These are daily quotes, with each selection chosen at random. Subscribe to the RSS feed to receive a new quote each day.
The daily quote for Thursday May 15, 2025
Most needed are those ‘third places’ which lend a public balance to the increased privatization of home life. Third places are nothing more than informal public gathering places. The phrase ‘third places’ derives from considering our homes to be the ‘first’ places in our lives, and our work places the ‘second.’
Ray Oldenburg, 1989 from the book The Great Good Place
© 1989 Ray Oldenburg
The daily quote for Wednesday May 14, 2025
Thus for the first time since his creation man will be faced with his real, his permanent problem – how to use his freedom from pressing economic cares, how to occupy the leisure, which science and compound interest will have won for him, to live wisely and agreeably and well.
John Maynard Keynes, 1930 from the essay “Economic Possibilities for our Grandchildren”
The daily quote for Monday May 12, 2025
It’s no use saying, ‘We are doing our best.’ You have got to succeed in doing what is necessary.
The daily quote for Wednesday May 7, 2025
There is always an easy solution to every human problem – neat, plausible and wrong.
H. L. Mencken, 1920 from Prejudices: Second Series
The daily quote for Tuesday May 6, 2025
There can be a strange magic in human-made things. Not in all of them: not in plastic bottles or Q-Tips or batteries; but in those that are interwoven with our pasts, with our homes, with our great loves. These are things that have been mysteriously imbued with humanity — our own or other people’s.
J. K. Rowling, 2021-12-24 from the article “J. K. Rowling on the Magic of 'Things'”
The daily quote for Monday May 5, 2025
To grasp what is involved with levels or stages, let’s use a very simple model possessing only 3 of them. If we look at moral development, for example, we find that an infant at birth has not yet been socialized into the culture’s ethics and conventions: this is called the preconventional stage. It is also called egocentric, in that the infant’s awareness is largely self-absorbed. But as the young child begins to learns its culture’s rules and norms, it grows into the conventional stage of morals. This stage is also called ethnocentric, in that it centers on the child’s particular group, tribe, clan, or nation, and it therefore tends to exclude those not of its group. But at the next major stage of moral development, the postconventional stage, the individual’s identity expands once again, this time to include a care and concern for all peoples, regardless of race, color, sex or creed, which is why this stage is also called worldcentric.
Thus, moral development tends to move from ‘me’ (egocentric) to ‘us’ (ethnocentric) to ‘all of us’ (worldcentric)–a good example of the unfolding waves of consciousness.
Ken Wilber, 2007 from the book the integral vision
© 2007 Ken Wilber
The daily quote for Saturday May 3, 2025
The most powerful learning comes from direct experience. But what happens when we can no longer observe the consequences of our actions? Herein lies the core learning dilemma that confronts organizations: we learn best from experience but we never directly experience the consequences of many of our most important decisions. The most critical decisions made in organizations have systemwide consequences that stretch over years or decades.
Peter Senge, 1990 from the book The Fifth Discipline: The Art and Practice of the Learning Organization
© 1990 Peter M. Senge.
The daily quote for Friday May 2, 2025
The world is in greater peril from those who tolerate or encourage evil than from those who actually commit it.
Albert Einstein, 1953-03-30 from the book Tribute to Pablo Casals
The daily quote for Wednesday April 30, 2025
At the heart of liberty is the right to define one’s own concept of existence, of meaning, of the universe, and of the mystery of human life.
Anthony M. Kennedy, 1992 from the opinion “Planned Parenthood v. Casey US Supreme Court opinion”
The daily quote for Tuesday April 29, 2025
Future economic historians may look back wryly at this period when we worshipped the divine right of capital while looking down on our ancestors who believed in the divine right of kings.
Tim O'Reilly, 2017 from the book WTF: What's the Future and Why It's Up To Us
© 2017 Timothy F. O'Reilly
The daily quote for Monday April 28, 2025
As a dancing partner Rose Tuttle was not a bargain. She was equipped for it physically and she had some idea of rhythm, that wasn’t it; it was her basic attitude. She danced cheerfully, and of course that was no good. You can’t dance cheerfully. Dancing is too important. It can be wild or solemn or gay or lewd or art for art’s sake, but it can’t be cheerful.
Rex Stout, 1958 from Champagne for One
The daily quote for Sunday April 27, 2025
The two texts present us with an obvious dilemma. Both the Code of Hammurabi and the American Declaration of Independence claim to outline universal and eternal principles of justice, but according to the Americans all people are equal, whereas according to the Babylonians people are decidedly unequal. The Americans would, of course, say that they are right, and that Hammurabi is wrong. Hammurabi, naturally, would retort that he is right, and that the Americans are wrong. In fact, they are both Wrong. Hammurabi and the American Founding Fathers alike imagined a reality governed by universal and immutable principles of justice, such as equality or hierarchy. Yet the only place where such universal principles exist is in the fertile imagination of Sapiens, and in the myths they invent and tell one another. These principles have no objective validity.
