is not human." -- Donald Phillip Verene
2021-12-07: "Most of the world is of great roughness and infinite complexity. However, the infinite sea of complexity includes two islands of simplicity: one of Euclidean simplicity and a second of relative simplicity in which roughness is present but is the same at all scales." -- Benoît Mandelbrot
2021-12-08: "I never intend to adjust myself to economic conditions that will take necessities from the many to give luxuries to the few." -- Martin Luther King Jr.
2021-12-09: "Free will is beyond forecasting. But what is most interesting about humans is how unfree they are." -- George Friedman
2021-12-10: "Now it is no longer a matter of deciding what to do, but of deciding how to decide." -- Rollo May
2021-12-12: "Life takes us by surprise and orders us to move toward the unknown — even when we don't want to and when we think we don't need to." -- Paulo Coelho
2021-12-13: "It is in the irony of Providence that the more man comes to control the material world about him, the more does he lose control over the effects of his action; and it is when he is remaking the world most speedily that he knows least whither he is driving." -- Hilaire Belloc
2021-12-20: "We are responsible not only for what we do but also for what we could have prevented." -- Peter Singer
2021-12-21: "It is said that what is called 'the spirit of an age' is something to which one cannot return. That this spirit gradually dissipates is due to the world's coming to an end." -- Ghost Dog ('Ghost Dog: The Way Of The Samurai', 1999)
2021-12-22: "For the life of me I cannot fathom why we expect so much from teachers and provide them so little in return." -- Bill Moyers
2021-12-23: "When we least expect it, life sets us a challenge to test our courage and willingness to change; at such a moment, there is no point in pretending that nothing has happened or in saying that we are not ready." -- Paulo Coelho
2021-12-24: "Three destructive aspects of the capitalist system stand out when we view this system in relation to the extinction crisis: 1) capitalism tends to degrade the conditions of its own production; 2) it must expand ceaselessly in order to survive; 3) it generates a chaotic world system, which in turn intensifies the extinction crisis." -- Ashley Dawson
2021-12-25: "Endure pain, find joy, and make your own meaning, because the universe certainly isn't going to supply it." -- Lois McMaster Bujold
2021-12-26: "There may be several forms of visual awareness and, by extension, even more forms of consciousness in general." -- Francis Crick
2021-12-27: "Every war is answered by a new war, until everything is smashed." -- Käthe Kollwitz
2021-12-28: "Forever goes quick." -- Joseph Heller ('Good As Gold', 1979)
2021-12-29: "If, as I believe, the ends of men are many, and not all of them are in principle compatible with each other, then the possibility of conflict — and of tragedy — can never wholly be eliminated from human life, either personal or social." -- Isaiah Berlin
2021-12-30: "Before the beginning of years, there came to the making of man Time with a gift of tears." -- Algernon Charles Swinburne ('Atalanta In Calydon', 1865)
2021-12-31: "A stop which can but for a moment last, / A point between the future and the past." -- Lucan ('Pharsalia', c. 61 AD)
January 2022
2022-01-01: "Laughing out loud with fear and hope, I've got a desperate plan." -- Rush ('Red Barchetta', 1981)
2022-01-02: "The future, even the near future, is cloaked in unreality." -- Mark Kac
2022-01-03: "Humans are something very recent, like the froth on top of a glass of beer." -- James Lovelock
2022-01-04: "Do unto those downstream as you would have those upstream do unto you." -- Wendell Berry
2022-01-05: "There is more than meets the eye." -- Tagline For 'Transformers' (2007)
2022-01-06: "Will localizes us; thought universalizes us." -- Henri-Frédéric Amiel
2022-01-07: "Death doesn't take no for an answer." -- Tagline For 'Final Destination' (2000)
2022-01-08: "What role does silence have in all this noise?" -- Federico Fellini
2022-01-09: "The passionate controversies of one era are viewed as sterile preoccupations by another, for knowledge alters what we seek as well as what we find." -- Freda Adler
2022-01-10: "Life teaches us to be less harsh with ourselves and with others." -- Johann Wolfgang von Goethe
2022-01-11: "And heaved and heaved, still unrestingly heaved the black sea, as if its vast tides were a conscience; and the great mundane soul were in anguish and remorse for the long sin and suffering it had bred." -- Herman Melville ('Moby-Dick', 1851)
2022-01-12: "Care for distress at home and care for distress elsewhere do but help each other if, working together, they wake men in sufficient numbers from their thoughtlessness, and call into life a new spirit of humanity." -- Albert Schweitzer
2022-01-13: "The most important human being who ever lived, if you want to leave out religious figures, would be Johannes Gutenberg." -- Tom Clancy
2022-01-14: "Ever since we arrived on this planet as a species, we've cut them down, dug them up, burnt them and poisoned them. Today we're doing so on a greater scale than ever. We destroy plants at our peril." -- David Attenborough
2022-01-15: "I know the human being and the fish can coexist peacefully." -- George W. Bush
2022-01-16: "The advance of knowledge is an infinite progression towards a goal that ever recedes." -- James George Frazer
2022-01-17: "Not a day passes over the earth, but men and women of no note do great deeds, speak great words, and suffer noble sorrows." -- Charles Reade
2022-01-18: "We passed through the cycles strange, / And breath by breath and death by death / We followed the chain of change." -- Langdon Smith
2022-01-19: "'Tis a world where all is bought, and nothing's worth the price." -- Alfred Austin
2022-01-20: "If we are bothered by possessions we cannot really live either from without or from within; we are the possession of our possessions." -- Natalie Clifford Barney
2022-01-21: "All animals are equal, but some animals are more equal than others." -- George Orwell ('Animal Farm', 1945)
2022-01-22: "It's the old stuff, the conflicts we've never come to terms with, that sneaks up on us, half forgotten, insisting upon action." -- Richard Russo ('Straight Man', 1997)
2022-01-23: "The stability of the Holocene is now gone, changes are accelerating beyond our understanding and control, and chaos waits at our door." -- Steven Best
2022-01-24: "I sometimes wonder why I like the people of this miserable planet so much." -- The Fifth Doctor ('Doctor Who', 'Warriors Of The Deep', 1984)
2022-01-25: "May you live all the days of your life." -- Jonathan Swift
2022-01-26: "The multiplier effect is a major feature of networks and flows." -- John Henry Holland
2022-01-27: "Their life, a general mist of error, / Their death, a hideous storm of terror." -- John Webster ('The Duchess Of Malfi', 1612)
2022-01-28: "It must have required enormous effort for man to overcome his natural tendency to live like the animals in a continual present." -- Gerald James Whitrow
2022-01-29: "Freedom, like everything else, is relative." -- Margaret Atwood ('The Handmaid's Tale', 1985)
2022-01-30: "The questions worth asking, in other words, come not from other people but from nature, and are for the most part delicate things easily drowned out by the noise of everyday life." -- Robert B. Laughlin
2022-01-31: "Prepare to go into the storm." -- Tagline For 'Into The Storm' (2014)
February 2022
2022-02-01: "Your time is tick-tick-ticking away." -- Nine Inch Nails ('The Warning', 2007)
2022-02-01: "Don't let yesterday use up too much of today." -- Will Rogers
2022-02-03: "Preventive measure is better than curative measure." -- Thai Proverb
2022-02-04: "Only fools build a fortress of wealth. Only fools would live in it and imagine themselves safe." -- Steven Erikson ('Forge Of Darkness', 2012)
2022-02-05: "As long as government policies emphasize growth in gross domestic product and transnational corporations relentlessly pursue shareholder returns, we will continue accelerating toward global catastrophe." -- Jeremy Lent
2022-02-06: "The longer I live, the more convinced am I that this planet is used by other planets as a lunatic asylum." -- George Bernard Shaw
2022-02-07: "Nothing's a gift, it's all on loan." -- Wislawa Szymborska
2022-02-08: "There is no safety in numbers, or in anything else." -- James Thurber
2022-02-09: "Are these the shadows of the things that will be, or are they shadows of things that may be, only?" -- Charles Dickens ('A Christmas Carol', 1843)
2022-02-10: "People are more important than things." -- Frank Herbert
2022-02-11: "The past is a foreign country; they do things differently there." -- L. P. Hartley ('The Go-Between', 1953)
2022-02-12: "Anyone who says that society can be run on the basis of everyone's trying to maximize his own greed is talking total nonsense." -- Carroll Quigley
2022-02-13: "The old life seems so cut off from the new, so alien and so unreasonable, that at times I find it bordering upon the incredible." -- H. G. Wells
2022-02-14: "The most terrifying fact about the universe is not that it is hostile but that it is indifferent." -- Stanley Kubrick
2022-02-15: "There is a growing awareness – from the grassroots to academia – that the real economy is the natural world, on which we ultimately depend for all of our needs." -- Helena Norberg-Hodge
2022-02-16: "Each thing has to end, or there will never be any room for beginnings." -- Algis Budrys
2022-02-17: "It is a pity the universe doesn't use a segmented architecture with a protected mode!" -- Rick Cook
2022-02-18: "The human problem cannot be solved by simply throwing money at it." -- Thade ('Planet Of The Apes', 2001)
2022-02-19: "Each of us is we." -- Karel Capek
2022-02-20: "A new technology sometimes creates more than it destroys. Sometimes, it destroys more than it creates. But it is never one-sided." -- Neil Postman
2022-02-21: "I mean, they tell you, look for the light at the end of the tunnel. Well, there is no tunnel. There's just no structure. The underlying order is chaos." -- Richard Linklater ('Slacker', 1991)
2022-02-22: "Change begets change." -- Charles Dickens ('Martin Chuzzlewit', 1842)
2022-02-23: "People are fragile. They need time to adapt. They accept change gradually." -- David Pilcher ('Wayward Pines', 2015-2016)
2022-02-24: "Sometimes it is the people no one imagines anything of who do the things no one can imagine." -- Alan Turing ('The Imitation Game', 2014)
2022-02-25: "Man is never watchful enough against dangers that threaten him every hour."
2022-02-26: "What we call chaos is just patterns we haven’t recognized." -- Chuck Palahniuk
2022-02-27: "Algorithms existed for at least five thousand years, but people did not know that they were algorithmizing." -- Doron Zeilberger
2022-02-28: "'Righteous hatred' is in the same category as 'righteous cancer' or 'righteous tuberculosis'. All of them are absurd concepts." -- B. Alan Wallace
March 2022
2022-03-01: "'Did you ever get that feeling? Man, I can't seem to shake it, not quite as clever as we think we are." -- Nine Inch Nails ('Ahead Of Ourselves', 2018)
2022-03-02: "'Those who comfort themselves with the thought that mutual deterrence has kept the peace for thirty years forget the importance of low probabilities in the macro context." -- J. J. C. Smart
2022-03-03: "The conception that we can only protect ourselves if we are prepared to protect others surely ought to belong to the nursery stage of social education." -- Norman Angell
2022-03-04: "Science does not stand still, and neither does philosophy, although the latter has a tendency to walk in circles." -- Peter Singer
2022-03-06: "Greed has poisoned men’s souls, has barricaded the world with hate, has goose-stepped us into misery and bloodshed. We have developed speed, but we have shut ourselves in. Machinery that gives abundance has left us in want. Our knowledge has made us cynical. Our cleverness, hard and unkind." -- Charlie Chaplin ('The Great Dictator', 1940)
2022-03-07: "The awareness that we are all human beings together has become lost in war and through politics." -- Albert Schweitzer
2022-03-08: "There are two morals to the story. The first is: avoid giving false alarms. The second is: in the end, the wolf came, so do not be misled by previous false alarms into thinking that the latest alarm is false, too. Of these two morals, the second one is more significant." -- David Fleming
2022-03-09: "We are infants still, with loaded guns for toys." -- Philip Wylie
2022-03-10: "A certain moral imbecility marks all ethnocentric movements." -- I. F. Stone
2022-03-11: "We've let a moment's warmth put off decision's chill." -- Harry Constantine
2022-03-12: "Since we tend to see ourselves primarily in the light of our intentions, which are invisible to others, while we see others mainly in the light of their actions, which are visible to us, we have a situation in which misunderstanding and injustice are the order of the day."
