BIRTHDAYS & QUOTATIONS

January 15, 1889 A. Philip Randolph "A community is democratic only when the humblest and weakest person can enjoy the highest civil, economic, and social rights that the biggest and most powerful possess." January 15, 1929 Martin Luther King, Jr "Darkness cannot...

January 6, 1882 Sam Rayburn "Any jackass can kick down a barn, but it takes a good carpenter to build one." January 6, 1883 Kahlil Gibran "When we turn to one another for counsel we reduce the number of our enemies."

December 28, 1856 Woodrow Wilson "In the Lord's Prayer, the first petition is for daily bread. No one can worship God or love his neighbor on an empty stomach." December 28, 1954 Denzel Washington "You pray for rain, you gotta deal with the mud too. That's a part of...

December 23, 1926 Robert Bly "It’s all right if you grow your wings on the way down." December 23, 1943 Margaret MacMillan "An apology offered and, equally important, received is a step towards reconciliation and, sometimes, recompense. Without that process, hurts can...

December 14, 1883 Morihei Ueshiba "As soon as you concern yourself with the 'good' and 'bad' of your fellows, you create an opening in your heart for maliciousness to enter. Testing, competing with, and criticizing others weaken and defeat you." December 14, 1897...

December 9, 1608 John Milton "He that studieth revenge keepeth his own wounds green, which otherwise would heal and do well." December 9, 1912 Tip O'Neill "All politics is local."

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, 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 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 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 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...

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 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 18, 1904 AJ Liebling "Freedom of the press is guaranteed only to those who own one." October 18, 1956 Martina Navratilova "The difference between involvement and commitment is like ham and eggs. The chicken is involved; the pig is committed."

October 13, 1870 Albert J. Nock "The mind is like the stomach. It is not how much you put into it that counts, but how much it digests." October 13, 1944 Charlotte Bunch "There is no private domain of a person's life that is not political, and there is no political...

October 4, 1542 St. Robert Bellermine "Peace and union are the most necessary of all things for men who live in common, and nothing serves so well to establish and maintain these as the forbearing charity whereby we put up with one another's defects." October 4, 1942...

September 28, 1839 Frances E. Willard "This seems to be the law of progress in everything we do; it moves along a spiral rather than a perpendicular; we seem to be actually going out of the way, and yet it turns out that we were really moving upward all the time."...

September 24, 1717 Horace Walpole "Justice is rather the activity of truth, than a virtue in itself. Truth tells us what is due to others, and justice renders that due. Injustice is acting a lie." September 24, 1775 John Marshall "To listen well is as powerful a means...

September 19, 1921 Paulo Freire "Liberating education consists in acts of cognition, not transferals of information." September 19, 1932 Mike Royko "It's much harder to be a liberal than a conservative. Why? Because it is easier to give someone the finger than a...

September 13, 1660 Daniel Defoe "Vice came in always at the door of necessity, not at the door of inclination." September 13, 1830 Marie von Ebner-Eschenbach "Those who understand only what can be explained understand very little."

September 9, 1871 Ralph Hodgson "Some things have to be believed to be seen." September 9, 1890 Kurt Lewin If you want to truly understand something, try to change it.

September 8, 1887 Swami Sivananda "A mountain is composed of tiny grains of earth. The ocean is made up of tiny drops of water. Even so, life is but an endless series of little details, actions, speeches, and thoughts. And the consequences whether good or bad of even...

September 5, 1905 Arthur Koestler "Courage is never to let your actions be influenced by your fears." September 5, 1935 Werner Erhard "The problems we have now in communities and societies are going to be resolved only when we are brought together by a common sense...

September 1, 1907 Walter Reuther "If you're not big enough to lose, you're not big enough to win." September 1, 1957 Gloria Estefan "Silence is a big enemy of morality."

August 28, 1749 Johann Wolfgang von Goethe "None are more hopelessly enslaved than those who falsely believe they are free." August 28, 1952 Rita Dove "One definition of eternity is that we are not alone on this planet, that there are those who've gone before and...

