Quote of the Day - September

September 1st

Whoever fights monsters should see to it that in the process he does not become a monster. And when you look into an abyss, the abyss also looks into you.
-- Friedrich Wilhelm Nietzsche

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September 2nd

Naturam expellas furca, tamen usque revenit.
(You may drive nature out with a pitchfork, she will nevertheless come back.)
-- Horace

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September 3rd

What we anticipate seldom occurs; what we least expected generally happens.
-- Benjamin Disraeli

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September 4th

Our greatest glory is not in never falling, but in rising every time we fall.
-- Confucius

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September 5th

The rights of one are as sacred as the rights of a million.
-- Eugene V. Debs

Our movement is of the working people, for the working people, by the working people. . . .There is not a right too long denied to which we do not aspire in order to achieve; there is not a wrong too long endured that we are not determined to abolish.
Samuel Gompers


Today is Labor Day, the day when we should be remembering and celebrating those that worked for worker’s rights. To most people however, Labor Day is the last hurrah for summer, a day off and the last national holiday before Thanksgiving. We’ve forgotten what Labor Day was and should be.

See more on Labor Day and How labor won its day

I will spend today thinking about my dad who went railroading in his teens (circa 1914). I remember hearing my dad and his friends talk about what it was like ‘railroading’ before the unions; immensely profitable for the owners but extremely dangerous for the workers.
My dad knew Eugene Debs and for a time worked with him for establishment of the railroad union(s).

In today’s climate the words ‘labor’ and ‘union’ as well as the word ‘liberal’ have become an anathema in certain circles. Granted unions have not behaved as they probably should have but in the final analysis, unions have served the workers better than the owners ever did, in certain areas of course. Without union intervention, overtime pay, vacations and sick leave policies might not exist, nor workplace safety rules protect us. Oops, the current administration made sure that for a considerable percent of the workforce overtime pay is eliminated and because of this administration’s initiatives, for many workers, vacations and sick leaves may also be on the chopping block. From what I’ve been reading in the business sections, CEO and CFO salaries are back up to where they were before the Enron and Worldcom meltdowns. Seems that we didn’t learn a thing or at least the people who work for these overpaid front men for the current administration have learned a lot and that’s bad for the majority of the workforce.

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September 6th

The cause of liberty becomes a mockery if the price to be paid is the wholesale destruction of those who are to enjoy liberty.
-- Mohandas Karamchand Gandhi

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September 7th

The more I see of the representatives of the people the more I admire my dogs.
- - Alphonse de Lamartine

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September 8th

My name is John Fitzgerald Byers. I was named after our 35th president, and I keep having this beautiful dream. In my dream, the events of November 22nd, 1963, never happened. In it, my namesake was never assassinated. Other things are different, too, in my dream. My country is hopeful and innocent - young again. Young in spirit. My fellow citizens trust their elected officials, never once having been betrayed by them. My government is truly "of the people, by the people, for the people". All my hopes for my country, for myself... all are fulfilled. I have everything a person could want - home and family... and love. Everything that counts for anything in life... I have it. But the dream ends the same way every time. I lose it all.
-- The X Files

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September 9th

Honesty may be the best policy, but it's important to remember that apparently, by elimination, dishonesty is the second-best policy.
-- George Carlin

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September 10th

The reason why truth is so much stranger than fiction is that there is no requirement for it to be consistent.
-- Mark Twain

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September 11th
__________________

Nothing's forgotten. Nothing is ever forgotten.
"Robin of Sherwood”
__________________

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September 12th

I was wrong. I was, I was just... I was wrong. Come on, we know that. Lots of times we don't know what right or wrong is, but lots of times we do, and come on... this is one. I may not have had sinister intent at the outset, but there were plenty of opportunities for me to make it right. No one in government takes responsibility for anything any more, we fuster, we obfuscate, we rationalize. "Everybody does it", that's what we say. So we come to occupy a moral safe house where everyone's to blame, so no one's guilty.
[sigh]
--The West Wing

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September 13th

Every generation thinks it has the answers, and every generation is humbled by nature.
-- Phillip Lubin

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September 14th

Think what a better world it would be if we all, the whole world, had cookies and milk about three o'clock every afternoon and then lay down on our blankets for a nap.
- - Barbara Jordan

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September15th

For most of history, Anonymous was a woman.
-- Virginia Woolf

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September 16th

Laughter gives us distance. It allows us to step back from an event, deal with it and then move on.
- -Bob Newhart

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September 17th

I am not ashamed to confess that I am ignorant of what I do not know.
-- Marcus Tullius Cicero

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September 18th

I'm not dumb, I just have a command of thoroughly useless information.
-- Bill Watterson

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September 19th

The test of our progress is not whether we add more to the abundance of those who have much it is whether we provide enough for those who have little.
- - Franklin D. Roosevelt

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September 20th

If you want something said, ask a man; if you want something done, ask a woman.
-- Margaret Thatcher

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