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User talk:Kalki

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Well is ALL. Well All IS. ALL IS WELL. ALWAYS and ALL WAYS.

 ♘ ☤   Kalki · † archives: X · index ·  iota · imago · αnima · 2003 · 2004 · 2005 · 2006 · 2007 · 2008 · 2009 · controversies · assessments · VOC·K · 2009 † 2010 · outrages · 2011 · contentions · RfA1 · 2012 · RfA2 · 2013 · 2014 · RfA3 · 2015 · RfA4 · 2016 · 2017 · 2018 · 2019 · 2020 · 2021 · 2022 · Magic · Worldsong · Restorations · Chronology · Vox Box · Heroes · OZ · OASIS · ♖    = ⨀ ∴ ☥ ♥ ☮ ∵ ꇎ ॐ  =

· I usually have only a sporadic presence here on most days. ·
 I remain very busy with many urgent and diverse tasks and expect to very often be doing very minimal editing here for most of the days of most of the coming years. Though I once regularly spent many hours of most days at least monitoring this site, I now quite often spend less than an hour a day doing so, at various random periods within any day. There are sometimes stretches of weeks where I am hardly online at all, most days. There may be a few periods in some years where I will have the opportunity for extensive activities here for days at a time, but I am not actually counting on that occurring very often. I shall continue to usually check in at least daily, most of the time, but Time shall reveal what opportunities times can provide. · So it goes… ⨀∴☥☮♥∵ॐ … Blessings. ~ ♞☤☮♌Kalki·⚚⚓⊙☳☶⚡ · · ALL abides, always, and all abide, ALWAYS amidst ALL. ·

Kierkegaard Quote Source - Proposed by Kalki February 14 2007
Hi Kalki,

Do you know the actual source for this quote? I don't think Kierkegaard is the author, and your proposed QOTD from Feb 2007 is the earliest known publication of this quote (digital, book, or otherwise) that I can find.

"When one has once fully entered the realm of love, the world — no matter how imperfect — becomes rich and beautiful, it consists solely of opportunities for love."

Any more specific info on the quote origin would be great.

Thanks --Cusabe (talk) Cusabe (talk) 16:59, 29 November 2023 (UTC)

 * Thanks for the inquiry. I seem to have first added this to the Kierkegaard page as being cited to Works of Love (1847) in an edit of 13th February 2007; I do not currently recall what source I had for that attribution. It seems to have remained on the page in the subsection for that work, prior to the page being extensively broken up into pages for separate works by other editors. None of the translations currently accessible to me have the statement, but it could be in a lesser-known translation or arose somewhere as a paraphrase of some statements within it, or perhaps is an improper attribution altogether; I will investigate it further to the extent I can in coming days. ~ ♞☤☮♌Kalki ⚚⚓⊙☳☶⚡ 00:11, 30 November 2023 (UTC)

Oregon or Colorado
Hi : I thought it was Colorado's Supreme Court which removed Trump from the ballot not Oregon? Ottawahitech (talk) 01:49, 21 December 2023 (UTC)
 * Oops. You're right — I was in a rush yesterday to get a layout done before leaving, and didn’t notice I was posting to the wrong state — will be amending things now. ~ ♞☤☮♌Kalki ⚚⚓⊙☳☶⚡ 21:47, 21 December 2023 (UTC)

Notice
Hello, someone started a request for comment against your behaviours on this project, Village pump. I'm just noticing you about that. BTW, if possible, I'd like to recuse from such a political case. - Lemonaka 01:26, 3 January 2024 (UTC)

Request for revdel
Hi. Sorry to bother you. Please revdel several edits made by Special:Contribs/202.128.73.51. Reason: N-word, w:Shina (word), other inappropriate content. 魔琴 (talk) 01:31, 7 March 2024 (UTC)

WQ in general
Hi Kalki, I thought to pose some three of the most venerable users here an important question I just can't seem to figure out: why do you think, WQ has such an horrendous page rank on most search engines? Why wouldn't e.g. a very expansive WQ article on a relatively niche intellectual always top a short and potentially skewed WP article? Indeed, I think, especially for controversial leaders from historical scientific, religious and or political movements, having a representative WQ entry is much more insightful than the overly curated alternative. What might be the exact reason for this very noticeable skew? Do you also believe that, maybe, the aforementioned inclusion of certain figures' exact quotes, from politically incorrect up to and including borderline defamatory, has - rightly or not - lead to the actual WMF, well, somehow hardcoding this inferior status into the platform regardless of quality? Any clarification would be extremely helpful! Biohistorian15 (talk) 14:21, 25 March 2024 (UTC)

Roe v. Wade
This page gets a lot of views, but it's also really long, in fact it is the longest Wikiquote page. I noticed recently reverted the additions I made to the page for miscarriage and has nominated teratoma for deletion, I'm starting to wonder whether by presence here is particularly welcome; could I request arbitration of this dispute? I'm kind of lonely and confused, it seems almost random to me which of my unnecessarily large edits are allowed and which aren't, would it be ok to revert Roe v. Wade to a shorter version of the page with three longer sections? I was kind of hoping to collaborate with people here but that doesn't seem to happen much. CensoredScribe (talk) 22:47, 31 March 2024 (UTC)

Quote of the day
Hi, I see you often do the quote of the day, and thought you might consider running the following quote:Serit arbores, quae saeclo prosint alteri.He sows the seed of trees that they may be a profit to another age.~ Caecilius Statius ~

Thanks, Ficaia (talk) 16:11, 25 April 2024 (UTC)

 * Just thought I'd let you know I've created Quote of the day/May 3, 2024 Ficaia (talk) 17:22, 30 April 2024 (UTC)
 * I had noted that addition on the day it was added, and decided I would probably accept it as a good-faith suggestion, though it exhibited an ignorance or deliberate disregard of the normal procedures for suggestions and selections of QOTD since 2005. You seemed familiar enough with many operations of the wiki that I was inclined to believe it the later, and I had intended to comment on this yesterday, but remained too busy with many other concerns to spend much time here recently. Thus I had neglected to make a response to your initial suggestion here, as I was especially pressed for time on that day. A short time ago, I was doing a brief check in here and saw your subsequent addition, and though I am willing to accept that as well, as there are presently a paucity of suggestions on both days, and the suggestions were generally acceptable, I have extended the ranges of the QOTD pages protected from unauthorized editing,. Thank you for your efforts, but henceforth, please use more normal procedures for suggestions on the days of each month, such as Quote of the day/May. Though generally it is sought that the quotes or usually their author have some relation to the dates, this is often difficult with the more ancient authors, and it might be a good idea to create some page for suggestions by them without necessarily some rigorously specified dates or ranges of dates, to be used when there occasionally are very few and relatively poor suggestions for dates. I have to be leaving now, and will probably do some minor sizing tweaks on the images you provided later today, after I have returned. ~ ♞☤☮♌Kalki ⚚⚓⊙☳☶⚡ 12:35, 2 May 2024 (UTC)
 * Well that was a pompous response. "The normal procedures for suggestions and selections of QOTD" are basically dead, having been frequented by almost no one but yourself for a decade. BTW, I've also created Quote of the day/May 10, 2024 and Quote of the day/May 11, 2024. Ficaia (talk) 15:23, 2 May 2024 (UTC)
 * Also, I want to replace the second image in Quote of the day/May 4, 2024 with commons:File:The Westminster Portrait of Richard II of England (1390s).jpg. Why can I no longer edit the page? Ficaia (talk) 16:47, 2 May 2024 (UTC)
 * You seem to have figured that out. With the above remarks you have clearly proven yourself engaged in actions both presumptuous and deceitful, and quite duplicitous in your attitudes and apparent ruses of ignorance of some particular matters. Even so, I yet was inclined to consider your future suggestions simply on their merits, relative to those of others, as I have done with other adversarial individuals in the past, despite their apparent disdain or animosities towards me or the procedures which were established nearly two decades ago, though almost certainly with somewhat less inclination to accommodate your apparent whims and aims than I have done in those two initial postings. Then I saw your persistence in deliberate rejection of the standard procedures of suggestions and selections, with further postings without regard for them, and it leaves me far less inclined to be either charitable or deferential to such arrogantly presumptuous actions in the future. The "normal procedures for suggestions and selections of QOTD" for suggestions and selections are not "dead" but they and the Quote of the Day have been maintained and sustained by me since the earliest days of this project, though you seem to have a definite will to do what you can to bring about their end with your acts of blatant rejection of them in favor of solely your own presumptuous postings. I am thus inclined to delete these more recent deliberate intrusions entirely, and will now assert that further unauthorized postings into the official Quote of the Day pages prior to their entry into the protection ranges could properly be treated as malicious vandalism, and could result in temporary or even eventually an indefinite blocking of your account. ~ ♞☤☮♌Kalki ⚚⚓⊙☳☶⚡ 00:14, 3 May 2024 (UTC)
 * You have a real w:WP:OWNERSHIP issue with this process. There are two of us editing Quote of the day now. Ficaia (talk) 05:05, 3 May 2024 (UTC)

Sexual harassment
Could I get blocked if I asked another editor out on a date, and would it matter how I worded that request or whether I continued making it after being told that the answer is no and is always going to be no? We have a page for pick-up lines, would any of those constitute sexual harassment? I find the idea of editing Wikiquote together with someone who enjoys doing this to be romantic, though I don't know if any of the other editors would share that opinion seeing as it's usually a lot of work. CensoredScribe (talk) 14:36, 7 May 2024 (UTC)

