# July 1

Quotes of the day from previous years:

## 2004

    A mature person is one who does not think only in absolutes, who is able to be objective even when deeply stirred emotionally, who has learned that there is both good and bad in all people and all things, and who walks humbly and deals charitably with the circumstances of life, knowing that in this world no one is all-knowing and therefore all of us need both love and charity. ~ Eleanor Roosevelt
   * selected by Kalki

## 2005

    We tried to break it up from the outside, but that wouldn't work. Now that we're inside we can make a complete pig's breakfast of the whole thing: set the Germans against the French, the French against the Italians, the Italians against the Dutch. The Foreign Office is terribly pleased, it's just like old times. ~ "Sir Humphrey" on European unity, in the comedy series Yes, Minister
   * celebrating the start of the British EU presidency on July 1, 2005
   * proposed by AllanHainey

## 2006

    Perhaps in time the so-called Dark Ages will be thought of as including our own. ~ Georg Christoph Lichtenberg (born 1 July 1742)
   * proposed by Kalki

## 2007

    It is almost impossible to bear the torch of truth through a crowd without singeing somebody’s beard. ~ Georg Christoph Lichtenberg (date of birth)
   * proposed by Kalki

## 2008

    We're on a mission from God. ~ Elwood J. Blues, in The Blues Brothers
   * proposed by MosheZadka (one of Dan Aykroyd's most important films; Dan was born on July 1)

## 2009

    There are two kinds of truths: those of reasoning and those of fact. The truths of reasoning are necessary and their opposite is impossible; the truths of fact are contingent and their opposites are possible. ~ Gottfried Leibniz (born 1 July 1646)
   * proposed by Kalki

## 2010

    A person reveals his character by nothing so clearly as the joke he resents. ~ Georg Christoph Lichtenberg
   * proposed by Kalki

## 2011

    The truth is too simple: one must always get there by a complicated route. ~ George Sand
   * proposed by InvisibleSun

## 2012

* One is happy as a result of one's own efforts, once one knows the necessary ingredients of happiness — simple tastes, a certain degree of courage, self denial to a point, love of work, and, above all, a clear conscience.
* ~ George Sand ~
   * proposed by InvisibleSun

## 2013

* Man is always partial and is quite right to be. Even impartiality is partial.
* ~ Georg Christoph Lichtenberg ~
   * proposed by Kalki

## 2014

* If an angel were ever to tell us anything of his philosophy I believe many propositions would sound like 2 times 2 equals 13.
* ~ Georg Christoph Lichtenberg ~
   * proposed by Kalki

## 2015

* Experiment and reflection enable us to introduce a significance into what is not legible, either to us or at all … the gradation we establish in the order of creatures: all this is not in the things but in us. In general we cannot remember too often that when we observe nature, and especially the ordering of nature, it is always ourselves alone we are observing.
* ~ Georg Christoph Lichtenberg ~
   * proposed by Kalki

## 2016

* In the stormy days of our youth, we imagine that solitude is a sure refuge from the assaults of life, a certain balm for the wounds of battle. This is a serious mistake, and experience teaches us that, if we cannot live in peace with our fellow-men, neither romantic raptures nor aesthetic enjoyment will ever fill the abyss gaping at the bottom of our hearts.
* ~ George Sand ~
   * proposed by InvisibleSun

## 2017

* With glowing hearts we see thee rise, The True North strong and free! From far and wide, O Canada, We stand on guard for thee.
* ~ Robert Stanley Weir ~
   * proposed by Kalki

## 2018

* We often have need of a profound philosophy to restore to our feelings their original state of innocence, to find our way out of the rubble of things alien to us, to begin to feel for ourselves and to speak ourselves, and I might almost say to exist ourselves. Even if my philosophy does not extend to discovering anything new, it does nevertheless possess the courage to regard as questionable what has long been thought true.
* ~ Georg Christoph Lichtenberg ~
   * proposed by Kalki

## 2019

* Truth comes from the mouths of fools and children: I wish every good mind which feels an inclination for satire would reflect that the finest satirist always has something of both in him.
* ~ Georg Christoph Lichtenberg ~
   * proposed by Kalki

## 2020

* Every morning I pick up my newspaper, get the obituary section, see if I'm listed, and if not, I have my breakfast.
* ~ Carl Reiner ~
   * proposed by Kalki, in regard to his recent death.