2022-03-13: "They have misread the hearts and minds of men. By their enslavement of the peoples whom they have made subject by force of arms, they have aroused against themselves a greater force than can be found in any army, in any weapon." -- Pearl S. Buck
2022-03-14: "Our tenancy on this planet is not guaranteed." -- Shawna Vogel
2022-03-15: "A philosopher once asked, 'Are we human because we gaze at the stars, or do we gaze at them because we are human?' Pointless, really. Do the stars gaze back? Now, that's a question." -- Narrator ('Stardust', 2007)
2022-03-16: "Not even the most accomplished ideologue will be able to tell the difference between the ashes of capitalism and the ashes of communism." -- John Kenneth Galbraith
2022-03-17: "Houston, we have a problem." -- Tagline For 'Apollo 13' (1995)
2022-03-18: "The truth sometimes not sought for comes forth to the light." -- Menander
2022-03-19: "If workers made the decisions, do you really think they would vote to outsource their own jobs to China? Of course not. Would workers vote to pollute their own air and water and poison their own kids just to make an extra nickel in profit? Of course not." -- Richard D. Wolff
2022-03-20: "Books give not wisdom where was none before, / But where some is, there reading makes it more." -- John Harington
2022-03-21: "Color outside the lines. Practice random kindness and senseless acts of beauty. This is your last chance." -- Anne Herbert
2022-03-22: "You must learn to see what you are looking at." -- Christopher Paolini ('Inheritance', 2011)
2022-03-23: "Hatred, as well as love, renders its votaries credulous." -- Jean-Jacques Rousseau
2022-03-24: "No fear can stand up to hunger, no patience can wear it out, disgust simply does not exist where hunger is; and as to superstition, beliefs, and what you may call principles, they are less than chaff in a breeze." -- Joseph Conrad ('Heart Of Darkness', 1899)
2022-03-25: "Man is his own Prometheus." -- Jules Michelet
2022-03-26: "Success is whatever humiliation everyone has agreed to compete for." -- James Richardson
2022-03-27: "The accumulation of capital and the amassing of wealth are increasingly occurring at the expense of an irrevocable rift in the social and environmental conditions governing human life on earth." -- John Bellamy Foster
2022-03-28: "The more a man grasps and knows, the greater is the horizon which opens up before him." -- Alice Bailey
2022-03-29: "Everything has a side-effect. My whole life's a side-effect." -- Isaac-Newton 'Zak' Midgeley ('Frequencies', 2013)
2022-03-30: "For all that we have done, as a civilization, as individuals, the universe is not stable, nor is any single thing within it." -- Richard K. Morgan ('Altered Carbon', 2002)
2022-03-31: "Information wants to be free — remember that old saw? Some truth to it, only it’s backwards. This isn’t an information economy — we’re drowning in that — it’s an attention economy. That’s what everybody’s vying for." -- Gregory Benford
April 2022
2022-04-01: "Yes, yes of course, this is going to hurt." -- Nine Inch Nails ('In Two', 2013)
2022-04-02: "If I have ventured wrongly, very well, life then helps me with its penalty. But if I haven't ventured at all, who helps me then?" -- Søren Kierkegaard
2022-04-03: "Can you tell me, in a world that is flagrant with the failures of civilisation, what there is particularly immortal about yours?" -- G. K. Chesterton ('The Napoleon Of Notting Hill', 1904)
2022-04-04: "Welcome to your new nightmare." -- Tagline For 'A Nightmare On Elm Street' (2010)
2022-04-05: "The evolution of the brain not only overshot the needs of prehistoric man, it is the only example of evolution providing a species with an organ which it does not know how to use." -- Arthur Koestler
2022-04-06: "Some things are better left buried." -- Tagline For 'The Oblong Box' (1969)
2022-04-07: "There are many steps on the continuum between controlling something and doing nothing at all." -- Orson Scott Card
2022-04-08: "More noise occurs from a single man shouting than a hundred thousand who are quiet." -- José de San Martín
2022-04-09: "The arrogance of man is thinking nature is in our control." -- Dr. Serizawa ('Godzilla', 2014)
2022-04-10: "Predicting rain doesn't count; building arks does." -- Warren Buffett
2022-04-11: "History admits no rules, only outcomes." -- David Mitchell ('Cloud Atlas', 2004)
2022-04-12: "I haven't got any use for wars and there is no more humor in 'em than there is reason for 'em." -- Will Rogers
2022-04-13: "The New was coming in its own fashion and beyond the common understanding of the world." -- H. G. Wells ('The Food Of The Gods', 1904)
2022-04-14: "One does not debate nature; one experiences nature." -- Michael Flynn ('Eifelheim', 2006)
2022-04-15: "It is said that in the final days of planet Earth, everyone had bad dreams." -- Rassilon
2022-04-16: "The present moment contains past and future. The secret of transformation is in the way we handle this very moment." -- Thích Nhat Hanh
2022-04-17: "Climate change is the defining issue of our time – and we are at a defining moment. We face a direct existential threat." -- António Guterres
2022-04-18: "You try your damnedest, but something always goes wrong. That’s life. If you’re smart, you plan for it." -- Glen Cook ('Shadows Linger', 1984)
2022-04-19: "You think you've seen it all, but you haven't. 'Cause life's always got one more surprise for you. And sometimes, it's a big one." -- Azazel ('Fallen', 1998)
2022-04-20: "Today, escalating human populations have vastly exceeded global carrying capacity and now produce massive quantities of solid, liquid, and gaseous waste." -- Paul Watson
2022-04-21: "Patience is bitter, but its fruit is sweet." -- Jean Chardin
2022-04-22: "Any book worth banning is a book worth reading." -- Isaac Asimov
2022-04-23: "Far from being the smartest possible biological species, we are probably better thought of as the stupidest possible biological species capable of starting a technological civilization - a niche we filled because we got there first, not because we are in any sense optimally adapted to it." -- Nick Bostrom
2022-04-24: "Mayday." -- Tagline For 'Poseidon' (2006)
2022-04-25: "Be warned. The nightmare has not gone away." -- Tagline For 'Eraserhead' (1977)
2022-04-26: "There is no third path and that is the one we are going to take." -- Jacqueline Rose
2022-04-27: "Like a yawn of fire from the grass it came, / And the fanning wind puffed it to flapping flame." -- Francis Thompson
2022-04-28: "He noblest lives and noblest dies who makes and keeps his self-made laws." -- Richard Francis Burton
2022-04-29: "When we have a choice it is always best to choose kindness." -- Sharon Gannon
2022-04-30: "Much of the evil in the world comes from seeing and judging people as members of groups rather than individuals." -- John Avlon
May 2022
2022-05-01: "Nowhere to run, not a place to hide." -- KMFDM ('Amnesia', 2011)
2022-05-02: "There are some things which it is madness not to try to know but which it is almost as much madness to try to know." -- Samuel Butler
2022-05-03: "We all partake of woe, our common fate." -- Nguyen Du
2022-05-04: "You’re in the present, you’re trapped in a young now or an old now, but there is no other now to be seen." -- Ray Bradbury ('Dandelion Wine', 1957)
2022-05-05: "When history moves — really moves — it does so in great convulsive jolts." -- David McNally
2022-05-06: "What is the cost of lies?" -- Tagline For 'Chernobyl' (2019)
2022-05-07: "We need to be bold and adventurous in our thinking in order to survive." -- William O. Douglas
2022-05-08: "Life is enlarged, drunk with annihilation." -- Paul Valéry
2022-05-09: "The human population growth that has taken place over the past few hundred years resembles nothing so much as the spikes that occur in the numbers of rabbits, house mice and plague rats. Like them, it can only be short-lived." -- John Gray
2022-05-10: "Research is the process of going up alleys to see if they are blind." -- Marston Bates
2022-05-11: "The liberties of none are safe unless the liberties of all are protected." -- William O. Douglas
2022-05-12: "The dynamics of history lack control experiments." -- Edwin Boring
2022-05-13: "The end and aim of the Cynic philosophy, as indeed of every philosophy, is happiness, but happiness that consists in living according to nature, and not according to the opinions of the multitude." -- Julian
2022-05-14: "Like a bad horror movie, isn't it?" -- The Host ('Hellraiser: Hellworld', 2005)
2022-05-15: "Excessive bureaucracy is distracting, time-consuming, and destructive to creativity." -- Jerome Isaac Friedman
2022-05-16: "We are called to understand technological civilisation just when its very realisation has radically put in question the possibility that there could be any such understanding." -- George Grant
2022-05-17: "Sometimes you just gotta ride the horse you rode in on." -- Mickey Haller ('The Lincoln Lawyer', 2022)
2022-05-18: "What is truly unbearable is that the person one recalls as part of the future should suddenly become the past." -- Javier Marías
2022-05-19: "Nothing is rarer than giving no importance to things that have none." -- Paul Valéry
2022-05-20: "From ignorance our comfort flows." -- Matthew Prior
2022-05-21: "Some luck lies in not getting what you thought you wanted but getting what you have, which once you have got it you may be smart enough to see is what you would have wanted had you known." -- Garrison Keillor
2022-05-22: "Certainly we cannot hope to solve our problems by continuing the very methods responsible for creating them." -- Floyd B. Olson
2022-05-23: "There is someone this morning, who didn't wake up, who will never see this day. Try to feel lucky that this is not you." -- Margaret Cho
2022-05-24: "The billionaire boom is not a sign of a thriving economy but a symptom of a failing economic system." -- Winnie Byanyima
2022-05-25: "It may help to understand human affairs to be clear that most of the great triumphs and tragedies of history are caused, not by people being fundamentally good or fundamentally bad, but by people being fundamentally people." -- Gaiman/Pratchett ('Good Omens', 1990)
2022-05-26: "The universe is peeled like an onion, and an onion is all peel." -- Umberto Eco ('Foucault's Pendulum', 1988)
2022-05-27: "Open your eyelids, will you all, and let your brains leave sleep behind." -- Ennius
2022-05-28: "What if, like, we're just these tiny things, and we're just, like, part of this whole other huge universe that's, like, so big we don't even know it exists?" -- Mosquito ('Antz', 1998)
2022-05-29: "Science is neat, but I'm afraid it's not very forgiving." -- Scott Clarke ('Stranger Things', 2016-)
2022-05-30: "A century and a half after its birth, the modern business corporation, an artificial person made in the image of a human psychopath, now is seeking to remake real people in its image." -- Joel Bakan
2022-05-31: "It is a profitable thing, if one is wise, to seem foolish." -- Aeschylus
June 2022
2022-06-01: "Satellite, I'm watching you, I'm one step ahead. / Satellite, I'm part of you, I'm inside your head." -- Nine Inch Nails ('Satellite, 2013)
2022-06-02: "Newton calculated what the attractive power possessed by the earth must be in order that the moon may continue in its path. He next compared this force with the force exerted by the earth in pulling the apple to the ground, and found the forces to be identical!" -- Benjamin Harrow
2022-06-03: "The world is a complex, interconnected, finite, ecological–social–psychological–economic system. We treat it as if it were not, as if it were divisible, separable, simple, and infinite. Our persistent, intractable global problems arise directly from this mismatch." -- Donella Meadows
2022-06-04: "When suffering knocks at your door and you say there is no seat for him, he tells you not to worry because he has brought his own stool." -- Chinua Achebe ('Things Fall Apart', 1958)
2022-06-05: "Oh! 'tis a dreadful interval of time, filled up with horror all, and big with death!" -- Joseph Addison ('Cato, A Tragedy', 1712)
2022-06-06: "The chapter of accidents is the longest chapter in the book." -- John Wilkes
2022-06-07: "Want of foresight, unwillingness to act when action would be simple and effective, lack of clear thinking, confusion of counsel until the emergency comes, until self-preservation strikes its jarring gong — these are the features which constitute the endless repetition of history." -- Winston Churchill
2022-06-08: "Facts need no pedigree, logic has no heraldry, and the living should not awed by the mistakes of the dead." -- Robert G. Ingersoll
2022-06-09: "The human race has found out the hard way that we are what we do, not just what we think." -- Robert Fulghum
2022-06-10: "Seek out argument and disputation for their own sake; the grave will supply plenty of time for silence." -- Christopher Hitchens
2022-06-11: "The man who underestimates himself is perpetually being surprised by success, whereas the man who overestimates himself is just as often surprised by failure. The former kind of surprise is pleasant, the latter unpleasant. It is therefore wise to be not unduly conceited, though also not too modest to be enterprising." -- Bertrand Russell
2022-06-12: "All nature, all the universe that we can see, is absolutely indifferent to us, and except to us human life is of no more value than grass." -- Richard Jefferies
2022-06-13: "I would rather sit with the rural poor, the desperate children of urban blight, the victims of racism, and working people seeking a better life than with those whose religion is the status quo, whose goal is profit and whose hearts are cold." -- Douglas Fraser
2022-06-14: "Within a generation or two human society will be in total destructive disarray." -- Isaac Asimov
2022-06-15: "Which do you pay dearer for, lies or the truth? The former costs you yourself, the latter at most your happiness." -- Christian Friedrich Hebbel
2022-06-16: "You can tell people the truth, but they'll never believe you until the event. Until it's too late." -- Chuck Palahniuk ('Survivor', 1999)
2022-06-17: "The theory of the light quantum, which Einstein initiated in 1905 and which is with us still, is certainly the most revolutionary development in the history of physics and arguably in the history of science." -- Jeremy Bernstein
2022-06-18: "Thus the whole duration of humanity, with its many sequent species and its incessant downpour of generations, is but a flash in the lifetime of the cosmos." -- Olaf Stapledon ('Last And First Men', 1930)
2022-06-19: "Human dignity is better served by embracing knowledge." -- John Polanyi
2022-06-20: "We're slow to believe what wounds us." -- Ovid
2022-06-21: "One choice can destroy you." -- Tagline For 'Insurgent' (2015)
2022-06-22: "Some people are so fond of ill-luck that they run half-way to meet it." -- Douglas William Jerrold
2022-06-23: "There falls no shadow where there shines no sun." -- Hilaire Belloc
2022-06-24: "If you want to make enemies, try to change something." -- Woodrow Wilson
2022-06-25: "Not curiosity, not vanity, not the consideration of expediency, not duty and conscientiousness, but an unquenchable, unhappy thirst that brooks no compromise leads us to truth." -- Georg Wilhelm Friedrich Hegel
2022-06-26: "People can play games with it if they want, but the truth is the truth." -- Walt Longmire ('Longmire', 2012-2017)
2022-06-27: "Life's meaning has always eluded me and I guess it always will. But I love it just the same." -- E. B. White
2022-06-28: "A person can get used to just about anything if it happens slow enough." -- Robert Olmstead
2022-06-29: "Faced with new realities, our systems have to transform." -- Béla H. Bánáthy
2022-06-30: "The complex system has a multiplicity of interacting feedback loops." -- Jay Wright Forrester