Quote of the day/Protect
Hi Kalki. I'm not sure if you have seen the discussion on my talk page related to this page. I know that in years passed, we had discussed reducing the buffer for the protected days, but it had gotten increased again a couple of times (most recently by you this month). I am sure the adjustments were in response to disagreements on the process for selecting the quotes for the QOTD. After reading the discussion, might I ask for your input on again relaxing the protections to the current day? I want to get your feedback in this discussion based on your long history with the QOTD pages. I haven't always agreed with you over the years, but I do find that you usually operate with the project's best interests in mind. I look forward to the discussion. Thanks. ~ UDScott (talk) 16:52, 31 May 2024 (UTC)
 * Please pardon my lack of response yesterday, and the fact that I very likely will not have time to make a substantial response for another day or so. The last couple of months have kept me in a very hectic pace of activities most days, even by my standards, and the last couple of days have even been more hectic than most of them. I had expected to make fuller response today but it has thus far been far busier upon me than yesterday, but I expect some opportunity to concern myself more extemsively with matters here within the next few days. Thanks for your notice upon these matters, and I must now do a very few things here, and then leave again, for at least a few hours, and expect to be very busy most of the coming day thereafter. ~ ♞☤☮♌Kalki ⚚⚓⊙☳☶⚡ 20:38, 1 June 2024 (UTC) + tweak

Ficaia
An user has started mass deleting quotes he appears not to like on dozens of pages without giving valid, specific reasons for each deleted quote but hand-wavingly claiming that they all have the same problem (wrong formatting, or typos, or bias, or academic prose) which is not true, as the quotes are all different and usually are adequately sourced etc, and in any case, a discussion and the cleanup template should be used instead before deleting. Mass deleting without giving a specific rationale for each deleted quote is not helpful at all. Just as an example, here he removed dozens of quotes from Voltaire and others. Since you have interacted with the user before I am notifying you. --ᘙ (talk) 22:37, 3 July 2024 (UTC)
 * I have also noticed this behavior on the pages for abortion and human, where they have moved many quotes to the talk page, I would not consider an analysis of fictionalized television depictions of a subject from NPR to be academic prose. The page they created for history of abortion was also problematic being idiosyncratically organized and Eurocentric, they also seemed unwilling to have quotes featured on multiple pages. CensoredScribe (talk) 14:55, 10 July 2024 (UTC)

title: User talk:Kalki


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Boris Yeltsin

Boris Nikolayevich Yeltsin [Бори́с Никола́евич Е́льцин] (1 February 1931 – 23 April 2007) was a Russian and former Soviet politician who served as the first President of Russia from 1991 to 1999. A member of the Communist Party of the Soviet Union from 1961 to 1990, he later stood as a political independent, during which time he was viewed as being ideologically aligned with liberalism and Russian nationalism.

1980s

 * Let's not talk about Communism. Communism was just an idea, just pie in the sky.
 * Comment during a visit to the United States, as quoted in The Independent [ London] (12 September 1989)

1990s

 * A man must live like a great brilliant flame and burn as brightly as he can. In the end he burns out. But this is far better than a mean little flame.
 * Statement to a Times reporter in 1990, as quoted in "The wit and wisdom of Boris" in Guardian Unlimited (23 April 2007)
 * Despite all the difficulties and severe trials being experienced by the people, the democratic process in the country is acquiring an increasingly broad sweep and an irreversible character. The peoples of Russia are becoming masters of their destiny.
 * Appeal to citizens of Russia to oppose the 1991 coup attempt against Mikhail Gorbachev. (19 August 1991)

 * Storm clouds of terror and dictatorship are gathering over the whole country... They must not be allowed to bring eternal night.
 * Appeal to citizens of Russia to oppose the 1991 coup attempt against Mikhail Gorbachev. (19 August 1991)

 * Your commanders have ordered you to storm the White House and to arrest me. But I as the elected President of Russia give you the order to turn your tanks and not to fight against your own people.
 * Appeal to the military to not participate in the coup attempt, while standing on a tank during troop movements against the Russian White House. (19 August 1991)

 * I believe in this tragic hour you can make the right choice. The honor and glory of Russian men of arms shall not be stained with the blood of the people.
 * Appeal to the military to not participate in the coup attempt. (19 August 1991)
 * Using the traditional demagoguery, which has been tried and tested over the years, the putschists blame all our current difficulties on the democrats and promise economic recovery and a better life, security and prosperity for the citizens of the USSR. What a hypocritical lie! Surely Pavlov is responsible for rocketing inflation and unprecedented price rises this year? Surely Yazov as leader of the most corrupt highest placed generals, is responsible for the poverty and lawlessness of our servicemen? Surely Pugo bears personal responsibility for the blood shed in the Baltic republics? Surely Starodubtsev, leader of the organization of Soviet land-owners is to blame, owing to the stance he assumed, for the abortive collection of last year’s bumper crops? And these are the people who promise to “restore order in the country!”
 * Appeal to the Russian public to resist the coup attempt. (20 August 1991)
 * Perhaps, for the first time ever there is now a real chance to put an end to despotism and to dismantle the totalitarian order, whatever shape it may take. I trust that after all the unthinkable tragedies and tremendous losses that it has suffered, mankind will reject this legacy. It will not allow the 21st century to bring new suffering and deprivations to our children and grandchildren.
 * Address to the U.N. Security Council (31 January 1992)
 * For many years our two nations were the two powers, the two opposites. They wanted to make us implacable enemies, that effected the destinies of the world in a most tragic way. The world was shaken by the storms of confrontation. It was close to exploding, close to perishing, beyond salvation. That evil scenario is becoming a thing of the past. Reason begins to triumph over madness. We have left behind the period when America and Russia looked at each other through gun sites ready to pull the trigger at any time. Despite what we saw in the well-known American film, The Day After, it can be said today, tomorrow will be a day of peace, a day less of fear and more of hope for the happiness of our children. The world can sigh in relief. The idol of communism which spread everywhere social strife, animosity and unparalleled brutality which instilled fear in humanity has collapsed. It has collapsed never to rise again. I am here to assure you we shall not let it rise again in our land. I am proud that the people of Russia have found strength to shake off the crushing burden of the totalitarian system. I am proud that I am addressing you on behalf of the great people whose dignity is restored. I admire ordinary Russian men and women who in spite of s...severe trials have preserved their intellectual integrity and are enduring tremendous hardships for the sake of the revival of their country. Russia has made its final choice in favor of a civilized way of life, common sense and universal human heritage. I am convinced that our people will reach that goal. There is no people on this earth who could be harmed by the air of freedom. There are no exceptions to that rule.
 * Address to U.S. Congress (18 June 1992)

You can build a throne with bayonets, but you can't sit on it for long.
 * You can build a throne with bayonets, but it's difficult to sit on it.
 * Televised speech (4 October 1993), as quoted in A Democracy of Despots (1995) by Donald Murray. p. 8
 * Variant translations: You can make a throne of bayonets, but you can't sit on it for long.

 * Liberty sets the mind free, fosters independence and unorthodox thinking and ideas. But it does not offer instant prosperity or happiness and wealth to everyone. This is something that politicians in particular must keep in mind.
 * As quoted in Russia and the Independent States (1993) by Daniel C. Diller, p. 446

 * There are numerous bugbears in the profession of a politician. First, ordinary life suffers. Second, there are many temptations to ruin you and those around you. And I suppose third, and this is rarely discussed, people at the top generally have no friends.
 * The Struggle for Russia (1994)

 * Today is the last day of an era past.
 * Speech at a Berlin ceremony to end the Russian military presence in Germany (1 September 1994)
 * History demonstrates that it is a dangerous delusion to suppose that the destinies of continents and of the world community in general can somehow be managed from one single capital
 * Address to the Conference on Security and Cooperation in Europe in Budapest opposing the expansion of NATO (6 December 1994)