## 2021

* 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 ~
   * proposed by Kalki

## 2022

* I have dedicated my career to public service because I love this country and our Constitution and the rights that make us free. … It has taken 232 years and 115 prior appointments for a Black woman to be selected to serve on the Supreme Court of the United States — but we've made it. … So as I take on this new role, I strongly believe that this is a moment in which all Americans can take great pride. We have come a long way toward perfecting our union. In my family, it took just one generation to go from segregation to the Supreme Court of the United States. And it is an honor — the honor of a lifetime — for me to have this chance to join the Court, to promote the rule of law at the highest level, and to do my part to carry our shared project of democracy and equal justice under law forward, into the future.
* ~ Ketanji Brown Jackson ~
   * proposed by Kalki; after her recent swearing in as an associate justice of the Supreme Court.

## 2023

* The most dangerous untruths are truths moderately distorted.
* ~ Georg Christoph Lichtenberg ~
   * proposed by Kalki

## 2024

* The most successful tempters and thus the most dangerous are the deluded deluders.
* ~ Georg Christoph Lichtenberg ~
   * proposed by Kalki

## 2025

    Rank or add further suggestions…
Ranking system:
    4 : Excellent - should definitely be used.
    3 : Very Good - strong desire to see it used.
    2 : Good - some desire to see it used.
    1 : Acceptable - but with no particular desire to see it used.
    0 : Not acceptable - not appropriate for use as a quote of the day.