July 2022
2022-07-01: "Protect and survive, you're better alive. / Take a step to the side, relax and revive." -- Fluke ('Switch/Twitch', 2003)
2022-07-02: "Life is short...and getting shorter by the minute." -- Shannon Wheeler ('Too Much Coffee Man', 1991-2013)
2022-07-03: "Ah, now we see the violence inherent in the system!" -- Dennis The Peasant ('Monty Python And The Holy Grail', 19975)
2022-07-04: "The direct use of physical force is so poor a solution to the problem of limited resources that it is commonly employed only by small children and great nations." -- David D. Friedman
2022-07-05: "Look at the world today. Is there anything more pitiful? What madness there is! What blindness! What unintelligent leadership! A scurrying mass of bewildered humanity crashing headlong against each other, compelled by an orgy of greed and brutality." -- High Lama ('Lost Horizon', 1937)
2022-07-06: "It is a sad reflection on life that when there is only one thing to do it is always extremely unpleasant." -- John Collier
2022-07-07: "It is better to fail in originality, than to succeed in imitation." -- Herman Melville
2022-07-08: "Philosophers are adults who persist in asking childish questions." -- Isaiah Berlin
2022-07-09: "Some choices will choose you. How you face these choices, these turns in the road, with what kind of attitude, more than the choices themselves, is what will define the context of your life." -- Dana Reeve
2022-07-10: "Once, mankind accepted a simple truth: that they were not alone in this universe." -- Odin ('Thor', 2011)
2022-07-11: "Show me a hero and I will write you a tragedy." -- F. Scott Fitzgerald
2022-07-12: "The human race believes in not taking its problems seriously enough to solve them." -- Celia Green
2022-07-13: "Don't undervalue irony; it is often of great use." -- Henry James
2022-07-14: "All of us labor in webs spun long before we were born." -- William Faulkner
2022-07-15: "The world is a looking-glass, and gives back to every man the reflection of his own face. Frown at it, and it will in turn look sourly upon you; laugh at it and with it, and it is a jolly kind companion." -- William Makepeace Thackeray
2022-07-16: "A thinker will be able to cultivate a strain of healthy thoughts only when he pays attention to thoughtlessness also." -- Mahaprajña
2022-07-17: "In pragmatic terms, our challenge is less to save the earth from ourselves and more to save ourselves from an earth that, if pushed too far, has ample power to rock, burn, and shake us off completely." -- Naomi Klein
2022-07-18: "Change comes from large groups of angry people." -- Aziz Ansari
2022-07-19: "A man should so live that at the close of every day he can repeat: 'I have not wasted my day'." -- The Zohar
2022-07-20: "We have three choices in life: to kill ourselves, go crazy, or learn to live with what we have in life." -- Elvin Semrad
2022-07-21: "I do my own thinking now and my own bossing." -- Sinclair Lewis
2022-07-22: "In all human affairs there are efforts, and there are results, and the strength of the effort is the measure of the result." -- James Allen
2022-07-23: "We die only once, and for such a long time!" -- Molière
2022-07-24: "Figuring things out for yourself is the only real freedom anyone really has." -- Lietenant Rasczak ('Starship Troopers', 1997)
2022-07-25: "Even if you managed to escape from one cage, weren’t you just in another, larger one?" -- Haruki Murakami ('1Q84', 2009)
2022-07-26: "We are all in the same boat." -- Kofi Annan
2022-07-27: "Time is long and fate is fickle." -- Silver Surfer
2022-07-28: "It is preoccupation with possession, more than anything else, that prevents men from living freely and nobly." -- Bertrand Russell
2022-07-29: "Desperate times, desperate measures." -- Ethan Hunt ('Mission Impossible - Rogue Nation', 2015)
2022-07-30: "In such seconds of decision entire futures are made." -- Dan Simmons ('Hyperion', 1989)
2022-07-31: "So remember when you're feeling very small and insecure, how amazingly unlikely is your birth / And pray that there's intelligent life somewhere up in space, 'cause there's bugger all down here on Earth!" -- Eric Idle ('Galaxy Song', 1983)
August 2022
2022-08:01: ""Life's screaming and rolling like a monster train / Destination to nowhere, I won't be late." -- Scorpions ('Sting In The Tail', 2010)
2022-08-02: "Everything is on loan in life — everything." -- Gianni Agnelli
2022-08-03: "Hope and optimism are irrepressible but there is a deep underlying premonition that the opposition to change is likely to be vicious." -- Aung San Suu Kyi
2022-08-04: "If the world will be gulled, let it be gulled." -- Robert Burton
2022-08-05: "There is a dynamic of development which is leading to more and more poverty, more and more inequality, more and more violence, more and more subjection of our lives to money." -- John Holloway
2022-08-06: "The greatest tragedy in mankind's entire history may be the hijacking of morality by religion." -- Arthur C. Clarke
2022-08-07: "The metaphysical explanation is an obstacle, because it withdraws attention from the close scrutiny of facts, and deludes the mind with unverified, unverifiable assumptions." -- George Henry Lewes
2022-08-08: "The global economy is built on the principle that one place can be exploited, even destroyed, for the sake of another place." -- Wendell Berry
2022-08-09: "Perhaps when distant people on other planets pick up some wave-length of ours all they hear is a continuous scream." -- Iris Murdoch
2022-08-10: "I honestly think it's the thing I like most, to laugh. It cures a multitude of ills." -- Audrey Hepburn
2022-08-11: "We live in the age of the overworked, and the under-educated; the age in which people are so industrious that they become absolutely stupid." -- Oscar Wilde
2022-08-12: "Redundancy is expensive but indispensable." -- Jane Jacobs ('Dark Age Ahead', 2004)
2022-08-13: "Sometimes I think man needs to feel a special position within nature, and this leads him to believe that he is either specially hated by other animals or specially cherished. Instead of the truth, which is that he's just another animal on the plain." -- Michael Crichton
2022-08-14: "Granting that an illusion may have its uses, it can only be of service so long as we do not know it to be an illusion." -- Chapman Cohen
2022-08-15: "Give every man thy ear, but few thy voice." -- William Shakespeare ('Hamlet', c. 1600)
2022-08-16: "Where the environment is stupid or prejudiced or cruel, it is a sign of merit to be out of harmony with it." -- Bertrand Russell
2022-08-17"Awareness is the greatest agent for change." -- Eckhart Tolle
2022-08-18: "As life runs on, the road grows strange." -- James Russell Lowell
2022-08-19: "The time has now come for us to cease to behave like a lot of irresponsible children letting off fireworks in a crowded hall." -- John Wyndham ('Web', 1979)
2022-08-20: "Know, Nature, like the cuckoo, laughs at law, placing her eggs in whatso nest she will." -- Alfred Austin
2022-08-21: "Knowledge begins with wonder." -- Ryoji Noyori
2022-08-22: "It is very hard to realize how total a change in outlook Isaac Newton has produced." -- Hermann Bondi
2022-08-23: "Time goes by and you look back and you just can’t believe what you thought was important." -- Sean Nelson
2022-08-24: "Clearly, we have compiled a record of serious failures in recent technological encounters with the environment. In each case, the new technology was brought into use before the ultimate hazards were known. We have been quick to reap the benefits and slow to comprehend the costs." -- Barry Commoner
2022-08-25: "Two roads diverged in a wood, and I — / I took the one less traveled by, / And that has made all the difference." -- Robert Frost ('The Road Not Taken', 1915)
2022-08-26: "There has to be somebody who comes from nowhere to say what others are too foolish or too frightened to say." -- Anthony Burgess ('Napoleon Symphony', 1974)
2022-08-27: "From rainbows, river meanders, and shadows to spider webs, honeycombs, and the markings on animal coats, the visible world is full of patterns that can be described mathematically." -- John A. Adam
2022-08-28: "When you are genuinely interested in one thing, it will always lead to something else." -- Eleanor Roosevelt
2022-08-29: "With ruin upon ruin, rout on rout, / Confusion worse confounded." -- John Milton ('Paradise Lost', 1667)
2022-08-30: "Life flees and does not stop an hour." -- Petrarch
2022-08-31: "It will be interesting to see what the long term fruits of our national apathy will be, because so far they've been pretty foul." -- Moby
September 2022
2022-09-01: "We've run out of excuses and we are running out of time." -- Orbital ('Our House Is On Fire', 2018)
2022-09-02: "It seems to be easier for us today to imagine the thoroughgoing deterioration of the earth and of nature than the breakdown of late capitalism; perhaps that is due to some weakness in our imaginations." -- Fredric Jameson
2022-09-03: "Inhumanity, n. One of the signal and characteristic qualities of humanity." -- Ambrose Bierce ('The Devil's Dictionary', 1911)
2022-09-04: "We were warned plenty that we were creating a disaster in the only atmosphere we’ve got, and we kept on doing it. Now we are facing the consequences." -- Bob Altemeyer
2022-09-05: "It is thrifty to prepare today for the wants of tomorrow." -- Aesop
2022-09-06: "Rotten eggs. H2S. Hydrogen sulfide. The stench of burning brimstone." -- Robert Heinlein ('Job: A Comedy Of Justice', 1984)
2022-09-07: "Science is the poetry of reality." -- Richard Dawkins
2022-09-08: "Somewhere round the next bend lies the road to terror." -- Tagline For 'Midnight Ride' (1990)
2022-09-09: "Only money economy has filled the days of so many people with weighing, calculating, with numerical determinations, with a reduction of qualitative values to quantitative ones." -- Georg Simmel
2022-09-10: "Some mistakes I guess we never stop paying for." -- Roy Hobbs ('The Natural', 1984)
2022-09-11: "We are in serious trouble, my friends. All data points to us being - how do you humans say it - completely screwed?" -- Dan Mott ('Without A Paddle', 2004)
2022-09-12: "Experience demands that man is the only animal which devours his own kind, for I can apply no milder term to the general prey of the rich on the poor." -- Thomas Jefferson
2022-09-13: "Things are seldom what they seem." -- W. S. Gilbert
2022-09-14: "Nothing in life is certain except death, taxes and the second law of thermodynamics." -- Seth Lloyd
2022-09-15: "From an ecological perspective, humans are an overpopulated, parasitic swarm, living in total ignorance of natural 'laws' they foolishly think they can master, but in truth must conform to and harmonize with if they intend to survive." -- Steven Best
2022-09-16: "I have gazed into the abyss, and the abyss has gazed into me. And neither of us liked what we saw." -- Brother Theodore
2022-09-17: "In an eye blink the curtain is up, the stage ablaze, for the vast drama of ourselves." -- Herman Wouk
2022-09-18: "There is nothing sacred about the existing system." -- Michael Parenti
2022-09-19: "Sometimes, I don't know where the bullshit ends and the truth begins." -- Joe Gideon ('All That Jazz', 1979)
2022-09-20: "The mystery which surrounds a thinking machine already surrounds a thinking man." -- B. F. Skinner
2022-09-21: "Rudeness is the weak man's imitation of strength." -- Eric Hoffer
2022-09-22: "Nature is not cruel, only pitilessly indifferent." -- Richard Dawkins
2022-09-23: "I can't help thinking that somewhere in the universe there has to be something better than man." -- George Taylor ('Planet Of The Apes', 1968)
2022-09-24: "We meet in an hour of change and challenge, in a decade of hope and fear, in an age of both knowledge and ignorance." -- John F. Kennedy
2022-09-25: "There's a storm coming." -- Charlie Dixon ('Terminator: The Sarah Connor Chronicles', 2008)
2022-09-26: "One cannot be deeply responsive to the world without being saddened very often." -- Erich Fromm
2022-09-27: "It is not my aim to surprise or shock you – but the simplest way I can summarize is to say that there are now in the world machines that think, that learn and that create. Moreover, their ability to do these things is going to increase rapidly until – in a visible future – the range of problems they can handle will be coextensive with the range to which the human mind has been applied." -- Herbert A. Simon
2022-09-28: "If you're not sure what to say, try 'So it has come to this' – it creates instant dramatic tension and is a valid observation in literally any situation." -- Randall Munroe
2022-09-29: "Ask the right questions, and nature will open the doors to her secrets." -- C. V. Raman
2022-09-30: "There will be commotions and turbulent times." -- Taliesin
October 2022
2022-10-01: "Armageddon may arrive any day." -- Danny Elfman ('The Little Things', 2008)
2022-10-02: "The methods of science, like everything else under the sun, are themselves objects of scientific scrutiny, as method becomes methodology, the analysis of methods. Methodology in turn falls under the gaze of epistemology, the investigation of investigation itself -- nothing is off limits to scientific questioning." -- Daniel Dennett
2022-10-03: "If we preserved as parks only those places that have no economic possibilities, we would have no parks. And in the decades to come, it will not be only the buffalo and the trumpeter swan who need sanctuaries. Our own species is going to need them too." -- Wallace Stegner
2022-10-04: "Certainty generally is illusion, and repose is not the destiny of man." -- Oliver Wendell Holmes Jr.
2022-10-05: "We're trained to learn information and give it back at test time. But we're not taught to think." -- Victor Villaseñor
2022-10-06: "Hypocrisy and sophistry become the second nature of the civilized man. But a society cannot live thus; it must return to truth or cease to exist." -- Peter Kropotkin
2022-10-07: "If you are awaiting a finding of 'clear and present danger,' then I can only say that the danger has never been more clear and its presence has never been more imminent." -- John F. Kennedy
2022-10-08: "The question is whether we can find in our own midst and in our own hearts that leadership of humane purpose that will recognize the terrible truths of our existence." -- Robert F. Kennedy
2022-10-09: "The story continues..." -- Tagline For 'The Karate Kid Part II' (1986)
2022-10-10: "Science means simply the aggregate of all the recipes that are always successful. All the rest is literature." -- Paul Valéry
2022-10-11: "I have said what I meant and meant what I said." -- Adlai Stevenson II
2022-10-12: "People become so preoccupied with the means by which an end is achieved, as eventually to mistake it for the end." -- Herbert Spencer
2022-10-13: "With the way the world’s going a nuclear Iran is going to be the least of our problems in 10 or 15 years. Iranian nukes will be a break from swimming through our climate-change flooded cities fighting ebola zombies with our teeth because we can’t hold guns thanks to our iPhone-shaped hand tumors." -- Jon Stewart
2022-10-14: "If we must fall, we should boldly meet the danger." -- Tacitus
2022-10-15: "Every man is working out his destiny in his own way and nobody can be of any help except by being kind, generous, and patient." -- Henry Miller
2022-10-16: "It's much worse than you think." -- Ethan Hunt ('Mission: Impossible', 1996)
2022-10-17: "It doesn't think. It doesn't feel. It doesn't give up." -- Tagline For 'It Follows' (2014)
2022-10-18: "The struggle to be free from oppression is, in my mind, per se noble. But noble causes attract a wide range of participants, and many would fall far short of nobility." -- Andrew Vachss
2022-10-19: "O poor mortals, how ye make this earth bitter for each other." -- Thomas Carlyle