 * One could see that what you are writing was that today's meeting with President Bill Clinton was going to be a disaster. Now, for the first time, I can tell you that you are a disaster.
 * Speaking to the press following a "postively productive" meeting with Bill Clinton (24 October 1995)
 * Alternative translation: those anticipating a failure of the meeting "have failed" ("вы провалились").
 * Then some sort of election race is being created. The elections are not until the year 2000, but already now such a situation is being created that everybody seems to be striving for elections. Of course, such a situation cannot be tolerated any more. Here, on the contrary, there must be a united team. The team must be close-knit and work as a single fist.
 * (17 October 1996)
 * Russia has entered the year 1997 with a heavy burden of problems and the situation in the country is extremely complex, above all as concerns the economy. We have failed to stop the production slump and ensure the influx of investments. Society's belief in the ability of the power structures to stop the onslaught of crime is being undermined. It is ever more difficult to provide the armed forces with the essentials. The already low standard of living for the majority of Russian citizens continues to decline. People are suffering from delays in the payment of wages, pensions and benefits. All efforts to solve this problem have failed to yield tangible results
 * Annual address to the Federal Assembly (1997)
 * It is time to have order. First of all, inside the power structures. And I will have it. I am not satisfied with the government. The executive power has proved unable to work without presidential peremptory shouts. Most of the promises given to the people, particularly as concerns social questions have not been fulfilled. I have prepared a package of important and urgent measures. The structure of the government will change. Competent, energetic people will join it. I will announce within the next few days. But emergency measures are not enough. For this reason we shall begin to restore order to the entire system of bodies of state authority, state finances, regulation of the economy, and the fulfillment of social promises of the state, and we shall do it this year. This year, we shall draft and approve a program of radical reform of the executive power. Its aim is to radically enhance the efficiency of the state government.
 * Annual address to the Federal Assembly (1997)
 * Great harm to the country is done by the passing of laws that cannot be implemented. No allocations for them are envisaged in the budget. The deputies are aware of this, but still insist on passing laws that require tens of trillions of roubles to implement. It is strange that the authoritative and experienced regional leaders -- members of the Federation Council.
 * Annual address to the Federal Assembly (1997)
 * I told NATO, the Americans, the Germans, don't push us towards military action. Otherwise there will be a European war for sure and possibly world war.
 * Speaking on television about the NATO intervention in Kosovo, as quoted by The Guardian (April 1999)
 * A sense of proportion and humanitarian action are not issues for terrorists. Their aim is that of killing and destroying.
 * Speech at a summit of the Organisation for Security and Cooperation in Europe in Istanbul, Turkey, as quoted in BBC World Service (19 November 1999)

Against the Grain (1990)

 * Against the Grain : An Autobiography (1990)

 * Dissidents should be paid 13 months' salary for a year, otherwise our mindless unanimity will bring us to an even more hopeless state of stagnation. It is especially important to encourage unorthodox thinking when the situation is critical: At such moments every new word and fresh thought is more precious than gold. Indeed, people must not be deprived of the right to think their own thoughts.
 * p. 172

 * I am convinced that the moment is coming when, with its message of eternal, universal values, it will come to the aid of our society. For in these words: "Thou shalt not kill; Thou shalt love thy neighbor as thyself," lie those very moral principles that will enable us to survive even the most critical situations.
 * On the renewal of the Christian church in Russia, p. 251

There won't be a civil war (1991)
Interview in Ogonek (23 March 1991)

 * Quite recently I spoke to very different audiences in Yaroslavl, Kaliningrad, and Novgorod provinces. And although I met with workers, intellectuals, peasants, military men, party employees, and managerial employees, people with diverse political views, sympathies, and passions, it will be a long time before I will be able to recall such unanimity on the most important point, that is, the understanding that the country has reached the very final stage of collapse and that there is no longer anywhere to fall back to. The people who led one of the wealthiest and most talented countries on the planet to a state of destitution and degradation must always have a face of the “enemy” to fall back on, someone they can blame for everything that is going on. We have always had an “enemy” in the seventy-three years of Soviet power: at first we had the bourgeoisie, the gentry, and the capitalists; then we had the counterrevolutionaries, the Trotskyites, and the left- and right-wing deviationists, and also the kulaks; then came the CIA, imperialism, and the Zionist conspiracy. And now we need a new “enemy,” because no one believes in the CIA, the Trotskyites, or the capitalists anymore. The new “enemy” is the so-called democrats, who are destabilizing, tormenting, subverting, disorienting, and committing all other kinds of vile acts in their lust for power. On the basis of this logic, all we would have to do to make everything good in the country would be to remove the democrats and get rid of them somehow, and then there would ensue a glorious time known as the “Communist future,” “the socialist choice,” or the “radiant future.”
 * I trusted Gorbachev. It seemed to me that an alliance with Gorbachev might become very important in stabilizing the situation both in the republics and in the country as a whole. And many people urged me on. Our joint work on the 500-day program brought the interests of a renewed union of republics and the center even closer together. Gorbachev had admitted publicly that the Shatalin-Iavlinskii program looked very interesting and promising to him. It seemed to me that all we had to do was take one more step, and we could walk together onto the road which would lead us out of the crisis. But that didn’t happen. He suddenly changed his position drastically, and the 500-day program collapsed, burying any hopes with it for a way out of the impasse. Instead of breaking with Gorbachev and firmly divorcing myself from the president’s policies of half steps, half measures, and half reforms, I fell prey to the illusion that we could still reach an agreement. But, as it turned out, it was impossible to make an agreement with a president who is simultaneously the general secretary of the Central Committee of the Communist party and to whom the interests of the party caste and the party elite will always take precedence over any other interests. And so we lost four months. We didn’t get anywhere by supporting Moscow indirectly by our silence.
 * But I don’t believe in a civil war. No matter how agitated the atmosphere gets and no matter how hard the president and his advisers try to aggravate the situation, I am absolutely confident of the people’s common sense.

Farewell speech (1999)

 * Resignation speech (31 December 1999)

I have made a decision. I thought long and hard over it. Today, on the last day of the departing century, I am resigning. I have heard many times that "Yeltsin will hang onto power by any means, he won't give it to anyone." That's a lie. But that's not the point. I have always said that I would not depart one bit from the constitution. That Duma elections should take place in the constitutionally established terms. That was done. And I also wanted presidential elections to take place on time — in June 2000. This was very important for Russia. We are creating a very important precedent of a civilized, voluntary transfer of power, power from one president of Russia to another, newly elected one. And still, I made a different decision. I am leaving. I am leaving earlier than the set term. I have understood that it was necessary for me to do this. '''Russia must enter the new millennium with new politicians, with new faces, with new, smart, strong, energetic people. And we who have been in power for many years already, we must go.''' Seeing with what hope and faith people voted in the Duma elections for a new generation of politicians, I understood that I have completed the main thing of my life. Already, Russia will never return to the past. Now, Russia will always move only forward.
 * Today I am turning to you for the last time with New Year's greetings. But that's not all. Today I am turning to you for the last time as president of Russia.
 * Variant translation: Russian must enter the new millennium with new politicians, new faces, new intelligent and energetic people...
 * As quoted in The 100 Greatest Heroes (2003) p. 60 by Harry Paul Jeffers

 * I should not interfere with this natural march of history. To hold onto power for another half-year, when the country has a strong man who is worthy of being president and with whom practically every Russian today ties his hopes for the future? Why should I interfere with him? Why wait still another half-year? No, that's not for me! It's simply not in my character!

I want to ask for your forgiveness. For the fact that many of the dreams we shared did not come true. And for the fact that what seemed simple to us turned out to be tormentingly difficult.''' I ask forgiveness for not justifying some hopes of those people who believed that at one stroke, in one spurt, we could leap from the gray, stagnant, totalitarian past into the light, rich, civilized future. I myself believed in this, that we could overcome everything in one spurt. I turned out to be too naive in something. In some places, problems seemed to be too complicated. We forced our way forward through mistakes, through failures. Many people in this hard time experienced shock.
 * '''Today, on this day that is so extraordinarily important for me, I want to say just a few more personal words than usual.

'''I am leaving. I did all I could''' — not according to my health, but on the basis of all the problems. A new generation is relieving me, a generation of those who can do more and better. In accordance with the constitution, as I resign, I have signed a decree placing the duties of the president of Russia on the head of government, Vladimir Vladimirovich Putin. For three months, again in accordance with the constitution, he will be the head of state. And in three months, presidential elections will take place.
 * Today it's important for me to tell you. The pain of each of you has called forth pain in me, in my heart. Sleepless nights, tormenting worries — about what needed to be done, so that people could live more easily and better. I did not have any more important task.

2000s

 * I cannot shift the blame for Chechnya, for the sorrow of numerous mothers and fathers. I made the decision, therefore I am responsible.
 * Interview on Russian television (2000), as quoted in the BBC Obituary (23 April 2007)

Russia also declared its independence. This was approved by the Supreme Soviet, and you know and remember that there was the Declaration on the Independence of Russia. So, the entire course of history was leading to a point when the regime, the political regime in the country had to be changed. It demonstrated that the Union was not as strong as this was loudly preached by mass media and the propaganda in general. The republics wished to become independent. This must only be welcomed... We have good peaceful relations and there were no military clashes. '''None of these countries had revolutions with bloody casualties and there was no civil war in any of the republics... Russia had to change and it did change.'''
 * It looks as if some people either have a short memory and are forgetting about that time and the events that occurred then … Let us recall the putsch of August 19, 1991. It was after the putsch that the republics began, one after another, to declare their independence.
 * Interview on Zerkalo (RTR) (29 December 2001)

 * We don't appreciate what we have until it's gone. Freedom is like that. It's like air. When you have it, you don't notice it.
 * As quoted in The 100 Greatest Heroes (2003) p. 60 by Harry Paul Jeffers