Yuval Noah Harari, 2015 from the book Sapiens: A Brief History of Humankind
© 2015 Yuval Noah Harari
The daily quote for Saturday April 26, 2025
A happy man is too satisfied with the present to dwell too much on the future.
Albert Einstein, 1896-09-18 from The Collected Papers of Albert Einstein
The daily quote for Friday April 25, 2025
If you’re picking colors based on a Pantone book, you’re limited to a certain number of choices. If you step out in nature, the palette is infinite. Each rock has such a variation of color within it, we could never find a can of paint to mimic the exact same shade.
Nature transcends our tendencies to label and classify, to reduce and limit. The natural world is unfathomably more rich, interwoven, and complicated than we are taught, and so much more mysterious and beautiful.
Rick Rubin, 2023 from the book The Creative Act: A Way of Being
The daily quote for Thursday April 24, 2025
You mean to tell me you’d try to kill the John Doe movement if you can’t use it to get what you want? Well, that certainly is a new low. You sit there with your big cigars and think of deliberately killing an idea that has made millions of people a little bit happier. Why look, I’m just a mug and I know it – but I’m beginning to understand a lot of things. Why, your types are as old as history! If you can’t lay your dirty fingers on a decent idea and twist it and squeeze it and stuff it into your own pocket, you slap it down! Like dogs, if you can’t eat something – you bury it! Why, this is the one worthwhile idea that’s come along! People are finally finding out that the guy next door isn’t a bad egg. That’s simple, isnt it? And yet a thing like that has got a chance to spread till it touches every last doggone human being in the world – and you talk about killing it! Well, when this fire dies down what’s going to be left? More misery! More hunger and more hate! And what’s to prevent that from starting all over again? Nobody knows the answer to that one. The John Doe idea may be the answer though, it may be the one thing capable of saving this cockeyed world, yet you sit back there on your fat hulks and tell me you’ll kill it if you can’t use it! Well, you go ahead and try – you couldn’t do it in a million years with all your radio stations, and all your power.
– Down-and-out pitcher Long John Willoughby to industrialist D.B. Norton
Robert Riskin, 1941 from the film Meet John Doe
The daily quote for Wednesday April 23, 2025
Prior to Steve Jobs’ return to Apple, there was a decent centralized usability team equipped with those fancy rooms with one-way mirrors and video cameras. I’m certain these folks did significant work, but when Jobs returned, he shut it down and he cast the design teams to the wind. Each product team inherited part of the former usability team.
Now, I arrived after this reorganization occurred, so I don’t know the actual reasoning, but I do know I never saw those usability labs used once and I would argue that in the past decade Apple has created some of the most usable products out there. My opinion is that the choice to spread the usability design function across the engineering team was intended to send a clear message: engineer and designer need to party more… together.
I can’t imagine building a team responsible for consumer products where engineers and designers weren’t constantly meddling in each other’s business. Yes, they often argue from completely opposite sides of the brain. Yes, it is often a battle of art and science, but engineering and design want exactly the same thing. They want the intense satisfaction of knowing they successfully built something that matters.
Michael Lopp, 2007 from the book Managing Humans: Biting and Humorous Tales of a Software Engineering Manager
The daily quote for Monday April 21, 2025
Overall the secret to Nordic success is not complicated. Nordic societies have simply taken the job of government seriously. They make mistakes and have their troubles, but they keep tweaking their systems in search of improvements, and they work hard to balance the books. They prove that there is nothing inherent in government that automatically makes it less efficient for arranging social services than the private sector.
Anu Partanen, 2016 from the book The Nordic Theory of Everything: In Search of a Better Life
The daily quote for Sunday April 20, 2025
Swing — the dance and the music — bespeaks the flexible nature of American life. In jazz, the bass walks a note on every beat. The drummer rides the cymbal or plays brushes on every beat. And everybody else invents melodies and sounds that sway with, against, and upside every beat. Every beat requires musicians to reassess their relationships to one another. This is what makes swinging so challenging. You are forced to be constantly aware of other people’s feelings.
Wynton Marsalis, 2008 from the book Moving to Higher Ground: How Jazz Can Change Your Life
© 2008 Wynton Marsalis Enterprises
The daily quote for Saturday April 19, 2025
If triangles had a god, they would give him three sides.