BIRTHDAYS & QUOTATIONS

December 6, 1927 Patsy Mink "It is easy enough to vote right and be consistently with the majority. But it is more often more important to be ahead of the majority and this means being willing to cut the first furrow in the ground and stand alone for a while if...

December 5, 1927 Bhumibol Adulyadej "A good person can make another person good; it means that goodness will elicit goodness in the society; other persons will also be good." December 5, 1934 Joan Didion "To free us from the expectations of others, to give us back to...

December 4, 1795 Thomas Carlyle "Nothing is more terrible than activity without insight." December 4, 1925 Albert Bandura "Moral justification is a powerful disengagement mechanism. Destructive conduct is made personally and socially acceptable by portraying it in the...

December 3, 1842 Ellen Swallow Richards "If you keep your feathers well oiled the water of criticism will run off as from a duck's back." December 3, 1935 Eddie Bernice Johnson "We can't go all over the world killing people because we disagree with them."...

December 1, 1797 Sojourner Truth "They are the same stars, and that is the same moon, that look down upon your brothers and sisters, and which they see as they look up to them, though they are ever so far away from us, and each other." December 1, 1948 N.T. Wright...

November 30, 1936 Abbie Hoffman "You measure a democracy by the freedom it gives its dissidents, not the freedom it gives its assimilated conformists." November 30, 1947 David Mamet "Every reiteration of the idea that nothing matters debases the human...

November 29, 1811 Wendell Phillips "If there is anything in the universe that can't stand discussion, let it crack." November 29, 1898 C. S. Lewis "It may be hard for an egg to turn into a bird: it would be a jolly sight harder for it to learn to fly while remaining...

November 28, 1944 Rita Mae Brown "The only queer people are those who don't love anybody." November 28, 1962 Jon Stewart "If you don't stick to your values when they're being tested, they're not values: they're hobbies."

November 26, 1922 Charles Schulz “Don’t worry about the world coming to an end today. It’s already tomorrow in Australia.” November 26, 1931 Adolfo Perez Esquivel "We know we cannot plant seeds with closed fists. To sow, we must open our hands."

November 25, 1812 Henry Mayhew "It is easy enough to be moral after a good dinner beside a snug coal fire, and with our hearts well warmed with fine old port." November 25, 1881 Pope John XXIII "Consult not your fears but your hopes and your dreams. Think not about...

November, 24 1888 Dale Carnagie "If you want to gather honey, don't kick over the beehive." November 24, 1946 Bruce Bueno de Mesquita "There is an interesting interplay between power corrupting and corruption empowering. The causality does not go one way."

November 22, 1857 George Gissing "It is because nations tend towards stupidity and baseness that mankind moves so slowly; it is because individuals have a capacity for better things that it moves at all." November 22, 1869 Andre Gide "One does not discover new lands...

November 21, 1694 Voltaire "Those who can make you believe absurdities can make you commit atrocities." November 21, 1937 Marlo Thomas "My father said there were two kinds of people in the world: givers and takers. The takers may eat better, but the givers sleep...

November 20, 1908 Alistair Cooke "Curiosity endows the people who have it with a generosity in argument and a serenity in their own mode of life which springs from their cheerful willingness to let life take the form it will." November 20, 1925 Robert Kennedy "Each...

November 19, 1917 Indira Gandhi "You cannot shake hands with a clenched fist." November 19, 1925 Zygmunt Bauman "Power, in a nutshell, is the ability to get things done, and politics is the ability to decide which things need to be done."

November 18, 1900 Howard Thurman "If a man knows precisely what he can do to you or what epithet he can hurl against you in order to make you lose your temper, your equilibrium, then he can always keep you under subjection." November 18, 1939 Margaret Atwood "Nothing...

November 16, 1922 José Saramago "What kind of world is this that can send machines to Mars and does nothing to stop the killing of a human being?" November 16, 1930 Chinua Achebe "The whole idea of a stereotype is to simplify. Instead of going through the problem of...

November 15, 1897 Aneurin Bevan "You can't have the crown of thorns and the thirty pieces of silver." November 15, 1933 Theodore Roszak "People try nonviolence for a week, and when it 'doesn't work' they go back to violence, which hasn't worked for centuries."

November 14, 1889 Jawaharlal Nehru "Peace is not a relationship of nations. It is a condition of mind brought about by a serenity of soul. Peace is not merely the absence of war. It is also a state of mind. Lasting peace can come only to peaceful people." November 14,...