Quotes about Yeltsin

 * At the end of 1991 the USSR disintegrated into fifteen independent nations. Russia’s president, Boris Yeltsin, launched economic reforms that privatized much of the economy but in the process allowed politically connected cronies to acquire vast wealth from what was once state property. The economy spiraled downward and by 1999, 40 percent of Russians were living in poverty. Rates of drug use, crime, and corruption rose, while health care deteriorated and life span declined. Russia’s population fell by more than 500,000 people each year, as death rates far exceeded birth rates. President Vladimir Putin, who took office in 1999, attempted to reduce corruption and the power of the economic oligarchs. With majority public support, Putin renationalized a number of major energy companies. He was accused of shifting government back toward authoritarianism, but some observers thought his actions were necessitated by the nature and scope of the problems his nation faced.
 * James DeFronzo, Revolutions and Revolutionary Movements (2018), p. 70
 * In June, the biggest republic of them all, the Russian, elected its own president. He was Boris Yeltsin, a former Moscow party boss and now Gorbachev's chief rival. The contrast could not be missed, because for all of his talk of democracy, Gorbachev had never subjected himself to a popular vote. Another contrast, less evident at the time, would soon become clear: Yeltsin, unlike Gorbachev, had a grand strategic objective. It was to abolish the Communist Party, dismantle the Soviet Union, and make Russia an independent democratic capitalist state. Yeltsin was not a popular figure in Washington. He had a reputation for heavy drinking, publicity seeking, and gratuitous attacks on Gorbachev at a time when Bush was trying to support him. He had even once picked a fight over protocol in the White House driveway with Condoleezza Rice, the president's young but formidable Soviet adviser—which he lost. By 1991, though, there was no denying Yeltsin's importance: in "reassert[ing] Russian political and economic control over the republic's own affairs," Scowcroft recalled, "he was attacking the very basis of the Soviet state." It was one thing for the Bush administration to watch Soviet influence in Eastern Europe disintegrate, and then to push German reunification. It was quite another to contemplate the complete breakup of the U.S.S.R. "My view is, you dance with who is on the dance floor," Bush noted in his diary. "[Y]ou especially don't . . . [encourage] destabilization. . . . I'm wondering, where do we go and how do we get there?"
 * John Lewis Gaddis, The Cold War: A New HIstory (2005), pp. 254-255
 * Yeltsin was not just an unpopular president: he was the first politician who Russians ever trusted—and the disappointment his people now felt was every bit as bitter as the support he had enjoyed had once been inspiring.
 * Masha Gessen, The Man Without a Face: The Unlikely Rise of Vladimir Putin (2012), pp. 12-13

 * Russia under Yeltsin was at this point experiencing extremes of humiliation and paranoia. It had a wrecked economy and a triumphant western alliance advancing towards its doorstep. Negotiations now began for Estonia, Latvia, Lithuania, Bulgaria and Romania also to join NATO, turning the earlier necklace of former communist states into what looked to Moscow more like a noose. But Yeltsin had other worries. He decided not to move Russia gradually towards capitalism, by ensuring currency control and strict financial policing. Instead he went full speed ahead. He curbed public spending, cut subsidies, freed prices and gave the ownership of factories and utilities to Russian citizens in the form of share vouchers. These grossly undervalued vouchers were swiftly bought up by middlemen and sold on to a network of oligarchs, who became sensationally rich before vanishing abroad. A Siberian oil well was swiftly converted into a Knightsbridge mansion. The value of Russia’s copious natural resources was thus invested in London, Cyprus, the Middle East and other boltholes in what became one of Europe’s most systematic acts of kleptomania. (William the Conqueror’s plunder of England in the eleventh century at least remained largely in situ.) By the end of the nineties, Russia’s national product had halved and the rouble collapsed. Millions lost their savings and, in some parts of the country, there was a cry for a return to communism. This in turn led to attempts to unseat Yeltsin. If Gorbachev had lost control over the demise of communism, Yeltsin lost it over the rise of capitalism.
 * Simon Jenkins, A Short History of Europe: From Pericles to Putin (2018)

 * The reformer Yeltsin represents the tendency which wants to reduce the gigantic state apparatus. Consequently he follows in Trotsky's footsteps.
 * Ernest Mandel in New Times, 21 March 1990. Quote from Harpal Brar's Trotskyism or Leninism?, pp. 56

 * He's been on the verge of death so many times. … His doctors themselves are in shock that he's still alive. Half the blood vessels in his brain are about to burst after his strokes, his intestines are spotted all over with holes, he has giant ulcers in his stomach, his heart is in absolutely disgusting condition, he is literally rotting … He could die from any one of dozens of physical problems that he has, but contrary to all laws of nature — he lives.
 * General Alexander Lebed; Lebed died in 2002, Yeltsin lived to 2007.

 * And for a time, it seemed like that corruption investigation might be the undoing of Yeltsin and his family and his cronies. Vladimir Putin as head of the FSB took care of that problem for Boris Yeltsin. Putin arranged for a video to be broadcast on television that showed the prosecutor or somebody who maybe kind of looked like the prosecutor in bed with not one but two young very young females.
 * The video was low enough quality and it was shot from sort of oblique enough angles that you couldn`t necessarily tell with the naked eye who this grown man was with these girls in this bed. But Putin stepped up in his authority as head of the FSB. Vladimir Putin assured the Russian public that he could guarantee that the man in the video was in fact that prosecutor.
 * And so that was the end of that prosecutor and that was the end of the corruption investigation into Boris Yeltsin and his family. And in gratitude, or at least in payback, Boris Yeltsin decided that he would name as the next prime minister of Russia and then the next president of Russia that FSB guy who helped him out, Vladimir Putin.
 * Rachel Maddow Transcript: The Rachel Maddow Show 4/18/22

 * When he came to power in 1985, Gorbachev had promoted a tall, energetic but reckless new leader named Boris Yeltsin to Moscow party chief and Politburo member. Almost the same age as Gorbachev, Yeltsin was the son of a builder who had been repressed by Stalin. Growing up in Sverdlovsk, he rose to local party secretary by 1976. Yeltsin was the opposite of Gorbachev: while the latter was contemplative, legalistic, sometimes verbose, often witty, and brave, Yeltsin was bombastic, emotional, courageous – and an alcoholic. The two soon clashed, and Gorbachev sacked Yeltsin in 1987, giving him a public dressing-down. But, both opportunistic and idealistic, Yeltsin was ahead of Gorbachev in realizing that the Soviet Union and communism itself would and should soon fall. Yeltsin embraced liberal democracy – yet it also suited him. He was elected president of the Russian Republic in 1989, giving him potential legitimacy unavailable to Gorbachev. In July 1990, he dramatically resigned from the Communist Party.
 * Simon Sebag Montefiore, Titans of History: The Giants Who Made Our World (2012)
 * In the following months, the strain started to show as ethnic turmoil and bloodshed intensified in the Caucasus and Soviet security forces seemed to be out of control, killing protesters in Lithuania. The Politburo and security service, the KGB, plotted to overthrow Gorbachev: in August 1991, a committee of incompetent drunken communist leaders and Chekists arrested Gorbachev on his Black Sea holiday and sent tanks into Moscow, but crowds defended the White House offices of Yeltsin. Yeltsin bravely climbed onto a tank outside to defiantly address the crowds. The coup fell apart, but its real victim was Gorbachev, who had lost his prestige. When Gorbachev tried to regain the momentum, Yeltsin ended the monopoly of the Communist Party and then conspired with the elected presidents of the other Soviet republics to end the Soviet Union. Gorbachev resigned on Christmas Day 1991, thus ending the Soviet Union, which broke up into its independent republics. Gorbachev realised that communist oligarchy was wrong, and after his fall he sincerely embraced liberal democracy but it was too late.
 * Simon Sebag Montefiore, Titans of History: The Giants Who Made Our World (2012)
 * Yeltsin dominated Russia in the 1990s and, initially, his enthusiasm and openness were refreshing. Almost for the first time in its history, Russia enjoyed totally free elections, a totally free press, a free economy, a free investigation of history and of state crimes – and all these were Yeltsin’s achievements. But he was fatally flawed: alcoholic, inconsistent and capricious, he ruled like a tsar through cronies and henchmen such as his sinister bodyguard General Korzhakov and his billionaire financial adviser Boris Berezovsky. Yeltsin’s privatisation of the Russian economy was hopelessly mismanaged, making billionaires of the so-called Oligarchs, overpowerful businessmen like Berezovsky. In 1993, communist hardliners in parliament threatened the entire democratic project with an armed revolt that Yeltsin defeated by ordering the storming by special forces of the White House in Moscow. The following year, faced with rebellion and the assertion of independence by Chechnya, Yeltsin invaded the little republic. As they committed atrocities on a vast scale, killing thousands of innocent civilians and utterly destroying cities such as Grozny, Russian forces were humiliated by dynamic Chechen fighters. Yeltsin was forced to retreat, withdraw Russian forces from Chechnya and infamously recognize Chechen independence – an unprecedented Russian humiliation. The decay of financial corruption, Kremlin intrigue, economic chaos, mafia disorder and resurgent repression unleashed by the Chechen war discredited his real achievements.
 * Simon Sebag Montefiore, Titans of History: The Giants Who Made Our World (2012)
 * By 1996, Yeltsin, ill and isolated, faced a new election that he seemed likely to lose: his billionaire cronies, the Oligarchs, mobilized their fortunes to help him win reelection but even democracy was tainted. The next three years saw economic meltdown and Yeltsin’s personal decline as he sacked prime ministers with imperial whimsy and embarrassed his country with acts of drunken buffoonery. In 1999, he chose a young, ambitious and severe ex-KGB officer and cabinet minister named Vladimir Putin to be his successor, dramatically resigning the presidency. Putin proved more than equal to the task: he restored the power of the state and the prestige of Russia as a great power, crushed mafia corruption and broke the influence of the Oligarchs. At the same time he demonstrated his discipline and vigour by again attacking Chechnya with brutal and bloody competence, crushing the rebellion at the cost of hundreds of thousands of civilian lives. Putin promoted his colleagues from the security services who dominated Russian government and business, diminished democracy and press freedom, ended the election of local governors and personified a new Russian form of authoritarian government that he called sovereign democracy. Putin utterly dominated Russia in a way Gorbachev and Yeltsin had never done, probably the dominant Russian leader of the early twenty-first century.
 * Simon Sebag Montefiore, Titans of History: The Giants Who Made Our World (2012)

International reactions to the death of Yeltsin

 * Declarations and condolences following the death of Yeltsin on April 23, 2007 from heart failure at age 76; sorted alphabetically by author or source.

