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January 7

From Wikiquote

Quotes of the day from previous years:

2004
Truth alone will endure; all the rest will be swept away before the tide of time. ~ Mohandas Gandhi
2005
The dogmas of the quiet past are inadequate to the stormy present. The occasion is piled high with difficulty, and we must rise with the occasion. As our case is new, so we must think anew and act anew. ~ Abraham Lincoln
2006
There is no first world and third world. There is only one world, for all of us to live and delight in. ~ Gerald Durrell (born 7 January 1925)
2007
It does not do harm to the mystery to know a little more about it. For far more marvelous is the truth than any artists of the past imagined it. Why do the poets of the present not speak of it? What men are poets who can speak of Jupiter if he were a man, but if he is an immense spinning sphere of methane and ammonia must be silent? ~ Richard Feynman (speaking of art, reality, and Jupiter, which Galileo Galilei discovered to have moons on this day in 1610)
2008
You cannot begin to preserve any species of animal unless you preserve the habitat in which it dwells. Disturb or destroy that habitat and you will exterminate the species as surely as if you had shot it. So conservation means that you have to preserve forest and grassland, river and lake, even the sea itself. This is not only vital for the preservation of animal life generally, but for the future existence of man himself — a point that seems to escape many people. ~ Gerald Durrell (born 7 January 1925)
2009
There are years that ask questions and years that answer. ~ Zora Neale Hurston
2010
When I take people round to see my animals, one of the first questions they ask (unless the animal is cute and appealing) is, "what use is it?" by which they mean, "what use is it to them?" To this one can reply "What use is the Acropolis?" Does a creature have to be of direct material use to mankind in order to exist? By and large, by asking the question "what use is it?" you are asking the animal to justify its existence without having justified your own. ~ Gerald Durrell
2011
We have inherited an incredibly beautiful and complex garden, but the trouble is that we have been appallingly bad gardeners. We have not bothered to acquaint ourselves with the simplest principles of gardening. By neglecting our garden, we are storing up for ourselves, in the not very distant future, a world catastrophe as bad as any atomic war, and we are doing it with all the bland complacency of an idiot child chopping up a Rembrandt with a pair of scissors. ~ Gerald Durrell
2012
Love, I find is like singing. Everybody can do enough to satisfy themselves, though it may not impress the neighbors as being very much. ~ Zora Neale Hurston
2013
The whole country is full of enterprise. Our common schools are diffusing intelligence among the people and our industry is fast accumulating the comforts and luxuries of life. … It is not strange, however much it may be regretted, that such an exuberance of enterprise should cause some individuals to mistake change for progress and the invasion of the rights of others for national prowess and glory.
~ Millard Fillmore ~
2014
Until we consider animal life to be worthy of the consideration and reverence we bestow upon old books and pictures and historic monuments, there will always be the animal refugee living a precarious life on the edge of extermination, dependent for existence on the charity of a few human beings.
~ Gerald Durrell ~
2015
Anyone who has got any pleasure at all from living should try to put something back. … I'm glad to be giving something back because I've been so extraordinarily lucky and had such great pleasure from it.
~ Gerald Durrell ~
2016
We now stand so aloof from nature that we think we are God. This has always been a dangerous supposition.
~ Gerald Durrell ~
2017
May God save the country, for it is evident that the people will not.
~ Millard Fillmore ~
2018
Let us remember that revolutions do not always establish freedom. Our own free institutions were not the offspring of our Revolution. They existed before.
~ Millard Fillmore ~
2019
Many people think that conservation is just about saving fluffy animals – what they don’t realise is that we’re trying to prevent the human race from committing suicide … We have declared war on the biological world, the world that supports us … At the moment the human race is in the position of a man sawing off the tree branch he is sitting on.
~ Gerald Durrell ~
2020
I accept this idea of democracy. I am all for trying it out. It must be a good thing if everybody praises it like that. If our government has been willing to go to war and sacrifice billions of dollars and millions of men for the idea I think that I ought to give the thing a trial.
The only thing that keeps me from pitching head long into this thing is the presence of numerous Jim Crow laws on the statute books of the nation. I am crazy about the idea of Democracy. I want to see how it feels.
~ Zora Neale Hurston ~
2021
We're debating a step that has never been taken in American history. Whether Congress should overrule the voters and overturn a Presidential election. … President Trump claims the election was stolen. The assertions range from specific local allegations to Constitutional arguments to sweeping conspiracy theories. I supported the President's right to use the legal system, dozens of lawsuits received hearings in courtrooms all across our country, but over and over, the courts rejected these claims, including all-star judges whom the President himself has nominated. … The voters, the courts, and the states have all spoken. They've all spoken. If we overrule them, it would damage our republic forever. … If this election were overturned by mere allegations from the losing side, our democracy would enter a death spiral. Self-government, my colleagues, requires a shared commitment to the truth and a shared respect for the ground rules of our system. We cannot keep drifting apart into two separate tribes with a separate set of facts and separate realities, with nothing in common except our hostility towards each other and mistrust for the few national institutions that we all still share. Congress will either override the voters, overrule them, the voters, the states, and the courts for the first time ever, or honor the people's decision. I will not pretend such a vote would be a harmless protest gesture while relying on others to do the right thing. I will vote to respect the people’s decision and defend our system of government as we know it.
~ Mitch McConnell ~
  • proposed by Kalki, in regard to historical issues and events which have occurred on this date.
2022
My fellow Americans, in life, there’s truth and, tragically, there are lies — lies conceived and spread for profit and power.
We must be absolutely clear about what is true and what is a lie.
And here is the truth: The former president of the United States of America has created and spread a web of lies about the 2020 election. He’s done so because he values power over principle, because he sees his own interests as more important than his country’s interests and America’s interests, and because his bruised ego matters more to him than our democracy or our Constitution.
He can’t accept he lost, even though that’s what 93 United States senators, his own Attorney General, his own Vice President, governors and state officials in every battleground state have all said: He lost.
That’s what 81 million of you did as you voted for a new way forward.
He has done what no president in American history — the history of this country — has ever, ever done: He refused to accept the results of an election and the will of the American people.
~ Joe Biden ~
  • proposed by Kalki, as recent significant remarks upon historically significant events.
2023
An honorable defeat is better than a dishonorable victory.
~ Millard Fillmore ~
2024
Gods always behave like the people who make them.
~ Zora Neale Hurston ~
2025
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[edit]

