BIRTHDAYS & QUOTATIONS

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 22, 1912 Lady Bird Johnson "The clash of ideas is the sound of freedom." December 22, 1960 Mark Frauenfelder "Coming up with a way to fix mistakes challenges your creativity and your critical thinking skills and your resourcefulness. Often you end up with...

December 21, 1892 Rebecca West "Did St. Francis preach to the birds? Whatever for? If he really liked birds he would have done better to preach to the cats." December 21, 1948 Samuel L. Jackson "People know about the Klan and the overt racism, but the killing of one's...

December 20, 1895 Susanne Langer "If we would have new knowledge, we must get a whole world of new questions." December 20, 1954 Sandra Cisneros "The older I get, the more I'm conscious of ways very small things can make a change in the world. Tiny little things, but...

December 19, 1875 Carter G. Woodson "When you control a man's thinking you do not have to worry about his actions." December 19, 1987 Ronan Farrow "LGBT people are some of the bravest and most potent change agents and leaders I have encountered, and the most forceful...

December 18, 1917 Ossie Davis "Any form of art is a form of power; it has impact, it can affect change - it can not only move us, it makes us move." December 16, 1927 Ramsey Clark A right is not what someone gives you; it's what no one can take from you.

December 17, 1916 Penelope Fitzgerald "However, no two people see the external world in exactly the same way. To every separate person a thing is what he thinks it is - in other words, not a thing, but a think." December 17, 1936 Pope Francis "Each of us has a vision...

December 16, 1901 Margaret Mead "Never doubt that a small group of thoughtful, committed citizens can change the world; indeed, it's the only thing that ever has." December 16, 1917 Arthur C. Clarke "It is not easy to see how the more extreme forms of nationalism can...

December 15, 1913 Muriel Rukeyser "The universe is made of stories, not of atoms." December 15, 1959 Donna Brazile "A government of, by, and for the people requires that people talk to people, that we can agree to disagree but do so in civility. If we let the...

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 13, 1797 Heinrich Heine "Wherever they burn books they will also, in the end, burn human beings." December 13, 1903 Ella Baker "Give light and people will find the way."

December 11, 1911 Naguib Mahfouz "You can tell whether a man is clever by his answers. You can tell whether a man is wise by his questions." December 11, 1973 Mos Def "Good art provides people with a vocabulary about things they can't articulate."

December 10, 1805 William Lloyd Garrison "With reasonable men, I will reason; with humane men I will plead; but to tyrants I will give no quarter, nor waste arguments where they will certainly be lost." December 10, 1830 Emily Dickinson "They might not need me; but...

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."

December 7, 1873 Willa Cather "There are some things you learn best in calm, and some in storm." December 7, 1927 Henepola Gunaratana "When you have learned compassion for yourself, compassion for others is automatic."

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...