November 13, 1856 Louis D. Brandeis "Fear of serious injury alone cannot justify oppression of free speech and assembly. Men feared witches and burnt women. It is the function of speech to free men from the bondage of irrational fears." November 13, 1955 Whoopi...

November 12, 1815 Elizabeth Cady Stanton "The moment we begin to fear the opinions of others and hesitate to tell the truth that is in us, and from motives of policy are silent when we should speak, the divine floods of light and life no longer flow into our souls."...

November 11, 1922 Kurt Vonnegut "There is no reason why good cannot triumph as often as evil. The triumph of anything is a matter of organization. If there are such things as angels, I hope that they are organized along the lines of the Mafia." November 11, 1968 Kim...

November 10, 1730 Oliver Goldsmith "You can preach a better sermon with your life than with your lips." November 10, 1879 Vachel Lindsay "You can't crush ideas by suppressing them. You can only crush them by ignoring them."

November 9, 1731 Benjamin Banneker "Were there no uniforms, there would probably be no armies." November 9, 1877 Muhammad Iqbal "Words, without power, is mere philosophy."

November 8, 1748 Richard Cecil "Every year of my life I grow more convinced that it is wisest and best to fix our attention on the beautiful and the good, and dwell as little as possible on the evil and the false." November 8, 1897 Dorothy Day “We have all known the...

November 6, 1848 Richard Jefferies "Science, as illustrated by the printing press, the telegraph, the railway, is a double-edged sword. At the same moment that it puts an enormous power in the hands of the good man, it also offers an equal advantage to the evil...

November 5, 1855 Eugene V. Debs "While there is a lower class, I am in it, while there is a criminal element, I am of it, and while there is a soul in prison, I am not free." November 5, 1885 Will Durant "Truth always originates in a minority of one, and every custom...

November 4, 1916 Walter Cronkite "America's health care system is neither healthy, caring, nor a system." November 4, 1969 Matthew McConaughey "There's two sorts of fear: one you embrace and one you should listen to and turn the other way."

November 2, 1773 Stephen Grellet "I shall pass through this world but once. Any good, therefore, that I can do or any kindness I can show to any human being, let me do it now. Let me not defer it or neglect it, for I shall not pass this way again." November 3, 1924...

November 1, 1878 Carlos Saavedra Lamas "Unemployment is a great tragedy. The man who goes about hopelessly seeking work in order to earn bread for his children is a living reproach to civilization." November 1, 1944 Kinky Friedman Money can buy you a fine dog, but...

October 31, 1860 Juliette Gordon Low "Right is right, even if no one else does it." October 31, 1931 Dan Rather "A free and truly independent press - fiercely independent when necessary - is the red beating heart of freedom and democracy."

October 30, 1735 John Adams "I must study politics and war that my sons may have liberty to study mathematics and philosophy." October 30, 1935 Robert Caro "In a democracy, supposedly we hold power by what we do at the ballot box, so therefore the more we know about...

October 29, 1942 Bob Ross "There are no mistakes, only happy accidents." Frans de Waal "Our brains have been designed to blur the line between self and other. It is an ancient neural circuitry that marks every mammal, from mouse to elephant."

October 28, 1818 Ivan Turgenev "Most people can't understand how others can blow their noses differently than they do." October 28, 1914 Jonas Salk "Hope lies in dreams, in imagination, and in the courage of those who dare to make dreams into reality."

October 25, 1914 John Berryman "We must travel in the direction of our fear." October 25, 1973 Suheir Hammad "Do not fear what has blown up. If you must, fear the unexploded."

The History Teacher Trying to protect his students’ innocence he told them the Ice Age was really just the Chilly Age, a period of a million years when everyone had to wear sweaters. And the Stone Age became the Gravel Age, named after the long driveways of the time....

October 23, 1491 St. Ignatius of Loyola "Be slow to speak, and only after having first listened quietly, so that you may understand the meaning, leanings, and wishes of those who do speak. Thus you will better know when to speak and when to be silent." October 23,...

October 22, 1845 Sarah Bernhardt "Life begets life. Energy creates energy. It is by spending oneself that one becomes rich." October 22, 1936 Bobby Seale "You don't fight racism with racism, the best way to fight racism is with solidarity."

October 21, 1929 Ursula K. Le Guin "To light a candle is to cast a shadow." October 21, 1943 Tariq Ali "History rarely repeats itself, but its echoes never go away."