Ships at a distance have every man's wish on board. ~ Zora Neale Hurston (born January 7, 1891)


She pulled in her horizon like a great fish-net. Pulled it from around the waist of the world and draped it over her shoulder. So much of life in its meshes! She called in her soul to come and see. ~ Zora Neale Hurston

  • 3 InvisibleSun 09:06, 6 January 2007 (UTC)
  • 1 Zarbon 17:59, 22 April 2008 (UTC)
  • 2 Triviaa 04:31, 2 January 2009 (UTC)
  • 2 Kalki 00:21, 6 January 2009 (UTC); but extended for context to read:
Of course he wasn't dead. He could never be dead until she herself had finished feeling and thinking. The kiss of his memory made pictures of love and light against the wall. Here was peace. She pulled in her horizon like a great fish-net. Pulled it from around the waist of the world and draped it over her shoulder. So much of life in its meshes! She called in her soul to come and see.

We mourn the blossoms of May because they are to whither; but we know that May is one day to have its revenge upon November, by the revolution of that solemn circle which never stops---which teaches us in our height of hope, ever to be sober, and in our depth of desolation, never to despair. ~ William Peter Blatty, The Exorcist (dob)


Would you like to hear a nice definition of jealousy? It's the feeling that you get when someone you absolutely detest is having a wonderful time without you. ~ William Peter Blatty, Legion


Janie saw her life like a great tree in leaf with the things suffered, things enjoyed, things done and undone. Dawn and doom was in the branches.
~ Zora Neale Hurston ~

They seemed to be staring at the dark, but their eyes were watching God.
~ Zora Neale Hurston ~

Mama exhorted her children at every opportunity to "jump at de sun." We might not land on the sun, but at least we would get off the ground.
~ Zora Neale Hurston ~

Research is formalized curiosity. It is poking and prying with a purpose. It is a seeking that he who wishes may know the cosmic secrets of the world and they that dwell therein.
~ Zora Neale Hurston ~


If you haven’t got it, you can’t show it. If you have got it, you can’t hide it.
~ Zora Neale Hurston ~