Quote of the Day for 2015-09-30

"With most men, unbelief in one thing springs from blind belief in another."

— Georg Christoph Lichtenberg (1742-1799) Miscellaneous Writings, Notebook L, number 81

Beginner's Bible Coloring Book by Derek Chatwood

Quote of the Day for 2015-09-29

"The flow'rs anew, returning seasons bring; / But beauty faded has no second spring."

— Ambrose Philips (1674-1749) "Lobbin," Pastorals (first set)

Mary Pickford and Douglas Fairbanks canoeing on the pool at their Pickfair estate (circa 1920s).

Quote of the Day for 2015-09-28

"Necessity never made a good bargain"

— Benjamin Franklin (1706-1790) Poor Richard's Almanack, 1735

Graham Chapman, Eric Idle, and John Cleese in the "Won't Haggle" scene from Monty Python's Life of Brian (1979).

Quote of the Day for 2015-09-27

"There's one thing about baldness; it's neat."

— Don Herold (1889-1966) There Ought to be a Law

Promotional picture of Cynthia Nixon, who played Vivian Bearing in the Broadway play Wit (2012)

Quote of the Day for 2015-09-26

"'Come, come,' said Tom's father, 'at your time of life, / There's no longer excuse for thus playing the rake— / It is time you should think, boy, of taking a wife.' / 'Why, so it is father—whose wife shall I take?'"

— Thomas Moore (1779-1852) "A Joke Versified," Fables for the Holy Alliance

Illustration and title page of The Country Wife by William Wycherley.

Quote of the Day for 2015-09-25

"A loud noise at one end and no sense of responsibility at the other."

— Father Ronald Knox (1888-1957) Quoted by Colin Blakemore in his 1976 Reith Lecture: Mechanics of the Mind, lecture 5: "A Burning Fire", chapter 5, page 137

Quote of the Day for 2015-09-24

"Lots of people who complained about us receiving the MBE received theirs for heroism in the war—for killing people. We received ours for entertaining other people. I'd say we deserve ours more."

— John Lennon (1940-1980) Quoted in The Beatles Illustrated Lyrics

John Lennon as Pvt. Gripweed in How I Won the War (1967)

Quote of the Day for 2015-09-23

"Assassination is the extreme form of censorship."

— George Bernard Shaw (1856-1950) The Shewing-up of Blanco Posnet, Preface

The blood stained lyrics to Shir La’Shalom (Song of Peace) found in Yitzhak Rabin's pocket, after his assassination by Yigal Amir at Kings of Israel Square in Tel Aviv, following a rally in support of the Oslo Peace Accord (November 4, 1995).

Quote of the Day for 2015-09-22

"Nobody talks so constantly about God as those who insist there is no God."

— Heywood Broun (1888-1939) "A New Preface to an Old Story," Broun's Nutmeg, August 19, 1939

Terry Gilliam's conception of God, purportedly based on cricketer W.G. Grace, from Monty Python and the Holy Grail.

Quote of the Day for 2015-09-21

"There is a great deal to be said for the Arts. For one thing they offer the only career in which commercial failure is not necessarily discreditable."

— Evelyn Waugh (1903-1966) "The Way to Fame"

Andy Warhol, Self-Portraits in Drag, 1980-1982 Polaroid. (In collaboration with Christopher Makos)

Quote of the Day for 2015-09-20

"But what experience and historians teach is this—that peoples and governments have never learned anything from history, or acted on the principles deduced from it."

— Georg Hegel (1770-1831) Lectures on the Philosophy of History, "Introduction"

George W. Bush and his inner circle, photographed in the Cabinet Room of the White House in December 2001. From left: Secretary of State Colin Powell, Vice President Dick Cheney, the president, National-Security Adviser Condoleezza Rice, White House chief of staff Andrew Card, C.I.A. director George Tenet (seated), and Secretary of Defense Donald Rumsfeld., Photograph by Annie Leibovitz for Vanity Fair.

Quote of the Day for 2015-09-19

"Come on, you sons of bitches! Do you want to live forever?"

— Daniel Daly (1874-1937) During the Battle of Belleau Wood, June 6, 1918. Quoted by Floyd Gibbons in And They Thought We Wouldn't Fight

La Brigade Marine Americaine au Bois de Belleau by Georges Scott (1918), published in L'Illustration

Quote of the Day for 2015-09-18

"The soul, too, has her virginity and must bleed a little before bearing fruit."

— George Santayana (1863-1952) "Normal Madness," Dialogues in Limbo

The Two Fridas by Frida Kahlo (1939). It was painted the same year she divorced Diego Rivera.

Quote of the Day for 2015-09-17

"Without tradition, art is a flock of sheep without a shepherd. Without innovation, it is a corpse."

— Winston Churchill (1874-1965) Speech at the Royal Academy of Arts banquet, April 30, 1953

Her Last Supper from the series Her by Marjorie Salvaterra (2014)

Quote of the Day for 2015-09-16

"Nobody can be so amusingly arrogant as a young man who has just discovered an old idea and thinks it is his own."

— Sydney J. Harris (1917-1986) "Purely Personal Prejudices," Strictly Personal

Hippasus after being thrown overboard by the disciples of Pythagoras for arguing that irrational numbers exist -OR- by the gods as punishment for disseminating the knowledge of said numbers.