 * Boris Yeltsin was a man of bold and free spirit who, I believe, will remain in the history of not only Russia but also of the Baltic States and the world. His position accelerated Lithuania’s march towards freedom and contributed to the restoration of the independence of all Baltic States. It was a great honor for us to have such a friend and partner.
 * Lithuanian President Valdas Adamkus, in a press release on the death of Yeltsin (23 April 2007)

 * As president, he had enormous challenges and difficult mandates, but he certainly brought East and West closer together and helped replace confrontation by cooperation.
 * President of the European Commission José Manuel Barroso, as quoted in "World hails Yeltsin as a courageous but flawed figure", France24 (23 April 2007)

 * Without a doubt, President Yeltsin — with all the human weaknesses no one is free of — was one of the truly great men of our age. When all was uncertain in the disintegrating Soviet Union, he was the one to set a new course by abolishing the Soviet Union and recognising the independence of the three Baltic States. His repudiation of Communism was unequivocal, and he clearly directed the new Russia towards ever closer cooperation with the rest of Europe. He was a great person in the history of Russia and of Europe.
 * Swedish foreign minister Carl Bildt, remarks on Yeltsin's death (23 April 2007)

 * He was a remarkable man who saw the need for democratic and economic reform and in defending that reform he played a vital role at a crucial time in Russia's history.
 * UK Prime Minister Tony Blair, "Blair tribute to Yeltsin's role", BBC (23 April 2007)

 * President Yeltsin was an historic figure who served his country during a time of momentous change. He played a key role as the Soviet Union dissolved, helped lay the foundations of freedom in Russia, and became the first democratically elected leader in that country's history.
 * US President George W. Bush, in "President and Mrs. Bush Saddened by the Death of Former Russian President Boris Yeltsin"

 * The world will keep of President Yeltsin the memory of a man who, by his courage, his tenacity and his political direction, knew to make the triumph of freedom and engage Russia on the way to democracy.
 * French President Jacques Chirac, in his message to Naina Yeltsina, Lettre de condoléances de M. Jacques CHIRAC à la suite du décès du Président Boris Eltsine (23 April 2007)

 * No Americans, at least, will forget seeing him standing on the tank outside of the [Russian] White House resisting the coup attempt.
 * United States Secretary of Defense Robert Gates, as quoted in "Comments About Boris Yeltsin's Death" (23 April 2007)

 * President Boris Yeltsin was of major importance to the development of democracy in Russia. Yeltsin was President of Russia at a time of great change —  he could be said to have brought democracy to Russia and defended it in challenging circumstances. I have great respect for President Yeltsin’s work in developing Russia and I wish to extend my sympathy to the people of Russia on the death of Boris Yeltsin.
 * President of Finland Tarja Halonen, in "Statement by President of the Republic Tarja Halonen on the death of former President Boris Yeltsin" (23 April 2007)

It was a tragic destiny.
 * I express my profoundest condolences to the family of the deceased, who had major deeds for the good of the country as well as serious mistakes behind him.
 * Mikhail Gorbachev, as quoted in "In quotes: Reactions to Yeltsin death", BBC (23 April 2007)

That momentous occasion when he stood on the tank outside the Russian Parliament and held back the counter-revolution, if I can put it that way, by the old guard of the former Soviet regime. He has a place in history as a result of that. Later on he lost a lot of credibility on some economic issues, but nothing can wipe out the contribution that Yeltsin made to bringing democracy to Russia.
 * I think he will be best remembered as the person who really ultimately did save the arrival of democracy in Russia.
 * Australian Prime Minister John Howard, as quoted in "Yeltsin 'saved democracy' in Russia: Howard" by AAP, in The Sydney Morning Herald (24 April 2007)

 * [Yeltsin] played a significant role in the dissolution of the Soviet Union as a totalitarian regime and the birth of a new Russia, whereby he contributed to democratic changes in Europe during the 1980s and 1990s.
 * President of Estonia Toomas Hendrik Ilves, in "President Ilves: Boris Yeltsin played a significant role in the birth of a new Russia" (23 April 2007)

 * The news on the sudden death of the first president of Russian Federation Boris Yeltsin was met with the feeling of a deep sorrow in Uzbekistan.
 * President of Republic of Uzbekistan Islam Karimov, in Official message to President of Russia Vladimir Putin (25 April 2007)

 * President Yeltsin will be remembered for the critical role he played in advancing political and economic reforms in Russia, as well as in fostering rapprochement between East and West.
 * United Nations Secretary-General Ban Ki-moon, in official statement on the Death of Boris Yeltsin (23 April 2007)

 * A leader of the nation, in the full sense of the word, has quitted life, a true patriot of his country, an outstanding statesman, a man who was rooting for Russia and its people with all his heart. Boris Nikolayevich, a true friend and a great politician, whose name is linked to the most important and memorable pages in the development of the union relationship between the Belarusian and Russian people, will remain forever in the hearts of Belarusians.
 * Belarussian President Alexander Lukashenko, in "Alexander Lukashenko Extends Condolences over the Death of the First President of the Russian Federation Boris Yeltsin" (23 April 2007)

 * Yeltsin was a great personality in Russian and international politics, a brave fighter for democracy and freedom and a true friend of Germany.
 * German Chancellor Angela Merkel, in "Bundeskanzlerin Angela Merkel kondolierte zum Tode von Boris Jelzin Die Bundesregierung" (23 April 2007)]
 * Yeltsin's presidency has inscribed him forever in Russian and in world history. … A new democratic Russia was born during his time: a free, open and peaceful country. A state in which the power truly does belong to the people. … the first President of Russia’s strength consisted in the mass support of Russian citizens for his ideas and aspirations. Thanks to the will and direct initiative of President Boris Yeltsin a new constitution, one which declared human rights a supreme value, was adopted. It gave people the opportunity to freely express their thoughts, to freely choose power in Russia, to realise their creative and entrepreneurial plans. This Constitution permitted us to begin building a truly effective Federation. … We knew [Yeltsin] as a brave and a warm-hearted, spiritual person. He was an upstanding and courageous national leader. And he was always very honest and frank while defending his position. … [Yeltsin] assumed full responsibility for everything he called for, for everything he aspired to. For everything he tried to do and did do for the sake of Russia, for the sake of millions of Russians. And he invariably took upon himself, let it in his heart, all the trials and tribulations of Russia, peoples’ difficulties and problems.
 * Russian president Vladimir Putin, declaring April 25, 2007, a day of national mourning, in his Address on the Occasion of Boris Yelstin’s Passing Kremlin (23 April 2007)]

 * It's sad news, that Boris Yeltsin is dead. We owe the former Russian president respect for standing ground for the democracy of Russia.
 * Prime Minister of Denmark Anders Fogh Rasmussen, in DR.DK TV remarks about the death of Yeltsin (23 April 2007)

 * When we remember Boris Yeltsin, we remember a person who played an important role in bringing down the Soviet dictatorship and who guided Russia in its first steps towards democracy. Without the contributions Yeltsin made at that time, it is likely that developments could have taken a very different turn. As President, Boris Yeltsin also helped open up Russia for important market economy reforms. In a country where private ownership was previously forbidden or actively opposed, this was an effort that was neither easy nor unproblematic, but was utterly necessary.
 * Swedish Prime Minister Fredrik Reinfeldt, in remarks on Yeltsin's death (23 April 2007)

 * He was a genuine politician. You could change his mind if you talked to him for half an hour. He and Vladimir Putin are two very, very different people.
 * Georgian President Mikhail Saakashvili, in "Georgia on a mission to win friends" by Richard Beeston, in The Times (25 April 2007)

 * Deepest condolences to the family, Russian people and Vladimir Putin for death of the first democratic Russian leader.
 * President of Serbia Boris Tadić, "Umro Boris Jeljcin" (23 April 2007)

 * Russia’s First President Boris Yeltsin has invaluable merit to the whole world … At the same time, he was strong opponent of withdrawal of Soviet troops from Poland and our joining NATO. I pity this person, one has to admit, his life was not kind to him. All of us will die some day.
 * Lech Walesa, Lech Walesa: Boris Yeltsin has invaluable merit to the whole world", Regnum News (23 April 2007)

 * A great democrat and remarkable politician, whose name is associated with an epoch in the world’s history … Boris Yeltsin made a unique contribution to Russia’s revival, promoting the principles of freedom, equality and sovereignty in the former Soviet Union and seeking to fairly rebuild the modern world, and his contribution can only be compared with those by great leaders.
 * Ukrainian President Viktor Yushchenko, in (23 April 2007)