2022-10-20: "If you understand comedy, you understand life. Drama, death, tragedy – everybody has these. But with humour you've got all these, and the antidote." -- Eric Sykes
2022-10-21: "Right now, the future I see doesn't look so great. The good news is, the future is always changing, in the largest of ways, by the smallest of things." -- Cassie Holmes ('Push', 2009)
2022-10-22: "We have met the enemy and he is us." -- Walt Kelly
2022-10-23: "Life boils down to standing in line to get shit dropped on your head. Everyone’s got a place in the queue, you can’t get out of it, and just when you start to congratulate yourself on surviving your dose of shit, you discover that the line is actually circular." -- Scott Lynch ('The Republic Of Thieves', 2013)
2022-10-24: "We must take a hard road, a road unforeseen." -- Elrond ('The Fellowship Of The Ring', 1954)
2022-10-25: "Which do you pay dearer for, lies or the truth? The former costs you yourself, the latter at most your happiness." -- Christian Friedrich Hebbel
2022-10-26: "That's mortals for you. They've only got a few years in this world and they spend them all in making things complicated for themselves." -- Terry Pratchett ('Mort', 1987)
2022-10-27: "Fate. Like, notice how whenever something happens in your life, like you fall in love or something, a tune gets attached. Fate tunes. Watch out for that shit." -- DBC Pierre ('Vernon God Little', 2003)
2022-10-28: "Do not hold on to possessions you no longer need." -- Miyamoto Musashi ('The Dokkodo', 1645)
2022-10-29: "It is not the similarity or dissimilarity of individuals that constitutes a group, but interdependence of fate." -- Kurt Lewin
2022-10-30: "When life is too easy for us, we must beware or we may not be ready to meet the blows which sooner or later come to everyone, rich or poor." -- Eleanor Roosevelt
2022-10-31: "While it is very sturdy of comfortable men to point out that life is unfair, the people it is unfair to are not apt to be morally or philosophically elevated by the announcement." -- Russell Baker
November 2022
2022-11-01: "Get your head out of the sand, but it's too late! But it's too late!" -- The Hives ('Tick Tick Boom', 2007)
2022-11-02: "Avoid the crowd, avoid mass audiences, keep your own counsel, which is the counsel of philosophy — of wisdom you can acquire and make your own." -- Zygmunt Bauman
2022-10-03: "I'm beginning to think it's very hard to know what to believe in this world." -- W. Somerset Maugham
2022-11-04: "We dare not even by silence sanction lies." -- Alfred, Lord Tennyson
2022-11-05: "Cheer up, the worst is yet to come." -- Philander Chase Johnson
2022-11-06: "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
2022-11-07: "Look round the habitable world: how few know their own good, or knowing it, pursue." -- John Dryden
2022-11-08: "I suppose the process of acceptance will pass through the usual four stages: (i) this is worthless nonsense; (ii) this is an interesting, but perverse, point of view; (iii) this is true, but quite unimportant; (iv) I always said so." -- J. B. S. Haldane
2022-11-09: "It is having nothing to wait for that is terrible." -- Cesare Pavese
2022-11-10: "It concentrates the mind wonderfully knowing that this life is all we can expect." -- Bernard MacLaverty
2022-11-11: "We are in an emergency situation in the Anthropocene epoch in which the disruption of the Earth system, particularly the climate, is threatening the planet as a place of human habitation." -- John Bellamy Foster
2022-11-12: "The ignorant and innocent masses in each country are unaware at the time that they are being misled, and when it is all over only here and there are the falsehoods discovered and exposed." -- Arthur Ponsonby
2022-11-13: "If man does find the solution for world peace it will be the most revolutionary reversal of his record we have ever known." -- George C. Marshall
2022-11-14: "But far more numerous was the herd of such, / Who think too little, and who talk too much." -- John Dryden
2022-11-15: "The world has achieved brilliance without conscience. Ours is a world of nuclear giants and ethical infants. We know more about war than we know about peace, more about killing than we know about living. If we continue to develop our technology without wisdom or prudence, our servant may prove to be our executioner." -- Omar Bradley
2022-11-16: "I'm talking about the inevitable time when, unless we do something to stop it, men will be hunting men through ruins, for food." -- John Wyndham ('Trouble With Lichen', 1960)
2022-11-17: "I do not believe in violence; it is the last resort of fools." -- H. Rider Haggard
2022-11-18: "There are no ugly questions except those clothed in condescension." -- John Steinbeck ('East Of Eden', 1952)
2022-11-19: "It is always so much easier to accept what you are being told than to think for yourself." -- Ivar Ekeland
2022-11-20: "To the blind all things are sudden." -- Marshall McLuhan
2022-11-21: "History teaches us that civilizations flourish, die and disappear." -- Michael Hamilton Morgan
2022-11-22: "The present is the ever moving shadow that divides yesterday from tomorrow." -- Frank Lloyd Wright
2022-11-23: "It is the eternal right of every man to raise his fist against his fate!" -- Daniel Webster ('The Devil And Daniel Webster', 1941)
2022-11-24: ""It is not easy to be wise for all times, not even for the present much less for the future; and those who judge the past must recollect that, when it was the present the present was future." -- Gouverneur Morris
2022-11-25: "Mathematics allows you to see the invisible." -- Edward Frenkel
2022-11-26: "The law that entropy always increases — the Second Law of Thermodynamics — holds, I think, the supreme position among the laws of Nature." -- Arthur Eddington
2022-11-27: "Information exists. It does not need to be perceived to exist. It does not need to be understood to exist. It requires no intelligence to interpret it. It does not have to have meaning to exist. It exists." -- Tom Stonier
2022-11-28: "Ethics is not just an abstract intellectual discipline. It is about the conflicts that arise in trying to meet real human needs and values." -- John Ziman
2022-11-29: "Oh, ‘twould be marvelous if the world and its moral questions were like some game board, with plain black players and white, and fixed rules, and nary a shade of grey." -- Glen Cook ('Shadows Linger', 1984)
2022-11-30: "Human consciousness isn’t optimized for anything, except maybe helping feral hominids survive in the wild." -- Charles Stross ('Rule 34', 2011)
December 2022
2022-12-01: "Collect the clues and connect the dots. You'll see the pattern that's bursting your bubble, and it's bad." -- The Hives ('Walk Idiot Walk', 2004)
2022-12-02: "Long years ago we made a tryst with destiny, and now the time comes when we shall redeem our pledge, not wholly or in full measure, but very substantially." -- Jawaharlal Nehru
2022-12-03: "You certainly usually find something, if you look, but it is not always quite the something you were after." -- J. R. R. Tolkien ('The Hobbit', 1937)
2022-12-04: "If I made a list of all the things in life I thought were coincidences and then looked back at them, I would see that they weren't coincidences at all." -- Harvey Jason
2022-12-05: "Modern man must descend the spiral of his own absurdity to the lowest point; only then can he look beyond it." -- Václav Havel
2022-12-06: "Mystery is delightful, but unscientific, since it depends upon ignorance." -- Bertrand Russell
2022-12-07: "Science is as yet in its infancy, and we can foretell little of the future save that the thing that has not been is the thing that shall be." -- J. B. S. Haldane
2022-12-08: "The goal is to survive." -- Tagline For 'The Last Boy Scout' (1991)
2022-12-09: "Sexually progressive cultures gave us mathematics, literature, philosophy, civilization and the rest, while sexually restrictive cultures gave us the Dark Ages and the Holocaust." -- Alan Moore
2022-12-10: "A million bureaucrats are diligently plotting death and some of them even know it." -- Thomas Pynchon ('Gravity's Rainbow', 1973)
2022-12-11: "How do we prevent the use of nuclear weapons? By threatening to use nuclear weapons. And we can't get rid of nuclear weapons, because of nuclear weapons. The intransigence, it seems, is a function of the weapons themselves." -- Martin Amis
2022-12-12: "Something is always happening, but when it happens, people don't always see it. Or understand it. Or accept it." -- Azazel ('Fallen', 1998)
2022-12-13: "There shall be no shackles upon the mind, no fetters imposed in early youth which the growing man or woman may feel prevented from shaking off, no barrier set up which daring thought may not transcend." -- Felix Adler
2022-12-14: "If light takes the path with the least time between two points, and light beams bend under the influence of gravity, then the shortest distance between two points is a curved line. Einstein was shocked by this conclusion: If light could be observed traveling in a curved line, it would mean that space itself is curved." -- Michio Kaku
2022-12-15: "The disappearance of the Easter Island civilization and the collapse of the Mayan empire, for example, have been linked to the depletion of environmental resources as populations rose." -- Manfred Laubichler
2022-12-16: "Things fall apart; the centre cannot hold." -- W. B. Yeats
2022-12-17: "Life is a conundrum of esoterica." -- Uncle Monty ('A Series Of Unfortunate Events', 2017)
2022-12-18: "See, you get caught up in the past and you become useless to the present." -- Brent Weeks ('The Way Of Shadows', 2008)
2022-12-19: "Have you seen what they do to valuable natural resources?! Have you seen a strip mine? Have you seen a clear cut in the forest? Have you seen a polluted river? Don't ever let them call you a valuable natural resource!" -- Utah Phillips
2022-12-20: "Give thyself time to learn something new and good, and cease to be whirled around." -- Marcus Aurelius
2022-12-21: "Somebody left the door open and the wrong dogs came home." -- The Stranger ('High Plains Drifter', 1973)
2022-12-22: "Minor things can become moments of great revelation when encountered for the very first time." -- Margot Fonteyn
2022-12-23: "Learning proceeds until death and only then does it stop. Its purpose cannot be given up for even a moment. To pursue it is to be human, to give it up to be a beast." -- Xun Kuang
2022-12-24: "In the end, even the flip of a coin is determined by how fast it's spinning and how long it takes to hit the ground. The ultimate symbol of chance isn't random at all. It only appears that way." -- Marcus du Sautoy
2022-12-25: "A country is considered the more civilised the more the wisdom and efficiency of its laws hinder a weak man from becoming too weak and a powerful one too powerful." -- Primo Levi ('If This Is A Man', 1947)
2022-12-26: "Reality contains not only evidence, but also the means (such as our minds, and our artefacts) of understanding it." -- David Deutsch
2022-12-27: "Single-minded monists, ruthless fanatics, men possessed by an all-embracing coherent vision do not know the doubts and agonies of those who cannot wholly blind themselves to reality." -- Isaiah Berlin
2022-12-28: "It would be no exaggeration to say that social theory begins with — and has an object only because of — the discovery that there exist orderly structures which are the product of the action of many men but are not the result of human design." -- Friedrich Hayek ('Law, Legislation And Liberty', 1973-1979)
2022-12-29: "The struggle itself toward the heights is enough to fill a man's heart. One must imagine Sisyphus happy." -- Albert Camus
2022-12-30: "Everybody knew. Nobody admitted to knowing. If other people began to discuss it, you tuned them out, because what they were saying was both so obvious and so unthinkable. We are using up the Earth. It is almost gone." -- Margaret Atwood ('The Year Of The Flood', 2009)
2022-12-31: "I am wading in the ruins of was." -- Siri Hustvedt
January 2023
2023-01-01: "Something wicked gonna come." -- Blues Saraceno ('Wicked Gonna Come', 2018)
2023-01-02: "To the natural philosopher there is no natural object unimportant or trifling. From the least of nature's works he may learn the greatest lessons." -- John Herschel
2023-01-03: "It was easy to share when there was enough, even barely enough, to go round. But when there was not enough? Then force entered in; might making right; power, and its tool, violence, and its most devoted ally, the averted eye." -- Ursula K. Le Guin ('The Dispossessed', 1974)
2023-01-04: "Old George Orwell got it backward. Big Brother isn't watching. He's singing and dancing. He's pulling rabbits out of a hat. Big Brother’s busy holding your attention every moment you're awake. He's making sure you're always distracted. He's making sure you're fully absorbed. He's making sure your imagination withers." -- Chuck Palahniuk ('Lullaby', 2002)
2023-01-05: "What hurt him most of all, made him feel like a sick child aware of terrible wrongness and yet incapable of explaining it to anyone who might help, was that in spite of the evidence around them, in spite of what their eyes and ears reported — and sometimes their flesh, from bruises, stab wounds, racking coughs, weeping sores — these people believed their way of life was the best in the world, and were prepared to export it at the point of a gun." -- John Brunner
2023-01-06: "A hundred times every day I remind myself that my inner and outer life depend on the labors of other men, living and dead, and that I must exert myself in order to give in the same measure as I have received and am still receiving." -- Albert Einstein
2023-01-07: "Somewhere between anticipation and nostalgia we should have been happy." -- Shannon Wheeler ('Too Much Coffee Man', 1991-2013)
2023-01-08: "The thing that fills the vacuum is what has come to be known as the Higgs field. Some particles interact strongly with this field, others not at all, and it is the strength of the interaction with the Higgs field that determines the fundamental particles' masses." -- James Gillies
2023-01-09: "Failure is just success rounded down." -- Ryan North
2023-01-10: "It’s almost irresistible to blame something or someone else, to shift responsibility away from ourselves, and to look for the control knob, the product, the pill, the technical fix that will make a problem go away." -- Donella Meadows
2023-01-11: "Terror often arises from a pervasive sense of disestablishment; that things are in the unmaking." -- Stephen King ('Danse Macabre', 1981)
2023-01-12: "Problems are only opportunities in work clothes." -- Henry J. Kaiser
2023-01-13: "Never work for a company that says people are its most important asset. If you wanted to get a mortgage and you said that your only asset was people you would end up living in a tent." -- Guy Browning
2023-01-14: "In everything on this earth that is worth doing, there is a stage when no one would do it, except for necessity or honor." -- G. K. Chesterton
2023-01-15: "Reasonably, all these fossil fuel investments are financial dead-ends or ecological disasters." -- Jacques Dubochet
2023-01-16: "You will be what you must be, or else you will be nothing." -- José de San Martín
2023-01-17: "Everyone knows that time is Death, that Death hides in clocks." -- Federico Fellini
2023-01-18: "Clouds are not spheres, mountains are not cones, coastlines are not circles, and bark is not smooth, nor does lightning travel in a straight line." -- Benoit Mandelbrot
2023-01-19: "This world is so full of crap, a man's gonna get into it sooner or later whether he's careful or not." -- Hud Bannon ('Hud', 1963)
2023-01-20: "For philosophy and history alike have taught to seek not what is 'safe,' but what is true." -- Henry Sidgwick