## Suggestions

Music is a hidden arithmetic exercise of the soul, which does not know that it is counting. ~ Gottfried Leibniz (date of birth)
* 2 Kalki 30 June 2005 21:03 (UTC) with a lean toward 3.
* 2 Zarbon 04:48, 24 April 2008 (UTC)
* 2 InvisibleSun 21:28, 30 June 2008 (UTC)
Britain has had the same foreign policy objective for at least the last 500 years: to create a disunited Europe. In that cause we have fought with the Dutch against the Spanish, with the Germans against the French, with the French and Italians against the Germans, and with the French against the Germans and Italians. Divide and rule, you see. Why should we change now when it's worked so well? ~ "Sir Humphrey" in Yes, Minister
* 1 Zarbon 04:48, 24 April 2008 (UTC)
* 2 InvisibleSun 21:28, 30 June 2008 (UTC)
* 1 Kalki 00:44, 1 July 2008 (UTC)
As head of a military structure I am responsible for the realization of military issues. If you want to have everlasting peace, you must be ready for war. ~ Seyran Ohanyan (born July 1)
* 4 because sometimes peace can only be won through war, and better yet, sometimes fire must be fought with fire. Zarbon 04:54, 18 April 2008 (UTC)
** Source: "Information About Blitzkrieg Is Groundless" Published on April 19, 2006
* 2 InvisibleSun 21:28, 30 June 2008 (UTC)
* 2 Kalki 00:44, 1 July 2008 (UTC)
It takes as much time and trouble to pull down a falsehood as to build up a truth. ~ Peter Mere Latham
* 2 Zarbon 06:05, 20 May 2008 (UTC)
* 3 InvisibleSun 21:28, 30 June 2008 (UTC)
* 3 Kalki 00:44, 1 July 2008 (UTC)
Poisons and medicine are oftentimes the same substance given with different intents. ~ Peter Mere Latham
* 2 Zarbon 06:05, 20 May 2008 (UTC)
* 3 InvisibleSun 21:28, 30 June 2008 (UTC)
* 3 Kalki 00:44, 1 July 2008 (UTC)
I don't consider myself a racist, I don't hate other peoples, but I certainly want to preserve my own. And I think that's true of all people. ~ David Duke
* 3 and I agree with this. I believe that all races should be preserved and kept pure. That is what will always keep them culturally brilliant. This is also a nice way of going against interracial marriage, which I am strongly against. Zarbon 06:19, 20 May 2008 (UTC)
* 0 InvisibleSun 21:28, 30 June 2008 (UTC)
* 0 Kalki 00:44, 1 July 2008 (UTC) I was briefly going to rank this a 1, as conceivably usable, in some fashion, but there is just no way I'd actually consider it Wikiquote QOTD material, and am simply being honest about that. ~ Kalki 01:04, 1 July 2008 (UTC)
* 0: I can't conceive of any reason Wikiquote should promote this kind of sentiment. Hydrangeans (talk) 21:48, 3 November 2024 (UTC)
Art is a demonstration of which nature is the proof. ~ George Sand (born July 1, 1804)
* 3 InvisibleSun 16:32, 30 June 2009 (UTC)
* 3 Kalki 16:45, 30 June 2009 (UTC)
* 1 Zarbon 18:05, 21 August 2009 (UTC)
All of us who have time and money to spare, travel — that is to say, we flee; since surely it is not so much a question of travelling as of getting away? Which of us has not some sorrow to dull, or some yoke to cast off? ~ George Sand
* 3 Kalki (talk · contributions) 23:53, 29 June 2010 (UTC)
I have an object, a task, let me say the word, a passion. The profession of writing is a violent and almost indestructible one. ~ George Sand
* 3 Kalki (talk · contributions) 23:53, 29 June 2010 (UTC)
Art for the sake of art itself is an idle sentence. Art for the sake of truth, for the sake of what is beautiful and good — that is the creed I seek. ~ George Sand
* 3 Kalki (talk · contributions) 23:53, 29 June 2010 (UTC) with a lean toward 4.
The business of art is to enlarge and correct the heart and to lift our ideals out of the ugly and the mean through love of the ideal … The business of art is to appeal to the soul. ~ Florence Earle Coates (born 1 July 1850)
* 3 Kalki (talk · contributions) 19:00, 13 September 2010 (UTC)