 * With his unfortunate passing, the Chinese people have lost a sincere friend.
 * Li Zhaoxing, Chinese foreign minister, as quoted in People's Daily (24 April 2007)

license: Creative Commons - Attribution Share-Alike - https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-sa/4.0/

title: Boris Yeltsin


text:
Walt Whitman

Walt Whitman (May 31, 1819 – March 26, 1892) was an American journalist and poet, most famous for his lifelong work on his book Leaves of Grass.
 * See also: Leaves of Grass

Quotes

 * It is a beautiful truth that all men contain something of the artist in them. And perhaps it is the case that the greatest artists live and die, the world and themselves alike ignorant what they possess. Who would not mourn that an ample palace, of surpassingly graceful architecture, fill'd with luxuries, and embellish'd with fine pictures and sculpture, should stand cold and still and vacant, and never be known or enjoy'd by its owner? Would such a fact as this cause your sadness? Then be sad. For there is a palace, to which the courts of the most sumptuous kings are but a frivolous patch, and, though it is always waiting for them, not one of its owners ever enters there with any genuine sense of its grandeur and glory. I think of few heroic actions, which cannot be traced to the artistical impulse. He who does great deeds, does them from his innate sensitiveness to moral beauty.
 * "Talk to an Art-Union (A Brooklyn fragment)" (1839); later delivered as a lecture at the Brooklyn Art Union (31 March 1851) and printed in the Brooklyn Daily Advertizer (3 April 1851)

 * Talk not so much, then, young artist, of the great old masters, who but painted and chisell'd. Study not only their productions. There is a still higher school for him who would kindle his fire with coal from the altar of the loftiest and purest art. It is the school of all grand actions and grand virtues, of heroism, of the death of patriots and martyrs — of all the mighty deeds written in the pages of history — deeds of daring, and enthusiasm, devotion, and fortitude.
 * "Talk to an Art-Union (A Brooklyn fragment)" (1839)

 * This is what you shall do: Love the earth and sun and the animals, despise riches, give alms to every one that asks, stand up for the stupid and crazy, devote your income and labor to others, hate tyrants, argue not concerning God, have patience and indulgence toward the people, take off your hat to nothing known or unknown or to any man or number of men, go freely with powerful uneducated persons and with the young and with the mothers of families, read these leaves in the open air every season of every year of your life, re examine all you have been told at school or church or in any book, dismiss whatever insults your own soul, and your very flesh shall be a great poem and have the richest fluency not only in its words but in the silent lines of its lips and face and between the lashes of your eyes and in every motion and joint of your body. . . . The poet shall not spend his time in unneeded work. He shall know that the ground is always ready ploughed and manured . . . . others may not know it but he shall. He shall go directly to the creation. His trust shall master the trust of everything he touches . . . . and shall master all attachment.
 * From the Preface to the 1855 edition of Leaves of Grass

 * In our sun-down perambulations, of late, through the outer parts of Brooklyn, we have observed several parties of youngsters playing "base", a certain game of ball ... Let us go forth awhile, and get better air in our lungs. Let us leave our close rooms ... the game of ball is glorious.
 * Comments on baseball in the Brooklyn Daily Eagle (23 July 1846), as quoted in Walt Whitman Looks at the Schools (1950) by Florence Bernstein Freedman, p. 126-127

 * I have just this moment heard from the front — there is nothing yet of a movement, but each side is continually on the alert, expecting something to happen. O Mother, to think that we are to have here soon what I have seen so many times, the awful loads and trains and boatloads of poor, bloody, and pale and wounded young men again — for that is what we certainly will, and before very long. I see all the little signs, getting ready in the hospitals, etc.; it is dreadful when one thinks about it. I sometimes think over the sights I have myself seen: the arrival of the wounded after a battle, and the scenes on the field, too, and I can hardly believe my own recollections. What an awful thing war is! Mother, it seems not men but a lot of devils and butchers butchering each other.
 * Letter to his mother (22 March 1864)

 * Looking over my scraps, I find I wrote the following during 1864. The happening to our America, abroad as well as at home, these years, is indeed most strange. The democratic republic has paid her to-day the terrible and resplendent compliment of the united wish of all the nations of the world that her union should be broken, her future cut off, and that she should be compell'd to descend to the level of kingdoms and empires ordinarily great. There is certainly not one government in Europe but is now watching the war in this country, with the ardent prayer that the United States may be effectually split, crippled, and dismember'd by it. There is not one but would help toward that dismemberment, if it dared. [...] Are we indignant? alarm'd? Do we feel jeopardized? No; help'd, braced, concentrated, rather. We are all too prone to wander from ourselves, to affect Europe, and watch her frowns and smiles. We need this hot lesson of general hatred, and henceforth must never forget it. Never again will we trust the moral sense nor abstract friendliness of a single government of the old world.
 * "Attitude of Foreign Governments During the War", The Complete Prose Works of Walt Whitman (1892), volume 1, part I: Specimen Days.

 * We Americans have yet to really learn our own antecedents, and sort them, to unify them. They will be found ampler than has been supposed, and in widely different sources. Thus far, impress'd by New England writers and schoolmasters, we tacitly abandon ourselves to the notion that our United States has been fashion'd from the British Islands only, and essentially form a second England only — which is a very great mistake.
 * "The Spanish Element in Our Nationality," letter to the Philadelphia Press (20 July 1883), later published in The Complete Prose Works of Walt Whitman (1892), part V: November Boughs

 * Some people are so much sunlight to the square inch. I am still bathing in the cheer he radiated.

 * There was a kind of labor agitator here today—a socialist, or something like that: young, a rather beautiful boy — full of enthusiasms: the finest type of the man in earnest about himself and about life. I was sorry to see him come: I am somehow afraid of agitators, though I believe in agitation: but I was more sorry to see him go than come. Some people are so much sunlight to the square inch. I am still bathing in the cheer he radiated. ... Cheer! cheer! Is there anything better in this world anywhere than cheer — just cheer? Any religion better? — any art? Just cheer!
 * Conversation with Whitman (16 May 1888) as quoted in With Walt Whitman in Camden (1906) by Horace Traubel, Vol. I

 * I find I'm a good deal more of a socialist than I thought I was: maybe not technically, politically, so, but intrinsically, in my meanings.
 * Conversation with Whitman (July 16 1888) as quoted in With Walt Whitman in Camden (1906) by Horace Traubel, Vol. II

 * I said: "Baseball is the hurrah game of the republic!" He was hilarious: "That's beautiful: the hurrah game! well — it's our game: that's the chief fact in connection with it: America's game: has the snap, go fling, of the American atmosphere — belongs as much to our institutions, fits into them as significantly, as our constitutions, laws: is just as important in the sum total of our historic life."
 * Conversation with Whitman (4 July 1889) as quoted in With Walt Whitman in Camden (1906) by Horace Traubel, Vol. IV

'''Poetry (like a grand personality) is a growth of many generations — many rare combinations. To have great poets, there must be great audiences too.'''
 * If the United States haven't grown poets, on any scale of grandeur, it is certain that they import, print, and read more poetry than any equal number of people elsewhere — probably more than the rest of the world combined.
 * Complete Prose Works (1892), III. Notes Left Over 3. Ventures, on an Old Theme, p.324

Bartlett's Familiar Quotations, 10th ed. (1919)

 * I will write the evangel-poem of comrades and of love.
 * Starting from Paumanok, 6

 * I say the real and permanent grandeur of these States must be their religion.
 * ''Starting from Paumanok. 7

 * I say the whole earth and all the stars in the sky are for religion’s sake.
 * ''Starting from Paumanok. 7

 * None has begun to think how divine he himself is and how certain the future is.
 * ''Starting from Paumanok. 7

 * Nothing can happen more beautiful than death.
 * ''Starting from Paumanok. 12

 * I loafe and invite my soul.
 * Song of Myself, 1

 * I have no mockings or arguments; I witness and wait.
 * Song of Myself, 4

 * In the faces of men and women I see God.
 * Song of Myself, 48

 * I sound my barbaric yawp over the roofs of the world.
 * Song of Myself, 52

 * I see Hermes, unsuspected, dying, well-beloved, saying to the people, "Do not weep for me, This is not my true country, I have lived banished from my true country—I now go back there, I return to the celestial sphere where every one goes in his turn."
 * Salut au Monde, 6

 * Each of us inevitable; Each of us limitless—each of us with his or her right upon the earth.
 * Salut au Monde, 11

 * The great city is that which has the greatest man or woman.
 * Song of the Broad-Axe

 * In this broad earth of ours, Amid the measureless grossness and the slag, Enclosed and safe within its central heart, Nestles the seed perfection.
 * Song of the Universal, 1

 * All, all for immortality, Love like the light silently wrapping all.
 * Song of the Universal, 4

 * Youth, large, lusty, loving—Youth, full of grace, force, fascination! Do you know that Old Age may come after you, with equal grace, force, fascination?
 * Youth, Day, Old Age and Night

 * Roaming in thought over the Universe, I saw the little that is Good steadily hastening towards immortality, And the vast that is evil I saw hastening to merge itself and become lost and dead.
 * Roaming in Thought, 1

 * Thunder on! Stride on! Democracy. Strike with vengeful stroke!
 * Drum-Taps. Rise O Days from your fathomless Deep, 3