2023-01-21: "It is a callous age; we have seen so many marvels that we are ashamed to marvel more; the seven wonders of the world have become seven thousand wonders." -- L. Frank Baum
2023-01-22: "Privilege tends to soften the brain, or so I’ve observed." -- Kage Baker
2023-01-23: "Men are like steel — when they lose their temper, they lose their worth." -- Anonymous
2023-01-24: "It’s hard to explain the cost and consequences of environmental pollution and destruction to a six year old. But we are paying a desperate price even now because adults did not heed the instructions of kindergarten: Clean up your own mess; put things back where you found them; don’t take what’s not yours." -- Robert Fulghum
2023-01-25: "Yes, indeed, I do feel the weight of the world's miseries pressing upon me!" -- Mirra Alfassa
2023-01-26: "What separates man from beast? Not much!" -- Tagline For 'Lord Of The Flies' (1990)
2023-01-27: "The world is full of things that are tragic or comic, heroic or bizarre or surprising, and those who fail to be interested in the spectacle that it offers are forgoing one of the privileges that life has to offer." -- Bertrand Russell
2023-01-28: "What kind of a universe would it be if we could not do small kindnesses for one another?" -- Sheri S. Tepper
2023-01-29: "Capitalism imposes its laws of motion on the environment, irrespective of the biogeochemical cycles of the planet and the earth’s metabolism, so that it creates rifts or ruptures in the biogeochemical cycles of the Earth system, disrupting ecosystem relations in ways that transcend the mere scale-effects of economic growth." -- John Bellamy Foster
2023-01-30: "However sugarcoated and ambiguous, every form of authoritarianism must start with a belief in some group's greater right to power, whether that right is justified by sex, race, class, religion or all four." -- Gloria Steinem
2023-01-31: "The chief aim of education is to show you, after you make a livelihood, how to enjoy living; and you can live longest and best and most rewardingly by attaining and preserving the happiness of learning." -- Gilbert Highet
February 2023
2023-02-01: "Everybody jumpin' out of their minds, everybody going out of their skins." -- Chemical Brothers ('Go', 2015)
2023-02-02: "The present moment is ever the critical time." -- Robert Barr
2023-02-03: "Like a Shakespearean sonnet that captures the very essence of love, or a painting that brings out the beauty of the human form that is far more than just skin deep, Euler's equation reaches down into the very depths of existence." -- Keith Devlin
2023-02-04: "If you don’t have all the clues, you can still do parts of the puzzle." -- Frank Wilczek
2023-02-05: "What used to be apocalyptic fantasy is today no more than sober realism." -- Terry Eagleton
2023-02-06: "The difficulty, my friends, is not in avoiding death, but in avoiding unrighteousness; for that runs deeper than death." -- Socrates
2023-02-07: "Few people really think about dying. Paranoids worry about it without really understanding it. Victims of fatal accidents and murder don't have time to think. You only really think about it if you take the time to. And you only take the time if you know it's going to happen." -- John Constantine
2023-02-08: "I am a man of fixed and unbending principles, the first of which is to be flexible at all times." -- Everett Dirksen
2023-02-09: "Time’s horses gallop down the lessening hill." -- Richard Le Gallienne
2023-02-10: "Upon the passage to truth, cross-currents are to be expected." -- Robert Aickman
2023-02-11: "It is the duty of righteous men to make war on all undeserved privilege, but one must not forget that this is a war without end." -- Primo Levi
2023-02-12: "The most important thing is to actually think about what you do. To become aware and actually think about the effect of what you do on the environment and on society." -- Jane Goodall
2023-02-13: "First you use machines, then you wear machines, and then...? Then you serve machines." -- John Brunner
2023-02-14: "There's no excuse to be bored. Sad, yes. Angry, yes. Depressed, yes. Crazy, yes. But there's no excuse for boredom, ever." -- Viggo Mortensen
2023-02-15: "Experts never seem to tell us what we’re up against until we’re up against it." -- William Feather
2023-02-16: "You’re not gonna change any of them by talkin’ right, they’ve got to want to learn themselves, and when they don’t want to learn there’s nothing you can do but keep your mouth shut or talk their language." -- Harper Lee ('To Kill A Mockingbird', 1960)
2023-02-17: "Even a mirror will not show you yourself, if you do not wish to see." -- Roger Zelazny ('Lord Of Light', 1967)
2023-02-18: "If you want to go fast, go alone. If you want to go far, go together." -- Thuli Madonsela
2023-02-19: "How far are we allowed to go, to fix something that's broken?" -- Dr. Michael Morbius ('Morbius', 2022)
2023-02-20: "While the earth is in the grip of the apocalypse the anthropocene delivers, humans fear an apocalypse that our consumerism, our greed and our narcissism welcomes." -- Patricia MacCormack
2023-02-21: "Life is a balance of self-indulgence and self-preservation." -- Shannon Wheeler ('Too Much Coffee Man', 1991-2013)
2023-02-22: "Life is futile unless it be directed towards a definite goal." -- Stefan Zweig
2023-02-23: "Truth is the beginning and end (the substance) of material existence. Without truth there is no material existence. It is for this reason that the moral man values truth." -- Zisi
2023-02-24: "We are all in the same boat, and we live in the shadow of a common doom." -- Gerald Bullett
2023-02-25: "History is a novel whose author is the people." -- Alfred de Vigny
2023-02-26: "The arms race is a race between nuclear weapons and ourselves." -- Martin Amis
2023-02-27: "Civilization is not inherited; it has to be learned and earned by each generation anew; if the transmission should be interrupted for one century, civilization would die, and we should be savages again." -- Will Durant
2023-02-28: "I guess life's pretty unpredictable after all." -- Gary Supernova ('Escape From Planet Earth', 2013)
March 2023
2023-03-01: "You ain't never seen a bigger threat." -- Achozen ('Deuces', 2008)
2023-03-02: "I earn that I eat, get that I wear, owe no man hate, envy no man's happiness; glad of other men's good, content with my harm." -- William Shakespeare ('As You Like It', c. 1600)
2023-03-03: "Our blind assault on the planet has finally come to alter the very fundamentals of the living world." -- David Attenborough
2023-03-04: "There are many voices of counsel, but few voices of vision; there is much excitement and feverish activity, but little concert of thoughtful purpose." -- Woodrow Wilson
2023-03-05: "There is a storm on the horizon." -- John Connor ('Terminator Salvation', 2009)
2023-03-06: "One must be ready to change his line sharply and suddenly, with no concern for the prejudices and memories of what was yesterday. To rest upon formula is a slumber that, prolonged, means death." -- Hyman G. Rickover
2023-03-07: "To probe the weaknesses of many popular assumptions, to develop alternatives, and to make one’s fellow men more thoughtful is a contribution worth attempting." -- Walter Kaufmann
2023-03-08: "For the first time we have to face the very real threat of extinction of the human race and of all life on this planet." -- Fritjof Capra
2023-03-09: "It is of immense importance to learn to laugh at ourselves." -- Katherine Mansfield
2023-03-10: "ARCHITECT, n. One who drafts a plan of your house, and plans a draft of your money." -- Ambrose Bierce ('The Devil's Dictionary', 1911)
2023-03-11: "Truth is always strange; stranger than fiction." -- Lord Byron
2023-03-12: "A real friend is one who walks in when the rest of the world walks out." -- Walter Winchell
2023-03-13: "Accuracy is, in every case, advantageous to beauty, and just reasoning to delicate sentiment." -- David Hume ('An Enquiry Concerning Human Understanding', 1748)
2023-03-14: "If you wish to make an apple pie from scratch, you must first create the universe." -- Carl Sagan
2023-03-15: "There was a time, two or three centuries ago, when it looked as if the intellect might win over the body, and our species become something worthwhile." -- Brian Aldiss
2023-03-16: "The mind is its own place, and in itself can make a heav'n of hell, a hell of heav'n." -- John Milton ('Paradise Lost', 1667)
2023-03-17: "I accept this idea of democracy. I am all for trying it out." -- Zora Neale Hurston
2023-03-18: "Most of us are unaware of our deep-seated faith in numbers." -- Carl Eckart
2023-03-19: "My brain, otherwise a sound instrument, has a serious defect — a hypertrophied lobe of curiosity." -- Jack Vance ('The Many Worlds Of Magnus Ridolph', 1966)
2023-03-20: "For all that the world is full of people who go around believing they've got you or your neighbor figured out, there really is no bottom to what is not known." -- Philip Roth ('The Human Stain', 2000)
2023-03-21: "Saying that something is too terrible to joke about is like saying that a disease is too terrible to try to cure it." -- Louis C.K.
2023-03-22: "The future is not google-able." -- William Gibson
2023-03-23: "At the door of life, by the gate of breath, there are worse things waiting for men than death." -- Algernon Charles Swinburne ('The Triumph Of Time', 1866)
2023-03-24: "Many people across the globe are realizing that there is something terribly wrong with the direction our world is headed." -- Jeremy Lent
2023-03-25: "Character consists of what you do on the third and fourth tries." -- James A. Michener
2023-03-26: "Anxiety destroys scale, and suffering makes us lose perspective." -- Saul Bellow
2023-03-27: "Fear leads to anger, anger leads to hate, hate leads to suffering." -- Yoda ('Star Wars: Episode I - The Phantom Menace', 1999)
2023-03-28: "The specialists discovered that what you call the human race was nonviable. That is, while the individuals composing it had strongly developed instincts of self-preservation, the species as a whole was suicidal." -- William Tenn
2023-03-29: "Man is nothing, except to other men." -- Tanith Lee ('The Birthgrave', 1975)
2023-03-30: "Time is the central mystery of our existence. It confines and defines us in many ways." -- Stephen R. Lawhead
2023-03-31: "Earth will grow worse till men redeem it, and wars more evil, ere all wars cease." -- G. K. Chesterton
April 2023
2023-04-01: "In secrecy this infection was spreading like a disease." -- Judas Priest ('Metal Gods', 1980)
2023-04-02: "It is one of the commonest of mistakes to consider that the limit of our power of perception is also the limit of all there is to perceive." -- Charles Webster Leadbeater
2023-04-03: "Men believe themselves to be free, simply because they are conscious of their actions, and unconscious of the causes whereby those actions are determined." -- Baruch Spinoza
2023-04-04: "Anything that can't go on forever will eventually stop." -- Cory Doctorow
2023-04-05: "Continuous threat analysis is vital." -- Robert F. Foley
2023-04-06: "It is important to distinguish between the amount of information and the quality of that information." -- Carl Sagan
2023-04-07: "Wisdom is knowing what to do next. Virtue is doing it." -- David Starr Jordan
2023-04-08: "As centuries of dictators have known, an illiterate crowd is easiest to rule." -- Alberto Manguel
2023-04-09: "I imagine one of the reasons people cling to their hates so stubbornly is because they sense, once hate is gone, they will be forced to deal with pain." -- James Baldwin
2023-04-10: "What you can't see can hurt you." -- Tagline For 'The Invisible Man' (2020)
2023-04-11: "Fear, ladies and gentlemen, is the only true comedian in town." -- Ian Rankin
2023-04-12: "Originality consists in thinking for yourself, not in thinking differently from other people." -- James Fitzjames Stephen
2023-04-13: "Fortune knows, we scorn her most, when most she offers blows." -- William Shakespeare ('Antony And Cleopatra', c. 1607)
2024-04-14: "Between the black of yesterday and the white of tomorrow is the great gray of today, filled with nostalgia and fear of the future." -- Roger Zelazny ('He Who Shapes', 1965)
2023-04-15: "It is better to have loafed and lost, than never to have loafed at all." -- James Thurber
2023-04-16: "Men gather the clouds, and then they complain of the tempests that follow." -- Joseph de Maistre
2023-04-17: "Plenty sits still; hunger is a wanderer." -- Zulu Proverb
2023-04-18: "It gives liberty and breadth to thought, to learn to judge our own epoch from the point of view of universal history, history from the point of view of geological periods, geology from the point of view of astronomy." -- Henri-Frédéric Amiel
2023-04-19: "For every single scientific paper or for every single scientist in 1670, there were 100 in 1770, 10,000 in 1870 and 1,000,000 in 1970." -- John Ziman
2023-04-20: "The capacity of the human mind for swallowing nonsense and spewing it forth in violent and repressive action has never yet been plumbed." -- Robert A. Heinlein
2023-04-21: "I venerate the intellect of man. I believe in its undreamed-of possibilities, when it grows free like an oak in the forest and is not dwarfed in a flower-pot. From that allegiance I have never wavered." -- John Buchan ('The Power-House', 1916)
2023-04-22: "This peck of troubles." -- Miguel de Cervantes ('Don Quixote', 1605)
2023-04-23: "The more you look, the less you really know." -- Freddy Riedenschneider ('The Man Who Wasn't There', 2001)
2023-04-24: "You think it could go on like this forever? Living like this with no consequences? There are always consequences!" -- Roland Cox ('Jumper', 2008)
2023-04-25: "Man will gather knowledge no matter what the consequences -- and we cannot predict what they will be." -- Linus Pauling
2023-04-26: "In this game that we're playing, we can't win. Some kinds of failure are better than other kinds, that's all." -- George Orwell ('Nineteen Eighty-Four', 1949)
2023-04-27: "Man is now seen to be an enigma only as an individual; in the mass he is a mathematical problem." -- Robert Chambers
2023-04-28: "The grape of truth is often bitter, but not to taste it in its season would be to waste the vine." -- Tanith Lee
2023-04-29: "Capitalism collapses without growth, yet perpetual growth on a finite planet leads inexorably to environmental calamity." -- George Monbiot
2023-04-30: "The world's an Inn; and I her guest." -- Francis Quarles
May 2023
2023-05-01: "How long do you want the human race to survive? There will come a time when we're forced to choose: do we destroy our planet or protect it?" -- Orbital ('There Will Come A Time', 2018)
2023-05-02: "The worst cynicism: a belief in luck." -- Joyce Carol Oates
2023-05-03: "There is a price to all power, and it is not always obvious." -- Tad Williams ('The Dragonbone Chair', 1988)
2023-05-04: "Enter a new dimension of strange." -- Tagline For 'Doctor Strange In The Multiverse Of Madness' (2022)
2023-05-05: "You can't undo the past. All you can do is face what's ahead." -- Hannah Lawson ('Geostorm', 2017)
2023-05-06: "Capitalists preach 'the market' for the working class - stand on your own two feet, don’t rely on the government - but themselves sponge off the public big time. Just look at the billions in subsidies and tax concessions the fossil fuel companies, huge enterprises for the most part, extract from state and federal governments." -- Tom Bramble
2023-05-07: "Learning does not consist only of knowing what we must or we can do, but also of knowing what we could do and perhaps should not do." -- Umberto Eco
2023-05-08: "People who are regimented all their lives, handed off to work from school and bracketed by the family in the beginning and the nursing home at the end, are habituated to hierarchy and psychologically enslaved." -- Bob Black
2023-05-09: "Sooner or later, false thinking brings wrong conduct." -- Julian Huxley