Quote of the Day for 2015-09-15

"Every gun that is made, every warship launched, every rocket fired, signifies, in the final sense, a theft from those who hunger and are not fed, those who are cold and are not clothed. The world in arms is not spending money alone. It is spending the sweat of its laborers, the genius of its scientists, the hopes of its children."

— Dwight D. Eisenhower (1890-1969) The "Chance for Peace" address to the American Society of Newspaper Editors, April 16, 1953

"Camels search for untainted shrubs and water in the burning oil fields of" Al Ahmadi, Kuwait after the Gulf War. Photograph taken by Steve McCurry and published in National Geographic, August 1991.

Quote of the Day for 2015-09-14

"There are bad manners everywhere, but an aristocracy is bad manners organized."

— Henry James (1843-1916) The Point of View

The Bush Family in the Red Room of the White House on January 6, 2005. (Photograph by Eric Draper)

Quote of the Day for 2015-09-13

"You have not converted a man because you have silenced him."

— John, Lord Morley (1838-1923) On Compromise

Martin Luther King, Jr., arrested for "loitering" at the Montgomery, Alabama court house awaiting a hearing for Ralph Abernathy, September 3, 1958. An anxious Coretta Scott King looks on at right. (Photograph by Charles Moore/Black Star)

Quote of the Day for 2015-09-12

"Light, God's eldest daughter, is a principal beauty in a building."

— Thomas Fuller (1608-1661) The Holy State, Book 2, chapter 7

The living room from Frances W. Little's summer house in Wayzata, Minnesota, designed by Frank Lloyd Wright in 1912, and rebuilt inside the American Wing of the Metropolitan Museum of Art in New York City.

Quote of the Day for 2015-09-11

"They named it Ovation from the Latin Ovis, [a sheep]."

— Plutarch (46-120) Parallel Lives, "Marcellus," section 22

Festa di Pales, o L'Estate by Joseph-Benoît Suvée (1783). After an Ovation the subject would sacrifice a sheep, as opposed to a triumph where the animal was an ox.

Quote of the Day for 2015-09-10

"An appeaser is one who feeds a crocodile, hoping it will eat him last."

— Winston Churchill (1874-1965) Quoted in Reader's Digest, December 1954

British prime minister Neville Chamberlain displaying the Anglo-German Declaration to a crowd at
the Heston Aerodrome on September 30, 1938. Later that day, in front of 10 Downing Street, he would
declare "I believe it is peace for our time." Within a year Britain would be engulfed in World War II.

Quote of the Day for 2015-09-09

"To see ourselves as others see us is a most salutary gift. Hardly less important is the capacity to see others as they see themselves."

— Aldous Huxley (1894-1963) The Doors of Perception, Page 13

Members of Anonymous with Guy Fawkes masks at the Baldwin Research Institute
(Church of Scientology) in Los Angeles, CA. (Photograph by Vincent Diamante)

Quote of the Day for 2015-09-08

"A stiff apology is a second insult."

— G.K. Chesterton (1874-1936) "The Real Dr. Johnson," The Common Man

A humorous take on Alfred Leete's Lord Kitchener Wants You recruiting poster.

Quote of the Day for 2015-09-07

"This is the way the world ends
This is the way the world ends
This is the way the world ends
Not with a bang but a whimper."

— T.S. Eliot (1888-1965) "The Hollow Men," Poems: 1909-1925

The Discovery of the Gunpowder Plot and the Taking of Guy Fawkes by Henry Perronet Briggs (circa 1823)

Quote of the Day for 2015-09-06

"Science may have found a cure for most evils; but it has found no remedy for the worst of them all—the apathy of human beings."

— Helen Keller (1880-1968) My Religion, chapter 6

The decomposed body of a German soldier, killed near the village of Beaumont-Hamel during the Battle of the Somme, November 1, 1916.

Quote of the Day for 2015-09-05

"I've never met a healthy person who worried much about his health, or a good person who worried much about his soul."

— J.B.S. Haldane (1892-1964) Attributed

Life Simplified by Matthieu Barrère

Quote of the Day for 2015-09-04

"Violent antipathies are always suspicious, and betray a secret affinity"

— William Hazlitt (1778-1830) "On Vulgarity and Affectation," Table-Talk, volume 1

Mary McCarthy and Lillian Hellman

Quote of the Day for 2015-09-03

"A peasant becomes fond of his pig and is glad to salt away its pork. What is significant, and is so difficult for the urban stranger to understand, is that the two statements in that sentence are connected by an and and not by a but."

— John Berger (1926-    ) About Looking

Swimming pigs of Big Major Cay in Exuma, Bahamas (Photograph by Christopher Dorobek)

Quote of the Day for 2015-09-02

"Of this I am quite sure, that if we open a quarrel between the past and the present, we shall find that we have lost the future."

— Sir Winston Churchill (1874-1965) "War Situation," speech in the House of Commons, June 18, 1940. After the fall of France.

Aftermath of the Dieppe Raid, August 19, 1942.

Quote of the Day for 2015-09-01

"As favor and riches forsake a man, we discover in him the foolishness they concealed, and which no one perceived before."

— Jean de la Bruyère (1645-1696) Les Caractères

Marie Antoinette au Tribunal Révolutionnaire
Engraving by Alphonse François, from a painting by Paul Delaroche (1857)