August 24, 1899 Jorge Luis Borges "Nothing is built on stone; all is built on sand, but we must build as if the sand were stone." August 24, 1922 Howard Zinn "There is no flag large enough to cover the shame of killing innocent people."

August 19, 1631 John Dryden "The intoxication of anger, like that of the grape, shows us to others, but hides us from ourselves." August 19, 1921 Gene Roddenberry "The strength of a civilization is not measured by its ability to fight wars, but rather by its ability...

August 11, 1921 Alex Haley "Anytime you see a turtle up on top of a fence post, you know he had some help." August 11, 1970 Charles M. Blow "America is a living idea. It isn't only the tenets of its founding, but also the terms of its future. Every day, we make...

August 6, 1775 Daniel O'Connell "Nothing is politically right which is morally wrong." August 6, 1808 Alfred, Lord Tennyson "Knowledge comes, but wisdom lingers."

August 4, 1810 Robert Purvis "It is the safeguard of the strongest that he lives under a government which is obliged to respect the voice of the weakest." August 4, 1961 Barack Obama "Change will not come if we wait for some other person or some other time. We are the...

July 28, 1902 Karl Popper "We should therefore claim, in the name of tolerance, the right not to tolerate the intolerant." July 28, 1924 Anne Braden "Either you find a way to oppose the evil, or the evil becomes part of you and you are a part of it, and it winds...

July 24, 1783 Simon Bolivar "Judgment comes from experience, and experience comes from bad judgment." July 24, 1920 Bella Abzug "Our struggle today is not to have a female Einstein get appointed as an assistant professor. It is for a woman schlemiel to get as quickly...

July 17, 1937 Stephen Levine "If you were going to die soon and had only one phone call you could make, who would you call and what would you say? And why are you waiting?" July 18, 1902 Jessamyn West "It is very east to forgive others their mistakes; it takes more...

July 12, 1817 Henry David Thoreau "If a man does not keep pace with his companions, perhaps it is because he hears a different drummer. Let him step to the music which he hears, however measured or far away." July 12, 1895 Oscar Hammerstein "You've got to be taught...

July 9, 1893 Dorothy Thompson "The most destructive element in the human mind is fear. Fear creates aggressiveness." July 9, 1905 Myles Horton “Nothing will change until we change — until we throw off our dependence and act for ourselves.”

July 7, 1906 Leroy Satchel Paige "Don't look back. Something might be gaining on you." July 7, 1933 David McCullough "History is a guide to navigation in perilous times. History is who we are and why we are the way we are."

July 4, 1918 Abigail Van Buren "People who fight fire with fire usually end up with ashes." July 4, 1918 Ann Landers "Keep in mind that the true measure of an individual is how he treats a person who can do him absolutely no good."

July 1, 1912 David Brower "When people say, 'You're not being realistic,' they're just trying to tag some thoughts that they can't otherwise handle." July 1, 1961 Princess Diana "Carry out a random act of kindness, with no expectation of reward, safe in the knowledge...

June 28, 1703 John Wesley "I deny that villainy is ever necessary. It is impossible that it should ever be necessary for any reasonable creature to violate all the laws of justice, mercy, and truth. No circumstances can make it necessary for a man to burst in sunder...

June 22, 1947 Octavia E. Butler "Simple peck-order bullying is only the beginning of the kind of hierarchical behavior that can lead to racism, sexism, ethnocentrism, classism, and all the other 'isms' that cause so much suffering in the world." June 22, 1949...

June 15, 1922 Mo Udall "Lord, give us the wisdom to utter words that are gentle and tender, for tomorrow we may have to eat them." June 15, 1969 Ice Cube "It's funny how people who ain't never been down there can think that America is so fair and that we should be...

June 9, 1843 Bertha Von Suttner "How can justice be attained when, in the expiation of an old wrong, another wrong is to be committed? No reasonable creature would conceive of the idea of obliterating ink stains with ink, or spots of oil with oil. Only blood must be...