2023-05-10: "It is what we think we know that keeps us from learning." -- Chester Barnard
2023-05-11: "Frank presentation of ominous facts was never more necessary than it is today because we seem to have developed escapism into a system of thought." -- Joseph Schumpeter
2023-05-12: "A well-prepared mind hopes in adversity and fears in prosperity." -- Horace
2023-05-13: "Down to the present day the luminous image of democracy has often served as a pretext for the most undemocratic actions." -- Randal Marlin
2023-05-14: "The bad news is time flies. The good news is you’re the pilot." -- Catherine Kasavuli
2023-05-15: "Men make it such a point of honour to be fit for business that they forget to examine whether business is fit for a man." -- George Savile
2023-05-16: "Man can learn nothing unless he proceeds from the known to the unknown." -- Claude Bernard
2023-05-17: "I think there's just one kind of folks. Folks." -- Harper Lee ('To Kill A Mockingbird', 1960)
2023-05-18: "It is good to love the unknown." -- Charles Lamb
2023-05-19: "It's weird how I am constantly surprised by the passage of time when it's literally the most predictable thing in the Universe." -- Randall Munroe
2023-05-20: "In a world as weird and cruel as this one we have made for ourselves, I figure anybody who can find peace and personal happiness without ripping off somebody else deserves to be left alone." -- Hunter S. Thompson
2023-05-21: "How we humans came to be the way we are is far less important than how we should act now to get out of the mess we have made for ourselves." -- Jane Goodall
2023-05-22: "The only thing we can control is what we decide to do." -- Tom Sutherland ('How It Ends', 2018)
2023-05-23: "We can’t always choose what we must endure." -- John, The Lord Chamberlain
2023-05-24: "The end of the road begins." -- Tagline For 'Fast X' (2023)
2023-05-25: "A society is not defined as developed by the wealth it has but by the poverty it doesn’t have." -- Jorge Majfud
2023-05-26: "There can be, and often are, cascades or chain reactions of disaster." -- Niall Ferguson
2023-05-27: "It is human nature to avoid being consumed by hypotheticals until they are staring us squarely in the face." -- Sanjay Gupta
2023-05-28: "When you're waking up, the world is a blur. What was clear in a dream, suddenly makes no sense. No surreal rescues. No easy, magic way out. But you are awake." -- May Payne ('Max Payne 2: The Fall Of Max Payne', 2003)
2023-05-29: "If it sounds too good to be true it usually is." -- Sanjuro Tsubaki ('Sanjuro', 1962)
2023-05-30: "Silence gives consent." -- Oliver Goldsmith
2023-05-31: "It's asking a great deal that things should appeal to your reason as well as your sense of the aesthetic." -- W. Somerset Maugham
June 2023
2023-06-01: "Speed increasing, all control is in the hands of those who know. Will they help us grow, to one day be starriders?" -- Foreigner ('Starrider', 1977)
2023-06-02: "Consciences keep silence more often than they should, that's why laws were created." -- José Saramago
2023-06-03: "With man, most of his misfortunes are occasioned by man." -- Pliny The Elder
2023-06-04: "Most ignorance is by choice, you know, and so ignorance is very telling about what really matters to people." -- Kim Stanley Robinson ('Red Mars', 1993)
2023-06-05: "I suggest to you today that the quickest, most direct way to ruin a democracy is to poison the information." -- Scott Pelley
2023-06-06: "We appear to have lost the capacity to question the present, much less offer alternatives to it." -- Tony Judt
2023-06-07: "On a long enough timeline the survival rate for everybody drops to zero." -- Chuck Palahniuk ('Fight Club', 1996)
2023-06-08: "The great, the base, the coward, and the brave, all food alike for worms, companions in the grave." -- George Granville
2023-06-09: "Today the world changes so quickly that in growing up we take leave not just of youth but of the world we were young in." -- Peter Medawar
2023-06-10: "After a vast research program, which depended very heavily upon the use of a number of highspeed computers, I am pleased to offer you the result: 'Space is that in which everything else is.'" -- James Van Allen
2023-06-11: "The more we elaborate our means of communication, the less we communicate." -- J. B. Priestley
2023-06-12: "To follow knowledge like a sinking star, beyond the utmost bound of human thought." -- Alfred, Lord Tennyson
2023-06-13: "It is something to have watched when all men slept, and seen the stars which never see the sun." -- G. K. Chesterton
2023-06-14: "I can't say, over the miles, that I had learned what I had wanted to know because I hadn't known what I wanted to know. But I did learn what I didn't know I wanted to know." -- William Least Heat-Moon ('Blue Highways', 1982)
2023-06-15: "It has been subsequently theorized that our species’ seeming inability to focus on long-term existential threats will inexorably lead to the destruction of our environment, overpopulation, and resource exhaustion." -- Daniel H. Wilson
2023-06-16: "It's not only the question, but the way you try to solve it." -- Maryam Mirzakhani
2023-06-17: "War will make corpses of us all." -- Boromir ('The Two Towers', 1954)
2023-06-18: "The universe is an intelligence test." -- Timothy Leary
2023-06-19: "The future, always so clear to me, had become like a black highway at night." -- Sarah Connor ('Terminator 2: Judgment Day', 1991)
2023-06-20: "The idea of indefinite progress in a right line was a chimera of the imagination, with no analogue in nature. The parabola of a comet was perhaps a better illustration of the career of humanity." -- Edward Bellamy ('Looking Backward: 2000–1887', 1888)
2023-06-21: "There are, in every age, new errors to be rectified, and new prejudices to be opposed." -- Samuel Johnson
2023-06-22: "The unobserved state is a fog of probability, a window of and for error. The watcher observes, the fog collapses, an event resolves - a theory becomes a fact." -- Trevor Goodchild ('Aeon Flux', 1991-1995)
2023-06-23: "Truth is powerful and it prevails" -- Sojourner Truth
2023-06-24: "Sadly, the combination of poverty and ignorance is toxic and deadly." -- Bisi Adeleye-Fayemi
2023-06-25: "There are two kinds of people in this world: those who believe there are two kinds of people in this world and those who are smart enough to know better." -- Tom Robbins
2023-06-26: "It's the wanting to know that makes us matter." -- Tom Stoppard ('Arcadia', 1993)
2023-06-27: "Scientists are saying the future is going to be far more futuristic than they originally predicted." -- Krysta Now ('Southland Tales', 2006)
2023-06-28: "You never know where a 'silly question' may lead you." -- Derek Abbott
2023-06-29: "Ill fares the land, to hastening ills a prey, / Where wealth accumulates, and men decay." -- Oliver Goldsmith
2023-06-30: "Stupidity, greed, misdirected aggression — or sum it up and call it man." -- Lester del Rey
July 2023
2023-07-01: "Round and 'round and 'round it goes / Where it stops nobody knows." -- Steve Miller Band ('Abracadabra', 1982)
2023-07-02: "Curiosity may have killed the cat, but it did alright by me." -- Helen Hayes
2023-07-03: "All the power on Earth can't change destiny." -- Tagline For 'The Godfather Part III' (1990)
2023-07-04: "Creation exists only in the unforeseen made necessary." -- Pierre Boulez
2023-07-05: "I hate and despise a shrewish suspicion of foreigners and foreign ways; a man who can look me in the face, laugh with me, speak truth and deal fairly, is my brother, though his skin is as black as ink or as yellow as an evening primrose." -- H. G. Wells
2023-07-06: "Diffused knowledge immortalizes itself." -- James Mackintosh
2023-07-07: "It has been a period of unexampled change, -- swift, varied, profound and extensive beyond example." -- Thorstein Veblen
2023-07-08: "If you shut your door to all errors truth will be shut out." -- Rabindranath Tagore
2023-07-09: "Alas! by what slight means are great affairs brought to destruction." -- Claudian
2023-07-10: "Broad, wholesome, charitable views of men and things cannot be acquired by vegetating in one little corner of the earth all one's lifetime." -- Mark Twain ('The Innocents Abroad', 1869)
2023-07-11: "When will we realize that the fact that we can become accustomed to anything, however disgusting at first, makes it necessary to examine carefully everything we have become accustomed to." -- George Bernard Shaw
2023-07-12: "Tell people the truth. Trust them to keep their heads." -- Olivia Manning
2023-07-13: "Murphy's Quantum Law: Anything that can, could have, or will go wrong, is going wrong, all at once." -- Paul Dickson
2023-07-14: "Wisdom tends to grow in proportion to one's awareness of one's ignorance." -- Anthony de Mello
2023-07-15: "Don't believe everything you see..." -- Tagline For 'Primal Fear' (1996)
2023-07-16: "In critical moments even the very powerful have need of the weakest." -- Aesop
2023-07-17: "But the sunshine aye shall light the sky, as round and round we run; / And the truth shall ever come uppermost, and justice shall be done." -- Charles Mackay
2023-07-18: "To inform, and, therefore to reconnoitre, this is the first and constant duty of the advanced guard." -- Ferdinand Foch
2023-07-19: "All journeys have secret destinations of which the traveler is unaware." -- Martin Buber
2023-07-20: "The fountain of content must spring up in the mind, and he who hath so little knowledge of human nature as to seek happiness by changing anything but his own disposition, will waste his life in fruitless efforts and multiply the grief he proposes to remove." -- Samuel Johnson
2023-07-21: "When you control a man's thinking you do not have to worry about his actions." -- Carter G. Woodson
2023-07-22: "Human nature with all its infirmities and depravation is still capable of great things." -- John Adams
2023-07-23: "I went back to staring tomorrow in the face. Better than looking backward. But tomorrow refused to shed its mask." -- Glen Cook ('The Black Company', 1984)
2023-07-24: "We are like islands in the sea, separate on the surface but connected on the deep." -- William James
2023-07-25: "Change is the process by which the future invades our lives." -- Alvin Toffler
2023-07-26: "The enemy of the conventional wisdom is not ideas but the march of events." -- John Kenneth Galbraith
2023-07-27: "Brute force is no substitute for diplomacy and guile." -- Loki ('Loki', 2021)
2023-07-28: "Men see with arrogant eyes which organize everything seen with reference to themselves and their own interests." -- Marilyn Frye
2023-07-29: "To my mind, having a care and concern for others is the highest of the human qualities." -- Fred Hollows
2023-07-30: "What is the pattern or the meaning or the why? It does not do harm to the mystery to know a little more about it." -- Richard Feynman
2023-07-31: "As the world rapidly becomes a civilization of machines, the masters of machines will increasingly be the ones in control of the world." -- John Howard Dellinger
August 2023
2023-08-01: "It's too close for comfort, this heat has got right out of hand." -- Bananarama ('Cruel Summer', 1983)
2023-08-02: "The cold truth is that the individualist creed of everybody for himself and the devil take the hindmost is principally responsible for the distress in which Western civilization finds itself." -- Charles A. Beard
2023-08-03: "It is difficult for the matter-of-fact physicist to accept the view that the substratum of everything is of mental character. But no one can deny that mind is the first and most direct thing in our experience, and all else is remote inference — inference either intuitive or deliberate." -- Arthur Eddington
2023-08-04: "It's time to face the music." --Tagline For ' Guardians Of The Galaxy Vol. 3' (2023)
2023-08-05: "Society is set up in such a way that it’s the poor and the uneducated who suffer the main impact of natural and man-made disasters." -- Don DeLillo ('White Noise', 1985)
2023-08-06: "It is a weak man who blames his failures on the strength of others." -- Orson Scott Card ('Seventh Son', 1987)
2023-08-07: "There is nothing in this world constant but inconstancy." -- Jonathan Swift
2023-08-08: "We live in a universe ruled by very few laws, but the redoubling of violence by violence is one of the main ones." -- Kim Stanley Robinson ('The Years Of Rice And Salt', 2002)
2023-08-09: "When winds are raging o'er the upper ocean / And billows wild contend with angry roar, / 'Tis said, far down beneath the wild commotion / That peaceful stillness reigneth evermore." -- Harriet Beecher Stowe
2023-08-10: "It is as fatal as it is cowardly to blink facts because they are not to our taste." -- John Tyndall
2023-08-11: "Nature has become something new. It is ours now, truly. And if our creation devours us, how poetic will that be?" -- Paolo Bacigalupi ('The Windup Girl', 2009)
2023-08-12: "Ask the next question. And the one after that." -- Theodore Sturgeon
2023-08-13: "I have a memory like an elephant. I remember every elephant I've ever met." -- Herb Caen
2023-08-14: "There is no branch of mathematics, however abstract, which may not some day be applied to phenomena of the real world." -- Nikolai Lobachevsky
2023-08-15: "Rationality is shown not so much in what you believe as in how you believe it. You are rational if you believe it on evidence and as firmly as the evidence warrants and if, further, your belief leads you to act only in ways which are no obstacle to the discovery of error." -- Bertrand Russell
2023-08-16: "Time, in its stealthy gliding, cheats us all." -- Ovid ('Metamorphoses', 8 AD)
2023-08-17: "Misunderstanding of the present is the inevitable consequence of ignorance of the past." -- Marc Bloch
2023-08-18: "It used to be, everyone was entitled to their own opinion, but not their own facts. But that's not the case anymore. Facts matter not at all. Perception is everything." -- Stephen Colbert
2023-08-19: "By aiming for the impossible, you reach the highest level of the possible." -- August Strindberg
2023-08-20: "If a man achieves or suffers change in premises which are deeply embedded in his mind, he will surely find that the results of that change will ramify throughout his whole universe." -- Gregory Bateson
2023-08-21: "Feedback: It is the fundamental principle that underlies all self-regulating systems, not only machines but also the processes of life and the tides of human affairs." -- Arnold Tustin
2023-08-22: "I think we are moving into extremely volatile and dangerous times, as modern electronic technologies give mankind almost unlimited powers to play with its own psychopathology as a game." -- J. G. Ballard
2023-08-23: "Every change in the world starts with some kind of idea, reflection or thought." -- Olga Tokarczuk
2023-08-24: "Doubt is the offspring of knowledge: the savage never doubts at all." -- William Winwood Reade
2023-08-25: "The imagination has made more discoveries than the eye." -- Joseph Joubert
2023-08-26: "There are many things that seem impossible only so long as one does not attempt them." -- André Gide
2023-08-27: "We all live under the same sky, but we don't all have the same horizon." -- Konrad Adenauer
2023-08-28: "Birds sing after a storm; why shouldn't people feel as free to delight in whatever sunlight remains to them?" -- Rose Kennedy
2023-08-29: "Any physical object which by its influence deteriorates its environment, commits suicide." -- Alfred North Whitehead
2023-08-30: "Thus, because we are rapidly advancing along this non-sustainable course, the world's environmental problems will get resolved, in one way or another, within the lifetimes of the children and young adults alive today. The only question is whether they will become resolved in pleasant ways of our own choice, or in unpleasant ways not of our choice, such as warfare, genocide, starvation, disease."