 * O Banner! Not houses of peace are you, nor any nor all of their prosperity; if need be you shall have every one of those houses to destroy them; You thought not to destroy those valuable houses, standing fast, full of comfort, built with money; May they stand fast then? Not an hour, unless you, above them and all, stand fast.
 * Drum-Taps. Song of the Banner at Daybreak

 * Over all the sky—the sky! far, far out of reach, studded with the eternal stars.
 * Drum-Taps. Bivouac on a Mountain-side

 * Give me the splendid silent sun, with all his beams full-dazzling!
 * Drum-Taps. Give me the splendid Silent Sun

 * Lo! the moon ascending! Up from the East, the silvery round moon; Beautiful over the house-tops, ghastly, phantom moon; Immense and silent moon.
 * Drum-Taps. Dirge for Two Veterans

 * Beautiful that war and all its deeds of carnage, must in time be utterly lost; That the hands of the sisters Death and Night incessantly softly wash again and ever again, this soiled world.
 * Drum-Taps. Reconciliation

 * When lilacs last in the door-yard bloomed, And the great star early drooped in the western sky in the night, I mourned, and yet shall mourn with ever-returning spring.
 * Memories of President Lincoln, 1

 * Come lovely and soothing death, Undulate round the world, serenely arriving, arriving, In the day, in the night, to all, to each, Sooner or later, delicate death.
 * Memories of President Lincoln, 14

 * Praised be the fathomless universe For life and joy and for objects and knowledge curious; And for love, sweet love—But praise! O praise and praise For the sure-enwinding arms of cool-enfolding Death.
 * Memories of President Lincoln, 14

 * O Captain! my Captain! our fearful trip is done! The ship has weathered every wrack, the prize we sought is won, The port is near, the bells I hear, the people all exulting.
 * Memories of President Lincoln. O Captain! my Captain!

 * Liberty is to be subserved, whatever occurs.
 * To a Foiled European Revolutionaire

 * Peace is always beautiful.
 * The Sleepers, 7

 * What do you suppose will satisfy the soul except to walk free and own no superior?
 * Laws for Creations

 * To me every hour of the light and dark is a miracle, Every cubic inch of space is a miracle.
 * Miracles

 * I was thinking the day most splendid, till I saw what the not-day exhibited; I was thinking this globe enough, till there sprang out so noiseless around me myriads of other globes.
 * Night on the Prairies

 * I see that I am to wait for what will be exhibited by death.
 * Night on the Prairies

 * I swear I think there is nothing but immortality!
 * To think of Time, 9

 * The paths to the house I seek to make, But leave to those to come the house itself.
 * Thou Mother with thy Equal Brood, 1

 * Society waits unformed and is between things ended and things begun.
 * Thoughts, 1

 * Now obey thy cherished secret wish, Embrace thy friends—leave all in order; To port and hawser's tie no more returning, Depart upon thy endless cruise, old Sailor!
 * Now Finalè to the Shore (To Tennyson)

 * I announce the great individual, fluid as Nature, chaste, affectionate, compassionate, fully armed; I announce a life that shall be copious, vehement, spiritual, bold, And I announce an end that shall lightly and joyfully meet its translation.
 * So Long!

Disputed

 * Be curious, not judgmental.
 * While consistently attributed to Whitman, this popular motivational quote has no source. It is occasionally listed as occurring in Leaves of Grass, but the closest phrase found in that collection is "Be not curious about God."

 * I see great things in baseball, It will take our people out-of-doors, fill them with oxygen, give them a larger physical stoicism, tend to relieve us from being a nervous, dyspeptic set, repair those losses and be a blessing to us.
 * This has been widely attributed to Whitman, and no one else, but without definite source. It has sometimes been cited as being from the Brooklyn Daily Eagle (sometimes with a date of 23 July 1846), where Whitman had been an editor, but its presence on that date is not apparent in the online historical archives of that publication.
 * Brian Cronin, in "Did 'Bull Durham' misquote Walt Whitman on baseball?", Los Angeles Times (28 March 2012), suggests that this is (loosely) paraphrased from a remark of September 1888 reported in Horace L. Traubel, With Walt Whitman in Camden, Vol. 2:
 * I like your interest in sports ball, chiefest of all base-ball particularly: base-ball is our game: the American game: I connect it with our national character. Sports take people out of doors, get them filled with oxygen generate some of the brutal customs (so-called brutal customs) which, after all, tend to habituate people to a necessary physical stoicism. We are some ways a dyspeptic, nervous set: anything which will repair such losses may be regarded as a blessing to the race. We want to go out and howl, swear, run, jump, wrestle, even fight, if only by so doing we may improve the guts of the people: the guts, vile as guts are, divine as guts are!
 * "Sports for a Dyspeptic Race", Intimate With Walt: Whitmans Conversataions With Horace Traubel, p. 261

 * Yes, Mexico must be thoroughly chastised! Let our arms now be carried with a spirit which shall teach the world that, while we are not forward for a quarrel, American knows how to crush, as well as expand!
 * Editorial comment identified as from the Brooklyn Daily Eagle (11 May 1846)

Misattributed

 * Keep your face always toward the sunshine – and shadows will fall behind you.
 * This has become attributed to both Walt Whitman and Helen Keller, but has not been found in either of their published works, and variations of the quote are listed as a proverb commonly used in both the US and Canada in A Dictionary of American Proverbs (1992), edited by Wolfgang Mieder, Kelsie B. Harder and Stewart A. Kingsbury.

Quotes about Whitman

 * Native American literature should be important to Americans not as a curio, an artifact of the American past that has little pertinence to an American present or future, but rather as a major tradition that informs American writers ranging from Cotton Mather and Nathaniel Hawthorne through Walt Whitman, William Carlos Williams, and William Faulkner to Adrienne Rich, Toni Cade Bambara, and Judy Grahn.
 * Paula Gunn Allen The Sacred Hoop: Recovering the Feminine in American Indian Traditions (1986)

 * I rank Muriel Rukeyser with Walt Whitman, the essential American poet, democratic at the level of hope.
 * Dorothy Allison, blurb for The Life of Poetry (1949)

 * Incompossible, adj. Unable to exist if something else exists. Two things are incompossible when the world of being has scope enough for one of them, but not enough for both—as Walt Whitman's poetry and God's mercy to man.
 * Ambrose Bierce, The Devil's Dictionary

 * the contributions of people whom we may now identify as lesbian, gay, bisexual, or transgender are integral and central to how we conceptualize our national history. Without the work of social activists, thinkers, writers, and artists such as We'Wha, Walt Whitman, Emily Dickinson, Martha "Calamity" Jane Cannary Burke, Edith Guerrier, Countee Cullen, Ethel Waters, Bayard Rustin, Roy Cohn, Robert Mapplethorpe, Cherrie Moraga, and Lily Tomlin, we would not have the country that we have today.
 * Michael Bronski A Queer History of the United States (2011)

 * Whitman...a man full-blooded and brotherly, unselfconscious in his democracy and genuinely at ease with all kinds and classes.
 * Gerald Bullett, "Walt Whitman", in Alfred Barratt Brown, Great Democrats, 1934.

 * The populist poet of Jacksonian democracy, Walt Whitman, sang the song of manhood and the Anglo-American super race that had been steeled through empire. As an enthusiastic supporter of the US war against Mexico in 1846, Whitman proposed the stationing of sixty thousand US troops in Mexico in order to establish a regime change there "whose efficiency and permanency shall be guaranteed by the United States. This will bring out enterprise, open the way for manufacturers and commerce, into which the immense dead capital of the country [Mexico] will find its way."2 Whitman explicitly grounded this prescription in racism: "The nigger, like the Injun, will be eliminated; it is the law of the races, history.... A superior grade of rats come and then all the minor rats are cleared out." The whole world would benefit from US expansion: "We pant to see our country and its rule far-reaching. What has miserable, inefficient Mexico... to do with the great mission of peopling the New World with a noble race?" In September 1846, when General Zachary Taylor's troops captured Monterrey, Whitman hailed it as "another clinching proof of the indomitable energy of the Anglo-Saxon character" Whitman's sentiments reflected the established US origin myth that had the frontier settlers replacing the Native peoples as historical destiny, adding his own theoretical twist of what would later be called social Darwinism.
 * Roxanne Dunbar-Ortiz, An Indigenous Peoples' History of the United States (2014)

 * Most of the books published during the five-year period leading up to, during, and after the invasion of Mexico were war-mongering tracts. Euro-American settlers were nearly all literate, and this was the period of the foundational "American literature," with writers James Fenimore Cooper, Walt Whitman, Edgar Allan Poe, John Greenleaf Whittier, Henry Wadsworth Longfellow, James Russell Lowell, Ralph Waldo Emerson, Henry David Thoreau, Nathaniel Hawthorne, and Herman Melville all active-each of whom remains read, revered, and studied in the twenty-first century, as national and nationalist writers, not as colonialists. Although some of the writers, like Melville and Longfellow, paid little attention to the war, most of the others either fiercely supported it or opposed it. Whitman, a supporter, was also enamored of the violent Indian- and Mexican-killing Texas Rangers. Whitman saw the war as bolstering US self-respect and believed that a "true American" would be unable to resist "this pride in our victorious armies."
 * Roxanne Dunbar-Ortiz, An Indigenous Peoples' History of the United States (2014)