Maeterlinck says that compared with ordinary truths mystic truths have strange privileges—they can neither age nor die. Beauty is eternal and ugliness, thank God, is ephemeral. Can there be any question as to which should attract the poet? ~ Florence Earle Coates (born 1 July 1850)
* 3 Kalki (talk · contributions) 19:00, 13 September 2010 (UTC)
They live indeed—the dead by whose example we are upward led. ~ Florence Earle Coates (born 1 July 1850)
* 3 Kalki (talk · contributions) 19:00, 13 September 2010 (UTC)
* All mathematical laws which we find in Nature are always suspect to me, in spite of their beauty. They give me no pleasure. They are merely auxiliaries. At close range it is all not true.
* ~ Georg Christoph Lichtenberg ~
* 3 ♞☤☮♌︎Kalki ⚚⚓︎⊙☳☶⚡ 00:58, 30 June 2014 (UTC)
* The motives that lead us to do anything might be arranged like the thirty-two winds and might be given names on the same pattern: for instance, "bread-bread-fame" or "fame-fame-bread."
* ~ Georg Christoph Lichtenberg ~
* 3 ♞☤☮♌︎Kalki ⚚⚓︎⊙☳☶⚡ 00:58, 30 June 2014 (UTC)
* It is hardly to be believed how spiritual reflections when mixed with a little physics can hold people's attention and give them a livelier idea of God than do the often ill-applied examples of his wrath.
* ~ Georg Christoph Lichtenberg ~
* 3 ♞☤☮♌︎Kalki ⚚⚓︎⊙☳☶⚡ 00:58, 30 June 2014 (UTC)
* Prejudices are so to speak the mechanical instincts of men: through their prejudices they do without any effort many things they would find too difficult to think through to the point of resolving to do them.
* ~ Georg Christoph Lichtenberg ~
* 3 ♞☤☮♌︎Kalki ⚚⚓︎⊙☳☶⚡ 00:58, 30 June 2014 (UTC)
* There are two ways of extending life: firstly by moving the two points "born" and "died" farther away from one another... The other method is to go more slowly and leave the two points wherever God wills they should be, and this method is for the philosophers.
* ~ Georg Christoph Lichtenberg ~
* 3 ♞☤☮♌︎Kalki ⚚⚓︎⊙☳☶⚡ 00:58, 30 June 2014 (UTC)
* As the few adepts in such things well know, universal morality is to be found in little everyday penny-events just as much as in great ones. There is so much goodness and ingenuity in a raindrop that an apothecary wouldn't let it go for less than half-a-crown.
* ~ Georg Christoph Lichtenberg ~
* 3 ♞☤☮♌︎Kalki ⚚⚓︎⊙☳☶⚡ 00:58, 30 June 2014 (UTC)
* With a pen in my hand I have successfully stormed bulwarks from which others armed with sword and excommunication have been repulsed.
* ~ Georg Christoph Lichtenberg ~
* 3 ♞☤☮♌︎Kalki ⚚⚓︎⊙☳☶⚡ 00:58, 30 June 2014 (UTC)
* A book is a mirror: if an ape looks into it an apostle is hardly likely to look out. We have no words for speaking of wisdom to the stupid. He who understands the wise is wise already.
* ~ Georg Christoph Lichtenberg ~
* 3 ♞☤☮♌︎Kalki ⚚⚓︎⊙☳☶⚡ 00:58, 30 June 2014 (UTC)
* A handful of soldiers is always better than a mouthful of arguments.
* ~ Georg Christoph Lichtenberg ~
* 3 ♞☤☮♌︎Kalki ⚚⚓︎⊙☳☶⚡ 00:58, 30 June 2014 (UTC)
* Nothing can contribute more to peace of soul than the lack of any opinion whatever.
* ~ Georg Christoph Lichtenberg ~
* 3 ♞☤☮♌︎Kalki ⚚⚓︎⊙☳☶⚡ 00:58, 30 June 2014 (UTC)
* We are obliged to regard many of our original minds as crazy — at least until we have become as clever as they are.
* ~ Georg Christoph Lichtenberg ~
* 3 ♞☤☮♌︎Kalki ⚚⚓︎⊙☳☶⚡ 00:58, 30 June 2014 (UTC)
* There are people who possess not so much genius as a certain talent for perceiving the desires of the century, or even of the decade, before it has done so itself.
* ~ Georg Christoph Lichtenberg ~
* 3 ♞☤☮♌︎Kalki ⚚⚓︎⊙☳☶⚡ 00:58, 30 June 2014 (UTC)
* If people should ever start to do only what is necessary millions would die of hunger.
* ~ Georg Christoph Lichtenberg ~
* 3 ♞☤☮♌︎Kalki ⚚⚓︎⊙☳☶⚡ 00:58, 30 June 2014 (UTC)
* Even truth needs to be clad in new garments if it is to appeal to a new age.
* ~ Georg Christoph Lichtenberg ~