-- Jared Diamond ('Collapse: How Societies Choose To Fail Or Succeed', 2005)
2023-08-31: "Philosophy begins where religion ends, just as by analogy chemistry begins where alchemy runs out, and astronomy takes the place of astrology." -- Christopher Hitchens
September 2023
2023-09-01: "Right here, right now, there is no other place I want to be. / Right here, right now, watching the world wake up from history." -- Jesus Jones ('Right Here Right Now', 1991)
2023-09-02: "In men this blunder still you find, / All think their little set mankind." -- Hannah More
2023-09-03: "The advance of knowledge stops men from wasting their resources upon delusive projects." -- Isaiah Berlin
2023-09-04: "Those who trusted at the wrong time and place will in turn mistrust at the wrong time and place." -- Marie von Ebner-Eschenbach
2023-09-05: "May we have wisdom not to fear shadows in the night, and courage when the day of danger truly dawns." -- Elizabeth I ('Elizabeth: The Golden Age', 2007)
2023-09-06: "The house of delusions is cheap to build, but draughty to live in, and ready at any instant to fall." -- A. E. Housman
2023-09-07: "The great mass of mankind shun the labor and responsibility of forming opinions for themselves." -- William Lloyd Garrison
2023-09-08: "If you don't understand other people in their time and why they did what they did, then you don't understand your own past. And when you lose your past, you lose some potential for your own future." -- C. J. Cherryh
2023-09-09: "Not everything everywhere is for us." -- Stanislaw Lem
2023-09-10: "Once muddying subjectivities are removed from the issue, the decision becomes clear." -- Ian McDonald ('Desolation Road', 1988)
2023-09-11: "The problem is that too often the only people who can act don’t want change." -- Jack McDevitt ('The Engines Of God', 1994)
2023-09-12: "Failing to act is a decision in and of itself." -- Robert J. Sawyer
2023-09-13: "There are myriad justifications for denial." -- Sidney Poitier ('The Measure Of A Man', 2000)
2023-09-14: "Sweet are the uses of adversity, which, like the toad, ugly and venomous, wears yet a precious jewel in his head." -- William Shakespeare ('As You Like It', c. 1600)
2023-09-15: "Everything's got a moral if only you can find it." -- Lewis Carroll ('Alice's Adventures In Wonderland', 1865)
2023-09-16: "When something matters enough that we are afraid of the consequences — afraid that even the honorable choice could result in harm or loss or sorrow — that’s when ethics are involved." -- Henry W. Bloch
2023-09-17: "We are born with the power to alter what we are given at birth." -- Anais Nin
2023-09-18: "The shadows lengthening as the vapours rise." -- John Dryden ('Absalom And Achitophel', 1681)
2023-09-19: "It is India that gave us the ingenious method of expressing all numbers by ten symbols, each receiving a value of position as well as an absolute value; a profound and important idea which appears so simple to us now that we ignore its true merit." -- Will Durant
2023-09-20: "Riches have sold more men than ever they have bought." -- Francis Bacon
2023-09-21: "Falsehood, cruelty, and madness everywhere, and brute force in the wings waiting to finish us off." -- Philip Roth ('The Plot Against America', 2004)
2023-09-22: "Avoid the simple problems, because they become the big problems." -- Kevin Hart
2023-09-23: "The bitterest tears shed over graves are for words left unsaid and deeds left undone." -- Harriet Beecher Stowe
2023-09-24: "The world is ending, as it always must. But the end of the world is getting faster." -- Catherine Webb ('The First Fifteen Lives Of Harry August', 2014)
2023-09-25: "In an instant age, perhaps we must relearn the ancient truth that patience, too, has its victories." -- Konrad Adenauer
2023-09-26: "Right now, for instance, one knows dimly at some level that there is frightful and preventable suffering in the world. Yet most of us feel no overpowering moral urgency to do anything about it." -- David Pearce
2023-09-27: "Always aim at complete harmony of thought and word and deed." -- Mahatma Gandhi
2023-09-28: "The history of utopias is no less fascinating than the history of metallurgy or of chemical engineering." -- Leszek Kolakowski
2023-09-29: "Truths and roses have thorns about them." -- Henry David Thoreau
2023-09-30: "In my view we are facing a boundless sea of unresolved problems." -- Vitaly Ginzburg
October 2023
2023-10-01: "I'm trippin' over time, I'm a ghost in the city." -- Crystal Method ('Ghost In The City', 2018)
2023-10-02: "Life always waits for some crisis to occur before revealing itself at its most brilliant." -- Paulo Coelho
2023-10-03: "While fame impedes and constricts, obscurity wraps about a man like a mist; obscurity is dark, ample, and free; obscurity lets the mind take its way unimpeded." -- Virginia Woolf ('Orlando: A Biography', 1928)
2023-10-04: "Although we talk so much about coincidence we do not really believe in it. In our heart of hearts we think better of the universe, we are secretly convinced that it is not such a slipshod, haphazard affair, that everything in it has meaning." -- J. B. Priestley
2023-10-05: "The scientific journey has no end. It has only halting places—points at which the traveller can look round and survey." -- Charles Scott Sherrington
2023-10-06: "Given a long enough time, of course, a wide enough frame, there is nothing said or done, ever, that isn't ironic in the end." -- Gregory Maguire ('Wicked', 1995)
2023-10-07: "The sea gives, and the sea takes." -- Tsireya ('Avatar: The Way Of Water', 2022)
2023-10-08: "If you've got a religious belief that withers in the face of observations of the natural world, you ought to rethink your beliefs — rethinking the world isn't an option." -- PZ Myers
2023-10-09: "The thought is somewhat repugnant to us that we should slowly sink into barbarism, into the sub-human, into blind and whimpering agony, that the last of Man should be a whine." -- Olaf Stapledon ('Last Men In London', 1932)
2023-10-10: "We have inherited an incredibly beautiful and complex garden, but the trouble is that we have been appallingly bad gardeners." -- Gerald Durrell
2023-10-11: "It's better to be a good nobody, than an evil somebody." -- Igor ('Igor', 2008)
2023-10-12: "Ignorance and deception can’t save anybody." -- Orson Scott Card ('Speaker For The Dead', 1986)
2023-10-13: "Every time men bring guns, men bring trouble." -- Tarzan ('Tarzan And The Amazons', 1945)
2023-10-14: "Vengeance always destroys the avenger." -- Mendoza ('Deliver Us From Evil', 2014)
2023-10-15: "The universe is a big place, perhaps the biggest." -- Philip José Farmer
2023-10-16: "Humour is by far the most significant activity of the human brain." -- Edward de Bono
2023-10-17: "Upon the subject of education, not presuming to dictate any plan or system respecting it, I can only say that I view it as the most important subject which we as a people can be engaged in." -- Abraham Lincoln
2023-10-18: "If the common soldiers of each army could just get together by a river bank and talk things over calmly, no war could possibly last as long as a week." -- William March ('Company K', 1933)
2023-10-19: "A wonderful thing about true laughter is that it just destroys any kind of system of dividing people." -- John Cleese
2023-10-20: "Things could always be worse. In fact, the overwhelming odds are that they will be." -- David Levy
2023-10-21: "It is a sign of the times, and not a very good sign, that these days it is necessary — and not only necessary but urgent — to interest minds in the fate of Mind, that is to say, in their own fate." -- Paul Valéry
2023-10-22: "Always plan for the worst, that way all your surprises will be pleasant ones." -- Robert Jordan ('The Great Hunt', 1990)
2023-10-23: "Most of the laugh tracks on television were recorded in the early 1950s. These days, most of the people you hear laughing are dead." -- Chuck Palahniuk ('Lullaby', 2002)
2023-10-24: "How do we rouse ourselves and keep from sleepwalking into a climate or a nuclear catastrophe that may not be reversed before it has destroyed our civilization and countless other species?" -- Ann Druyan
2023-10-25: "However many ways there may be of being alive, it is certain that there are vastly more ways of being dead." -- Richard Dawkins ('The Blind Watchmaker', 1986)
2023-10-26: "Although life is a matter of indifference, the use which you make of it is not a matter of indifference." -- Epictetus
2023-10-27: "Humor empowers the disempowered." -- Melanie Kaye/Kantrowitz
2023-10-28: "Imaginary causes have gradually receded with the widening bounds of knowledge and disappear entirely before sound philosophy, which sees in them only the expression of our ignorance of the true causes." -- Pierre-Simon Laplace
2023-10-29: "Some contend that encountering a highly advanced civilization - even one whose technology is essentially comprehensible to us - would produce a traumatic cultural shock effect on man by divesting him of his smug ethnocentrism and shattering the delusion that he is the center of the universe." -- Stanley Kubrick
2023-10-30: "Truth does not need to borrow garments from falsehood." -- José Rizal
2023-10-31: "Fear is real and there is nothing you can do about it except to keep functioning, keep your hands and legs and body moving, your mind focused on the task at hand." -- Alvah Bessie
November 2023
2023-11-01: "Shake it off, I shake it off." -- Taylor Swift ('Shake It Off', 2014)
2023-11-02: "There’s no freedom quite like the freedom of being constantly underestimated." -- Scott Lynch ('The Lies Of Locke Lamora', 2006)
2023-11-03: "Men the most infamous are fond of fame, / And those who fear not guilt yet start at shame." -- Charles Churchill
2023-11-04: "When we speak of defending the environment, we are speaking of defending our own lives." -- Frank Herbert
2023-11-05: "We are all one, and if we don’t know it we will learn it the hard way." -- Bayard Rustin
2023-11-06: "Punishment comes one way or another." -- Tagline For 'True Grit' (2010)
2023-11-07: "As quantum computing and quantum communication become a commercial reality, tomorrow’s students may find themselves routinely grappling with the same philosophical questions that challenged their forebears almost a century ago." -- David Kaiser
2023-11-08: "The best way to capture moments is to pay attention. This is how we cultivate mindfulness. Mindfulness means being awake. It means knowing what you are doing." -- Jon Kabat-Zinn
2023-11-09: "The proper route to an understanding of the world is an examination of our errors about it." -- Errol Morris
2023-11-10: "Curiosity, which may or may not eventuate in something useful, is probably the outstanding characteristic of modern thinking." -- Abraham Flexner
2023-11-11: "The gravitational force is the oldest force known to man and the least understood." -- Peter van Nieuwenhuizen
2023-11-12: "Anything that is theoretically possible will be achieved in practice, no matter what the technical difficulties are, if it is desired greatly enough." -- Arthur C. Clarke
2023-11-13: "Even rulers, notoriously the slowest of men to change, realized that something had to be done." -- Robert Sheckley
2023-11-14: "What are the lies we tell ourselves now? What are the blind spots of our age?" -- Bono
2023-11-15: "Our visitors from outer space could be forgiven if they reported home that our planet is inhabited by a race of insane men whose future is bleak and uncertain." -- Martin Luther King Jr.
2023-11-16: "MIND, n. A mysterious form of matter secreted by the brain. Its chief activity consists in the endeavor to ascertain its own nature, the futility of the attempt being due to the fact that it has nothing but itself to know itself with." -- Ambrose Bierce
2023-11-17: "Of all wild beasts preserve me from a tyrant; and of all tame, a flatterer." -- Ben Jonson
2023-11-18: "There's so much to discover before the world ends." -- Sylens ('Horizon Zero Dawn', 2017)
2023-11-19: "Baleful death has banished hence many of the human race." -- Beowulf (c. 975-1025 AD)
2023-11-20: "I think, at a child's birth, if a mother could ask a fairy godmother to endow it with the most useful gift, that gift should be curiosity." -- Eleanor Roosevelt
2023-11-21: "Certain ways of being, of feeling, of relating to each other are only possible given certain linguistic resources.." -- Charles Taylor
2023-11-22: "There is no worse heresy than that the office sanctifies the holder of it." -- Lord Acton
2023-11-23: "Our futures are being destroyed." -- Alexandria Villaseñor
2023-11-24: "We struggle onward, ignorant and blind, / For a result unknown and undesign’d." -- Theognis of Megara
2023-11-25: "The interesting question is, just because something thinks differently from you, does that mean it's not thinking?" -- Alan Turing ('The Imitation Game', 2014)
2023-11-26: "Curiosity is the hunger of Reason." -- Donald Barr
2023-11-27: "If there is such a phenomenon as absolute evil, it consists in treating another human being as a thing." -- John Brunner
2023-11-28: "Men are influenced by big loud empty words, styes which swell the eyelids and impede vision of the truth." -- Anthony Burgess
2023-11-29: "Paradoxically, it has turned out that game theory is more readily applied to biology than to the field of economic behavior for which it was originally designed." -- John Maynard Smith
2023-11-30: "Normal is not something to aspire to, it is something to get away from." -- Jodie Foster
December 2023
2023-12-01: "Got no time to for spreadin' roots, the time has come to be gone." -- Led Zeppelin ('Ramble On', Led Zeppelin II', 1969)
2023-12-02: "The intolerant can be viewed as free-riders, as persons who seek the advantages of just institutions while not doing their share to uphold them." -- John Rawls ('A Theory Of Justice', 1971)
2023-12-03: "We shall manage to postpone the worst one way and another, but postponement isn't solution, and when the breakdown comes there'll be something so ghastly that the hydrogen-bomb will seem humane by comparison." -- John Wyndham ('Trouble With Lichen', 1960)
2023-12-04: "We can do better. We will. We have to." -- Bruce Wayne ('Batman v Superman: Dawn Of Justice', 2016)
2023-12-05: "Shortsided and unchecked greed resulted in denuded forests, floods, droughts, a disappearing water table, erosion, a less stable and equable climate, a vanishing wildlife." -- Harold L. Ickes
2023-12-06: "Science, ever since the time of the Arabs, has had two functions: (1) to enable us to know things, and (2) to enable us to do things." -- Bertrand Russell
2023-12-07: "History is indeed little more than the register of crimes, follies, and misfortunes of mankind." -- Edward Gibbon
2023-12-08: "The fact disclosed by a survey of the past that majorities have usually been wrong, must not blind us to the complementary fact that majorities have usually not been entirely wrong." -- Herbert Spencer
2023-12-09: "You drown not by falling into a river, but by staying submerged in it." -- Paulo Coelho
2023-12-10: "Blessed are those who give without remembering and take without forgetting." -- Elizabeth Bibesco
2023-12-11: "Mere imagination would indeed be mere trifling; only no imagination is mere." -- Charles Sanders Peirce
2023-12-12: "I prefer silent prudence to loquacious folly." -- Cicero
2023-12-13: "All war is a symptom of man's failure as a thinking animal." -- John Steinbeck
2023-12-14: "A crust eaten in peace is better than a banquet partaken in anxiety." -- Aesop
2023-12-15: "Man is a savage animal, who, periodically to relieve his nervous tension, tries to destroy himself." -- Captain Courtney ('The Dawn Patrol', 1938)
2023-12-16: "I think that young people who want to understand the world can profit from the works of Plato and Socrates, the behaviour of the three Thomases, Aquinas, More and Jefferson — the austere analyses of Immanuel Kant and the political leadership of Abraham Lincoln and Franklin Roosevelt." -- James A. Michener
2023-12-17: "Everything here is alive thanks to the living of everything else." -- Lewis Thomas
2023-12-18: "No society has been able to abolish human sadness, no political system can deliver us from the pain of living, from our fear of death, our thirst for the absolute. It is the human condition that directs the social condition, not vice versa." -- Eugene Ionesco
2023-12-19: "Men should be taught and won over by reason, not by blows, insults, and corporal punishments." -- Julian
2023-12-20: "He who would be a courtier under a king, is almost certain to be a demagogue in a democracy." -- James Fenimore Cooper
2023-12-21: "If we persist in choosing ideology over evidence, this endangers us all." -- David Robert Grimes
2023-12-22: "Age appears to be best in four things; old wood best to burn, old wine to drink, old friends to trust, and old authors to read." -- Francis Bacon
2023-12-23: "Come, clear the way, then, clear the way: blind creeds and kings have had their day." -- Edwin Markham
2023-12-24: "There are many pleasant fictions of the law in constant operation, but there is not one so pleasant or practically humorous as that which supposes every man to be of equal value in its impartial eye, and the benefits of all laws to be equally attainable by all men, without the smallest reference to the furniture of their pockets." -- Charles Dickens ('Nicholas Nickleby', 1838-1839)
2023-12-25: "There is a nobility in compassion, a beauty in empathy, a grace in forgiveness." -- John Connolly
2023-12-26: "Though life is very glorious, it is difficult." -- E. M. Forster ('A Room With A View', 1908)
2023-12-27: "Fate seemed to be playing a series of extraordinarily unamusing jokes." -- George Orwell ('Down And Out In Paris And London', 1933)
