1076 – “Now we all have a great need for acceptance, but you must trust that your beliefs are unique, your own, even though others may think them odd or unpopular, even though the herd may go, ‘that’s baaaaad.'”

-John Keating (Played by Robin Williams) in Dead Poets Society

984 – “Refusal to believe until proof is given is a rational position; denial of all outside of our own limited experience is absurd.”

-Annie Besant

889 – “I believe in evidence. I believe in observation, measurement, and reasoning, confirmed by independent observers. I’ll believe anything, no matter how wild and ridiculous, if there is evidence for it. The wilder and more ridiculous something is, however, the firmer and more solid the evidence will have to be.”

–Isaac Asimov

861 – “The moment you doubt whether you can fly, you cease forever to be able to do it.”

–Captain W____ referring to Peter Pan in J M Barrie’s The Little White Bird

832 – “We must keep our faith in the Republic. The day we stop believing democracy can work is the day we lose it.”

–Jamillia, Queen of Naboo (Played by Ayesha Dharker) in Star Wars: Attack of the Clones

May the Force be with you. Always. Happy Star Wars Day!

765 – “I believe that dreams — day dreams, you know, with your eyes wide open and your brain machinery whizzing — are likely to lead to the betterment of the world. The imaginative child will become the imaginative man or woman most apt to create, to invent, and therefore to foster civilization. A prominent educator tells me that fairy tales are of untold value in developing imagination in the young.”

–L Frank Baum

Today is Tell a Fairy Tale Day, so go out and reread your favorite or tell a new one!

661 – “People don’t want to hear the truth because they don’t want their illusions destroyed.”

–anonymous

656 – Eisenhower’s Kinship Among Nations Quote

“Kinship among nations is not determined in such measurements as proximity of size and age. Rather we should turn to those inner things — call them what you will — I mean those intangibles that are the real treasures free men possess. To preserve his freedom of worship, his equality before law, his liberty to speak and act as he sees fit, subject only to provisions that he trespass not upon similar rights of others….”

–Dwight Eisenhower, 34th President of the United States of America

29 years ago today, in 1989, Mauerfall began when East and West Berliners joined together and began dismantling the Berlin Wall, which would eventually lead to the fall of the Iron Curtain and preceded the collapse of the Soviet Union.

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550 – “The truth may be puzzling. It may take some work to grapple with. It may be counterintuitive. It may contradict deeply held prejudices. It may not be consonant with what we desperately want to be true. But our preferences do not determine what it true.”

–Carl Sagan

530 – “There is no greater fallacy than the belief that aims and purposes are one thing, while methods and tactics are another. This conception is a potent menace to social regeneration. All human experience teaches that methods and means cannot be separated from the ultimate aim. The means employed become, through individual habit and social practice, part and parcel of the final purpose; they influence it, modify it, and presently the aims and means become identical.”

–Emma Goldman