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reetings from Australia.
Welcome to this Red-Letter Day. Below you will find today's global celebrations, birthdays and events.
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The island of Utopia is in the middle two
hundred miles broad, and holds almost at the same breadth over a
great part of it, but it grows narrower towards both ends. Its
figure is not unlike a crescent. Between its horns the sea comes in
eleven miles broad, and spreads itself into a great bay, which is
environed with land to the compass of about five hundred miles, and
is well secured from winds. In this bay there is no great current;
the whole coast is, as it were, one continued harbour, which gives
all that live in the island great convenience for mutual commerce.
But the entry into the bay, occasioned by rocks on the one hand and
shallows on the other, is very dangerous. In the middle of it there
is one single rock which appears above water, and may, therefore,
easily be avoided; and on the top of it there is a tower, in which a
garrison is kept; the other rocks lie under water, and are very
dangerous. The channel is known only to the natives; so that if any
stranger should enter into the bay without one of their pilots he
would run great danger of shipwreck. Sir Thomas More, English lawyer, writer, and politician, born on February 7, 1478 and posthumously known as St Thomas More; from Utopia (1516), 'Concerning the Best State of a Commonwealth' |
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A map of the world that does not include Utopia is not worth glancing at.
Oscar Wilde
We have founded a state which we hope will become a shining light among all the nations of the southern hemisphere.
Governor Arthur
Phillip, from his journal, February 7, 1788 (in Sydney-town)
Ride on! Rough-shod if need be, smooth-shod if that will do, but ride on! Ride on over all obstacles, and win the race!
Charles Dickens, English novelist born on February 7, 1812
You can only form the minds of reasoning animals upon Facts: nothing else will ever be of any service to them. Stick to Facts, sir!
Charles Dickens
MY father's family name being Pirrip, and
my christian name Philip, my infant tongue could make of both names
nothing longer or more explicit than Pip. So, I called myself Pip, and
came to be called Pip.
Charles Dickens; opening paragraph of
Great
Expectations
To conceal
anything from those to whom I am attached, is not in my nature. I can never
close my lips where I have opened my heart.
Charles Dickens; Master Humphrey's Clock (1840 - '41)
I am quite serious when I say that I do not believe there are, on the whole
earth besides, so many intensified bores as in these United States. No man can
form an adequate idea of the real meaning of the word, without coming here.
Charles Dickens; comment made, March 1842, while on an American tour.
Quoted in Hesketh Pearson's Dickens (1949), Ch. 8
He is not, as he forcibly remarks, ‘one of those fortunate men who, if they were
to dive under one side of a barge stark-naked, would come up on the other with a
new suit of clothes on, and a ticket for soup in the waistcoat–pocket:’ neither
is he one of those, whose spirit has been broken beyond redemption by misfortune
and want. He is just one of the careless, good-for-nothing, happy fellows, who
float, cork–like, on the surface, for the world to play at hockey with: knocked
here, and there, and everywhere: now to the right, then to the left, again up in
the air, and anon to the bottom, but always reappearing and bounding with the
stream buoyantly and merrily along.
Charles Dickens; Sketches by Boz (1836 - '37), Our Parish,
Ch. 5
We still leave unblotted in the leaves of our statute book, for the reverence
and admiration of successive ages, the just and wholesome law which declares
that the sturdy felon shall be fed and clothed, and that the penniless debtor
shall be left to die of starvation and nakedness. This is no fiction.
Charles Dickens; Pickwick Papers (1836), Ch. 42
For nature gives to every time and season some beauties of its own; and from
morning to night, as from the cradle to the grave, is but a succession of
changes so gentle and easy, that we can scarcely mark their progress.
Charles Dickens; Nicholas Nickleby (1838 - '39), Ch. 22
Man knows much more than he understands.
Alfred Adler, Austrian medical doctor and psychologist, born on February
7, 1870; as quoted in A Primer of Adlerian Psychology: The
Analytic-Behavioural-Cognitive Psychology of Alfred Adler (1999) by Harold
H. Mosak and Michael P. Maniacci
It is always easier to fight for one's principles than to live up to them.
Alfred Adler
Advertising is a valuable economic factor because it is the cheapest way of
selling goods, particularly if the goods are worthless.
Sinclair Lewis, American novelist, short-story writer, and playwright who
became the first American to be awarded the Nobel Prize in Literature, born on
February 7, 1885; attributed
There are two insults which no human will endure: the assertion that he hasn't a
sense of humor, and the doubly impertinent assertion that he has never known
trouble.
Sinclair Lewis; attributed
American professors like their literature clear and cold and pure and very dead.
Sinclair Lewis; attributed
I love America, but I don't like it.
Sinclair Lewis; attributed
Fortune has dealt with me rather too well. I have known little struggle, not
much poverty, many generosities. Now and then I have, for my books or myself,
been somewhat warmly denounced— there was one good pastor in California who upon
reading my Elmer Gantry desired to lead a mob and lynch me, while another holy
man in the state of Maine wondered if there was no respectable and righteous way
of putting me in jail.
Sinclair Lewis; from his Nobel lecture (December 12, 1930)
This age, which should adjudge happiness to be as valuable as soap or munitions,
would never come so long as the workers accepted the testimony of paid
spokesmen... to the effect that they were contented and happy, rather than the
evidence of their own wincing nerves to the effect that they live in a polite
version of hell.
Sinclair Lewis; The Job (1917)
I think perhaps we want a more conscious life. We're tired of drudging and
sleeping and dying. We're tired of seeing just a few people able to be
individualists. We're tired of always deferring hope till the next generation.
We're tired of hearing politicians and priests and cautious reformers ... coax
us, 'Be calm! Be patient! Wait! We have the plans for a Utopia already made;
just wiser than you.' For ten thousand years they've said that. We want our
Utopia now — and we're going to try our hands at it.
Sinclair Lewis; Main Street (1920)
February 7 is the 38th
day of the year in the Gregorian
calendar, with 327
days remaining (328 in leap years).
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Dies nefasti of February, ancient Rome
"This is one of the dies nefasti (N), a day on which no legal action or public voting could take place. The dies nefasti of February were days of religious ceremony honoring the dead and heralding the rebirth of the Spring and its associated fertility."
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