2023-12-28: "Controlling reproduction has always been the first step in any hierarchical or authoritarian government." -- Gloria Steinem
2023-12-29: "Audacity augments courage; hesitation, fear." -- Publilius Syrus
2023-12-30: "We travel together, passengers on a little spaceship, dependent on its vulnerable reserves of air and soil." -- Adlai Stevenson II
2023-12-31: "Injustice, poverty, slavery, ignorance — these may be cured by reform or revolution. But men do not live only by fighting evils. They live by positive goals, individual and collective, a vast variety of them, seldom predictable, at times incompatible." -- Isaiah Berlin
January 2024
2024-01-01: "I'm on the highway to hell." -- AC/DC ('Highway To Hell', 1979)
2024-01-02: "In every commercial state, notwithstanding any pretension to equal rights, the exaltation of a few must depress the many." -- Adam Ferguson
2024-01-03: "Ignorance always carries a price tag." -- Chad Oliver
2024-01-04: "In such a strait the wisest may well be perplexed, and the boldest staggered." -- Edmund Burke
2024-01-05: "When fire breaks out in a ten-story building, the person living on the first floor cries out for help. The person living on the tenth floor says that it is not his problem. But it soon will become his problem too." -- Mata Amritanandamayi
2024-01-06: "The question was once put to Aristotle how we ought to behave to our friends; and his answer was, 'As we should wish them to behave to us.'" -- Diogenes Laertius
2024-01-07: "What to do if you find yourself stuck with no hope of rescue: Consider yourself lucky that life has been good to you so far. Alternatively, if life hasn't been good to you so far — which, given your present circumstances, seems more likely — consider yourself lucky that it won't be troubling you much longer." -- Douglas Adams ('Hitchhiker's Guide To The Galaxy', 1979)
2024-01-08: "Doubt is the debut of consciousness." -- Hossein Nuri
2024-01-09: "Life does not cease to be funny when people die any more than it ceases to be serious when people laugh." -- George Bernard Shaw
2024-01-10: "Our deeds carry their terrible consequences, quite apart from any fluctuations that went before — consequences that are hardly ever confined to ourselves." -- George Eliot ('Adam Bede', 1859)
2024-01-11: "Water connects all things, life to death, darkness to light." -- Tsireya ('Avatar: The Way Of Water', 2022)
2024-01-12: "Listening benefits the listener." -- Ptahhotep ('The Maxims Of Ptahhotep', c. 2375–2350 BC)
2024-01-13: "Now, here you see, it takes all the running you can do, to keep in the same place. If you want to get somewhere else, you must run at least twice as fast as that!" -- Lewis Carroll ('Through The Looking-Glass', 1871)
2024-01-14: "We are not absolved by following the dictates of a mentor or of a majority." -- Juanita Morrow Nelson
2024-01-15: "The sun persists in rising, so I make myself stand." -- Tagline For 'The Hunger Games: Catching Fire' (2013)
2024-01-16: "Insofar as thought could be governed at all, it could only be commanded to follow what reason affirmed anyhow; command it otherwise, and it would not obey." -- Walter M. Miller Jr. ('A Canticle For Leibowitz', 1959)
2024-01-17: "An excellent plumber is infinitely more admirable than an incompetent philosopher." -- John W. Gardner
2024-01-18: "In the midst of global crises such as pollution, wars, and famine, kindness may be too easily dismissed as a ‘soft’ issue, or a luxury to be addressed after the urgent problems are solved. But kindness is the greatest need in all those areas." -- Bo Lozoff
2024-01-19: "I cannot and will not cut my conscience to fit this year's fashions." -- Lillian Hellman
2024-01-20: "So many people are busy trying to create an image, they die in the process." -- Salma Hayek
2024-01-21: "When a man has so far corrupted and prostituted the chastity of his mind, as to subscribe his professional belief to things he does not believe, he has prepared himself for the commission of every other crime." -- Thomas Paine
2024-01-22: "You are lost if you forget that the fruits of the earth belong to everyone and the earth itself belongs to no one." -- Jean-Jacques Rousseau
2024-01-23: "The troubles which have come upon us always seem more serious than those which are only threatening." -- Livy
2024-01-24: "Only earthbound man still clings to the dark and poisoning superstition that his world is bounded by the nearest hill, his universe ends at river shore, his common humanity is enclosed in the tight circle of those who share his town or his views and the color of his skin." -- Robert F. Kennedy
2024-01-25: "When it occurs to a man that nature does not regard him as important, and that she feels she would not maim the universe by disposing of him, he at first wishes to throw bricks at the temple, and he hates deeply the fact that there are no bricks and no temples." -- Stephen Crane ('The Open Boat', 1897)
2024-01-26: "The million, million, million to one chance happens once in a million, million, million times no matter how surprised we may be that it results in us." -- Ronald Fisher
2024-01-27: "Stars and blossoming fruit-trees: utter permanence and extreme fragility give an equal sense of eternity." -- Simone Weil
2024-01-28: "People will resist information unless the price of not knowing it greatly exceeds the price of learning it." -- Calvin Mooers
2024-01-29: "People will hang on to illusion as eagerly as life itself." -- Ben Hecht
2024-01-30: "Our pasts wax while our future wanes." -- Shannon Wheeler ('Too Much Coffee Man', 1991-2013)
2024-01-31: "Women are not weaker. They are just as strong, just as resolute, just as creative, and are filled with just as much potential as any man." -- Brad Meltzer
February 2024
2024-02-01: "Well, we're scared, but we ain't shakin' / Kinda bent, but we ain't breakin' / In the long run." -- Eagles ('The Long Run', 1979)
2024-02-02: "Somewhere in the child, somewhere in the adult, there is a hard, irreducible, stubborn core of biological urgency, and biological necessity, and biological reason that culture cannot reach and that reserves the right, which sooner or later it will exercise, to judge the culture and resist and revise it." -- Lionel Trilling
2024-02-03: "Once again, as in the days when Homer sang, we are face-to-face with immensity and must accept its grandeur and terror, its inspiring possibilities and its dreadful restraints." -- Arthur C. Clarke
2024-02-04: "Propaganda offers ready-made opinions for the unthinking herd." -- Everett Dean Martin
2024-02-05: "We are facing a climate catastrophe. The discourse might be going in the right direction, but our actions are going in, decidedly, the wrong direction." -- Aviva Chomsky
2024-02-06: "There is no reason to be less moved by nature around us simply because it's revealed to have more layers of complexity than we first observed." -- Robert Sapolsky
2024-02-07: "The supreme issue, involving all others, is the encroachment of the powerful few upon the rights of the many." -- Robert M. La Follette
2024-02-08: "Among the strange things of this world, nothing seems more strange than that men pursuing happiness should knowingly quit the right and take a wrong road, and frequently do what their judgments neither approve nor prefer." -- John Jay
2024-02-09: "Every point is a turning point." -- Pat Murphy ('There And Back Again', 1999)
2024-02-10: "Every day that we allow ourselves to take things for granted, every day that we allow some little physical infirmity or worldly worry to come between us and our obstinate, indignant, defiant exultation, we are weakening our genius for life." -- John Cowper Powys
2024-02-11: "There is no formula for success, except perhaps an unconditional acceptance of life and what it brings." -- Arthur Rubinstein
2024-02-12: "Traditionally, psychology has been the study of two populations: university freshmen and white rats." -- Paul Bloom
2024-02-13: "The spirits of our foolish deeds haunt us, with or without repentance." -- Gilbert Parker
2024-02-14: "To an ambitious man, what he already has is nothing. It’s what he doesn’t have that counts." -- Gordon R. Dickson ('Tactics Of Mistake', 1970)
2024-02-15: "As often happens, fear showed itself in hostility." -- Michael Flynn ('Eifelheim', 2006)
2024-02-16: "All through history, there have been tyrants and murderers, and for a time they can seem invincible, but in the end they always fall, always." -- Mahatma Gandhi
2024-02-17: "Political language — and with variations this is true of all political parties, from Conservatives to Anarchists — is designed to make lies sound truthful and murder respectable, and to give an appearance of solidity to pure wind." -- George Orwell
2024-02-18: "The offal of cities circles the world in global currents; beaches are strewn with the cast-off artifacts of men two thousand miles away." -- Archie Carr
2024-02-19: "If you don't stick to your values when they're being tested, they're not values — they're hobbies." -- Jon Stewart
2024-02-20: "All they want is to start the merry-go-round of blind greed all over again. -- Eugene O'Neill
2024-02-21: "I am sick of atrocities, though these are now the natural order of our world." -- Imre Kertész
2024-02-22: "Like the ostrich, head under wing, when the roaring storm breaks, so many people take refuge under the soft pillow of specious arguments." -- Georges Rouault
2024-02-23: "Inhumanity is the keynote of stupidity in power." -- Alexander Berkman
2024-02-24: "Men don't begin to live fully until their backs are against the wall." -- Paul Auster
2024-02-25: "Strategy requires thought, tactics require observation." -- Max Euwe
2024-02-26: "The shepherd drives the wolf from the sheep's throat, for which the sheep thanks the shepherd as his liberator, while the wolf denounces him for the same act as the destroyer of liberty. Plainly, the sheep and the wolf are not agreed upon a definition of liberty." -- Abraham Lincoln
2024-02-27: "Nature abhors a vacuum." -- Baruch Spinoza ('Ethics', 1677)
2024-02-28: "Pursuing Time, we are like a knight on a quest, condemned to wander through innumerable forests, bewildered and baffled, because the magic beast he is looking for is the horse he is riding." -- J. B. Priestley
2024-02-29: "Well may he smell fire, whose gown burns." -- George Herbert
March 2024
2024-03-01: "See the flames, higher and higher." -- U2 ('Bullet The Blue Sky', 1987)
2024-03-02: "Remember what John Adams said about Ben Franklin, 'He does not hesitate at our boldest measures but rather seems to think us too irresolute.' Well, this is the time for bold measures." -- Bono
2024-03-03: "The truth is that there is no terror untempered by some great moral idea." -- Jean-Luc Godard
2024-03-04: "Many are the strange chances of the world, and help oft shall come from the hands of the weak when the wise falter." -- Mithrandir ('The Silmarillion', 1977)
2024-03-05: "Everybody takes his or her reality for granted." -- Martín Espada
2024-03-06: "Let us realize the power of individuals, joined for good purposes." -- Hannah G. Solomon
2024-03-07: "I'm a pessimist about probabilities, I'm an optimist about possibilities." -- Lewis Mumford
2024-03-08: "Evolve or die." -- Tagline For 'A Sound Of Thunder' (2005)
2024-03-09: "Care to our coffin adds a nail, no doubt, / And every grin so merry draws one out." -- John Wolcot
2024-03-10: "Whoever improves his own nature improves the universe of which he is a part." -- William Winwood Reade
2024-03-11: "Life shrinks or expands according to one's courage." -- Anais Nin
2024-03-12: "Many die too late, and some die too early. Yet strange soundeth the precept: 'Die at the right time!'" -- Friedrich Nietzsche ('Thus Spoke Zarathustra', 1883-1885)
2024-03-13: "The end of the line is just the beginning." -- Tagline For 'Bullet Train' (2022)
2024-03-14: "The immense mass of events of which we are alternately the cause and the effect surpasses the human imagination." -- Laura Huxley
2024-03-15: "Man is a messenger who forgot the message." -- Abraham Joshua Heschel
2024-03-16: "Accident is only the will of the universe expressing itself." -- Hal Jordan ('Green Lantern: Emerald Knights', 2011)
2024-03-17: "Birds born in a cage think flying is an illness." -- Alejandro Jodorowsky
2024-03-18: "At its most fundamental level, physics tells us about what there is, about the categories of being. And modern physics tells us that what there is ain't nothing like what we thought there is." -- Tim Maudlin
2024-03-19: "We know that no one ever seizes power with the intention of relinquishing it." -- George Orwell ('Nineteen Eighty-Four', 1949)
2024-03-20: "Justice has a way of not arriving where and when you wish it." -- John Barnes ('A Million Open Doors', 1992)
2024-03-21: "I would rather sit with the rural poor, the desperate children of urban blight, the victims of racism, and working people seeking a better life than with those whose religion is the status quo, whose goal is profit and whose hearts are cold." -- Douglas Fraser
2024-03-22: "Attention rather than information becomes the scarce resource, and those who can distinguish valuable information from the background clutter gain power." -- Joseph Nye
2024-03-23: "The more I study religions the more I am convinced that man never worshipped anything but himself." -- Richard Francis Burton
2024-03-24: "Happiness in this world, when it comes, comes incidentally. Make it the object of pursuit, and it leads us a wild-goose chase, and is never attained." -- Nathaniel Hawthorne
2024-03-25: "History is the unfolding of miscalculations." -- Barbara W. Tuchman
2024-03-26: "If people do not believe that mathematics is simple, it is only because they do not realize how complicated life is." -- John von Neumann
2024-03-27: "That the threat is now intense is not a reason to abandon our quest for knowledge." -- Vannevar Bush
2024-03-28: "Manipulating the public in the interest of the private is the very definition of corruption." -- Prince Shotoku
2024-03-29: "We are not princes of the earth, we are the descendants of worms, and any nobility must be earned." -- PZ Myers
2024-03-30: "The sword of revolution is sharpened on the whetting-stone of ideas." -- Bhagat Singh
2024-03-31: "Tis not for mortals always to be blest." -- John Armstrong
April 2024
2024-04-01: "I know it's all getting away, and it comes to me as no surprise." -- Nine Inch Nails ('Last', 1992)
2024-04-02: "I know what the worst sins are, and there are only 2 of them: doing nothing, and doing too little." -- Robert Boswell
2024-04-03: "Honestly, if you're given the choice between Armageddon or tea, you don't say 'what kind of tea?" -- Neil Gaiman
2024-04-04: "Of the past let us wipe the slate clean." -- Eugène Edine Pottier ('The Internationale', 1871)
2024-04-05: "Abused prosperity is oftentimes made the very means of our greatest adversity." -- Daniel Defoe ('Robinson Crusoe', 1719)
2024-04-06: "It's easy to be cynical; harder is remembering that on any given day the person beside you on the subway or taking too long to pay for a tub of yogurt at the supermarket could be going through something tremendous and sorrowful and arduous." -- Rob Payne
2024-04-07: "All peoples have a kind of centrifugal force that makes them continually act one against another, and tend to aggrandise themselves at their neighbours' expense." -- Jean-Jacques Rousseau ('The Social Contract', 1762)
2024-04-08: "Death was kind of a boisterous egomaniac that needed no encouragement." -- Edward St Aubyn
2024-04-09: "Luck is the residue of design." -- Branch Rickey
2024-04-10: "They always talk who never think." -- Matthew Prior
2024-04-11: "We are born to inquire after truth." -- Michel de Montaigne
2024-04-12: "It is wiser to contemplate the law of impermanence than to try to repeal it." -- Larry Rosenberg
2024-04-13: "Most of us are about as eager to change as we were to be born, and go through our changes in a similar state of shock." -- James Baldwin
2024-04-14: "The world was changing, and it wouldn't change back." -- Jack Cady
2024-04-15: "When to mischief mortals bend their will, / How soon they find it instruments of ill." -- Alexander Pope
2024-04-16: "Sound opinion is not the exclusive prerogative of those who are paid to give it." -- Frederick E. Morgan
2024-04-17: "No poet ever interpreted nature as freely as a lawyer interprets the truth." -- Jean Giraudoux
2024-04-18: "Fool beckons fool, and dunce awakens dunce." -- Charles Churchill
2024-04-19: "HABIT, n. A shackle for the free." -- Ambrose Bierce
2024-04-20: "Cooperation was, in the long run, a more powerful evolutionary strategy than violence, once a species was high-tech." -- Nancy Kress ('Probability Moon', 2000)
2024-04-21: "Perhaps it is impossible for a person who does no good not to do harm." -- Harriet Beecher Stowe ('Uncle Tom's Cabin', 1852)
2024-04-22: "However fixed our likes and dislikes may seem, the tide of time and events will often bring surprising changes in the relations between nations and neighbors." -- John F. Kennedy
2024-04-23: "Whatever the day brings, part of it always belongs to sympathy, for the well-being of men and states is ever changing." -- Johann Friedrich Herbart
2024-04-24: "Profit, Empire, Industry. What was a dead lake, a few poisoned rivers, a few slagged hillsides? Priorities, that was what it was about." -- Ian McDonald ('Desolation Road', 1988)
2024-04-25: "What I have learned, above all, is to keep marching forward because the best news is that since chance does play a role, one important factor in success is under our control: the number of at bats, the number of chances taken, the number of opportunities seized." -- Leonard Mlodinow
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