* 3 ♞☤☮♌︎Kalki ⚚⚓︎⊙☳☶⚡ 00:58, 30 June 2014 (UTC)
* Man can acquire accomplishments or he can become an animal, whichever he wants. God makes the animals, man makes himself.
* ~ Georg Christoph Lichtenberg ~
* 3 ♞☤☮♌︎Kalki ⚚⚓︎⊙☳☶⚡ 00:58, 30 June 2014 (UTC)
* Much reading has brought upon us a learned barbarism.
* ~ Georg Christoph Lichtenberg ~
* 3 ♞☤☮♌︎Kalki ⚚⚓︎⊙☳☶⚡ 00:58, 30 June 2014 (UTC)
* It is certainly not a matter of indifference whether I learn something without effort or finally arrive at it myself through my system of thought. In the latter case everything has roots, in the former it is merely superficial.
* ~ Georg Christoph Lichtenberg ~
* 3 ♞☤☮♌︎Kalki ⚚⚓︎⊙☳☶⚡ 00:58, 30 June 2014 (UTC)
* Doubt must be no more than vigilance, otherwise it can become dangerous.
* ~ Georg Christoph Lichtenberg ~
* 3 ♞☤☮♌︎Kalki ⚚⚓︎⊙☳☶⚡ 00:58, 30 June 2014 (UTC)
* I am convinced we do not only love ourselves in others but hate ourselves in others too.
* ~ Georg Christoph Lichtenberg ~
* 3 ♞☤☮♌︎Kalki ⚚⚓︎⊙☳☶⚡ 00:58, 30 June 2014 (UTC)
* What is called an acute knowledge of human nature is mostly nothing but the observer's own weaknesses reflected back from others.
* ~ Georg Christoph Lichtenberg ~
* 3 ♞☤☮♌︎Kalki ⚚⚓︎⊙☳☶⚡ 00:58, 30 June 2014 (UTC)
* Just as the performance of the vilest and most wicked deeds requires spirit and talent, so even the greatest demand a certain insensitivity which under other circumstances we would call stupidity.
* ~ Georg Christoph Lichtenberg ~
* 3 ♞☤☮♌︎Kalki ⚚⚓︎⊙☳☶⚡ 00:58, 30 June 2014 (UTC)
* The human tendency to regard little things as important has produced very many great things.
* ~ Georg Christoph Lichtenberg ~
* 3 ♞☤☮♌︎Kalki ⚚⚓︎⊙☳☶⚡ 00:58, 30 June 2014 (UTC)
* He who is enamored of himself will at least have the advantage of being inconvenienced by few rivals.
* ~ Georg Christoph Lichtenberg ~
* 3 ♞☤☮♌︎Kalki ⚚⚓︎⊙☳☶⚡ 00:58, 30 June 2014 (UTC)
* Man is a masterpiece of creation if for no other reason than that, all the weight of evidence for determinism notwithstanding, he believes he has free will.
* ~ Georg Christoph Lichtenberg ~
* 3 ♞☤☮♌︎Kalki ⚚⚓︎⊙☳☶⚡ 00:58, 30 June 2014 (UTC)
* There is no greater impediment to progress in the sciences than the desire to see it take place too quickly.
* ~ Georg Christoph Lichtenberg ~
* 3 ♞☤☮♌︎Kalki ⚚⚓︎⊙☳☶⚡ 00:58, 30 June 2014 (UTC)
* There were honest people long before there were Christians and there are, God be praised, still honest people where there are no Christians. It could therefore easily be possible that people are Christians because true Christianity corresponds to what they would have been even if Christianity did not exist.
* ~ Georg Christoph Lichtenberg ~
* 3 ♞☤☮♌︎Kalki ⚚⚓︎⊙☳☶⚡ 00:58, 30 June 2014 (UTC)
* Actual aristocracy cannot be abolished by any law: all the law can do is decree how it is to be imparted and who is to acquire it.
* ~ Georg Christoph Lichtenberg ~
* 3 ♞☤☮♌︎Kalki ⚚⚓︎⊙☳☶⚡ 00:58, 30 June 2014 (UTC)
* Those who have racked their brains to discover new proofs have perhaps been induced to do so by a compulsion they could not quite explain to themselves. Instead of giving us their new proofs they should have explained to us the motivation that constrained them to search for them.
* ~ Georg Christoph Lichtenberg ~
* 3 ♞☤☮♌︎Kalki ⚚⚓︎⊙☳☶⚡ 00:58, 30 June 2014 (UTC)
* If we make a couple of discoveries here and there we need not believe things will go on like this for ever.... Just as we hit water when we dig in the earth, so we discover the incomprehensible sooner or later.
* ~ Georg Christoph Lichtenberg ~
* 3 ♞☤☮♌︎Kalki ⚚⚓︎⊙☳☶⚡ 00:58, 30 June 2014 (UTC)
* Woman must save her self. I would not risk my salvation to any man.
* ~ Eliza R. Snow ~
* 3 Hydrangeans (talk) 21:50, 3 November 2024 (UTC) For clarity, this date is suggested because this is the day on which Snow said the quote. Hydrangeans (talk) 21:51, 3 November 2024 (UTC)