 * I am not blind to the worth of the wonderful gift of "LEAVES OF GRASS." I find it the most extraordinary piece of wit and wisdom that America has yet contributed. I am very happy in reading it, as great power makes us happy. It meets the demand I am always making of what seemed the sterile and stingy nature, as if too much handiwork, or too much lymph in the temperament, were making our western wits fat and mean. I give you joy of your free and brave thought. I have great joy in it. I find incomparable things said incomparably well, as they must be. I find the courage of treatment which so delights us, and which large perception only can inspire. I greet you at the beginning of a great career, which yet must have had a long foreground somewhere, for such a start. I rubbed my eyes a little, to see if this sunbeam were no illusion; but the solid sense of the book is a sober certainty. It has the best merits, namely, of fortifying and encouraging...
 * Ralph Waldo Emerson, in a letter to Whitman, thanking him for a copy of Leaves of Grass (21 July 1855)

 * The whole world has given heroic figures to humanity, who in the face of persecution and obloquy have lived and fought for their right and the right of mankind to free and unstinted expression. America has the distinction of having contributed a large quota of native-born children who have most assuredly not lagged behind. Walt Whitman, Henry David Thoreau, Voltairine de Cleyre...Moses Harman...Horace Traubel...and quite an array of other brave souls have expressed themselves in keeping with their vision of a new social order based on freedom from every form of coercion. True, the price they had to pay was high. They were deprived of most of the comforts society offers to ability and talent, but denies when they will not be subservient. But whatever the price, their lives were enriched beyond the common lot.
 * Emma Goldman "Was My Life Worth Living?" (1934)

 * I had started reading Marx and Lenin, but at that point I think Walt Whitman and Henry David Thoreau had more effect on me. What I responded to in my readings were emotional rather than theoretical questions. I was developing a hatred of the brutality of the existing economic system, a hatred of the impersonal degradation of human beings. That's what moved me as a teenager, and stayed with me.
 * Dorothy Ray Healey California Red: A Life in the American Communist Party (1990)

 * I always knew in my heart Walt Whitman’s mind to be more like my own than any other man’s living. As he is a very great scoundrel this is not a pleasant confession.
 * Gerard Manley Hopkins, in a letter to Robert Bridges (18 October 1882)

 * One Whitman is miracle enough, and when he comes again it will be the end of the world.
 * Randall Jarrell, in "Some Lines from Whitman" in Poetry and the Age (1953), p. 119

 * Walt Whitman; I love his poetry.
 * Mariame Kaba, We Do This Til We Free Us (2021)

 * I know the formal element in Walt Whitman's poetry found and enormous echo throughout the world. Yet Walt Whitman's significance lies elsewhere. He combined the contemplation of nature and of civilization which are apparently either contradictory, into a single intoxicating vision of life, because he always had sight of the transitoriness of all phenomena. He said: "Living is the little that is left over from dying." so he gave his whole heart to every leaf of grass. I admire in him the reconciliation of art and nature. When the war between the Northern and Southern States in America, which first really set in motion the power of our present machine world, first broke out, Walt Whitman became a medical orderly. He did what all of us ought to do, particularly today. He helped the weak, the sick and the defeated. He was a Christian and–with a close affinity to us Jews–he was therefore an important measure of the status and worth of humanity.
 * Franz Kafka qtd. in Gustav Janouch Conversations with Kafka (1971), p. 167

 * I mean to carry on in the tradition of Walt Whitman. Whitman says, "I sing the body electric" and "I sing the body from top to toe." He writes about his goal of celebrating the modern man as he calls it, and he sings the American self.
 * 1989 interview in Conversations with Maxine Hong Kingston (1998)

 * I felt some really exciting things were happening with the language in the Sixties because people were finding that vocabulary for psychedelic states or visions or social action. But as I was working with that language, I saw too how it had its roots a hundred years ago in Whitman. So if it goes back a hundred years to Whitman, then it goes back thirty more to Poe. I feel very much in that tradition, showing people how 1960 was using language of the 1860s. Because we don't remember. Walt Whitman said, "Look to the East, that's also your motherland." He already had that idea that our myths are not just from Europe, but from Asia. So I'm saying, "Look at Asia," because we already know that we come from Europe. For a long time when we say classical, we meant Greek and Roman. And I'm saying, "Look, there's more classics, more."
 * 1989 interview in Conversations with Maxine Hong Kingston (1998)

 * I like the freedom that Walt Whitman was using to play with and shape the American language. Especially in writing Tripmaster Monkey-I just lifted lines from Leaves of Grass. You would think they were modern Sixties' slang-"Trippers and Askers" and "Linguists and Contenders Surround Me"-all of that-"Song of the Open Road," "Song of Occupations"-I just took those for title headings for my book. I like the rhythm of his language and the freedom and the wildness of it. It's so American. And also his vision of a new kind of human being that was going to be formed in this country-although he never specifically said Chinese-ethnic Chinese also I'd like to think he meant all kinds of people. And also I love that throughout Leaves of Grass he always says "men and women," "male and female." He's so different from other writers of his time, and even of this time. Even a hundred years ago he always included women and he always used [those phrases], "men and women," "male and female."
 * 1990 interview in Conversations with Maxine Hong Kingston (1998)

 * Behold great Whitman, whose licentious line Delights the rake, and warms the souls of swine; Whose fever'd fancy shuns the measur'd pace, And copies Ovid's filth without his grace. In his rough brain a genius might have grown, Had he not sought to play the brute alone; But void of shame, he let his wit run wild, And liv'd and wrote as Adam's bestial child. Averse to culture, strange to humankind, He never knew the pleasures of the mind. Scorning the pure, the delicate, the clean, His joys were sordid, and his morals mean. Thro' his gross thoughts a native vigour ran, From which he deem'd himself the perfect man: But want of decency his rank decreas'd, And sunk him to the level of the beast. Would that his Muse had dy'd before her birth, Nor spread such foul corruption o'er the earth.
 * H. P. Lovecraft, in an "Essay on Modern Poets" this was published as a "Fragment on Whitman” in The Ancient Track (2001) edited by S. T. Joshi, p. 192

 * Walt was always working on the same book/First edition did not/have his name on cover/He reviewed himself in newspapers anonymously/quoted Ralph Waldo Emerson/without permission/on the spine/Emerson was not thrilled/Take a breath/Full breath/That's what I call a poet
 * Naomi Shihab Nye Voices in the Air (2018)

 * Anyone can visit Walt Whitman's birthing corner on/Long Island./The guide points and says, There, right there, he was/born./Some visitors can't move on quickly/to the next room./They are hypnotized./What if Walt had never left this corner or stepped out/into the streets/to do and say all he did?/Then who would we be?
 * Naomi Shihab Nye Voices in the Air (2018)

 * When Whitman in Song of Myself wrote "Camerado, this is no book. Who touches this touches a man, and "What I assume you shall assume," he articulated an abiding impulse latent within all poetry. The women's poetry movement today is a carrier of that same impulse and makes it possible for us to "assume" more than we did before.
 * Alicia Ostriker Epilogue to Stealing the Language: The Emergence of Women's Poetry in America (1986)

 * I read a lot. In poetry, I liked W. H. Auden more than anyone. I loved British writers and the novels I grew up with, Twain, Dickens, and so on. I was not influenced say by Walt Whitman or anyone like that. His freedom was not my freedom, and so it didn’t affect me.
 * Grace Paley Interview with Poets & Writers (2008)

 * I make a pact with you, Walt Whitman — I have detested you long enough.
 * Ezra Pound, "A Pact"

 * Whitman’s masterpiece, his whole vision, is exactly about this: life as a quest for truth, love, beauty, goodness, and freedom; life as the art of becoming human through the cultivation of the human soul.
 * Rob Riemen, recalling a conversation with Joseph Goodman, Nobility of Spirit : A Forgotten Ideal (2008), p. xxvii

 * Whitman is a "bad influence"; that is, he cannot be imitated.
 * Muriel Rukeyser The Life of Poetry (1949)

 * Whitman to me is the most fascinating of American poets. Whitman started to write the great poetry from scratch after he had written all that junk for newspapers, the sentimental lyrical poems. All of a sudden he wrote Leaves of Grass. When I was teaching at the University of Nebraska, my friend James Miller was chairman of the English Department. He wrote the first book attempting to make a parallel between the structure of Leaves of Grass and the steps of the mystical experience as in St. John of the Cross. I was completely bowled over by this, not having been able to explain how Whitman came to write “Song of Myself,” which is unlike anything not only in American literature, but unique in all the world. The parallels to it are mystical literature. Miller tried to show that there was actual evidence for this kind of experience, which evidently happens at a particular moment in someone's life. ... When I saw the negative reaction to Whitman with the great ruling critics of the time, I couldn't believe it. Eliot never really gave up hammering away on Whitman, neither did Pound. Although Pound makes little concessions. Whitman, you know, didn't have any influence in this country until Allen Ginsberg came along.
 * Karl Shapiro, in "Karl Shapiro, The Art of Poetry No. 36", interviewed by Robert Phillips in Paris Review No. 99 (Spring 1986)

 * I would think Walt Whitman probably had more influence on my whole poetic thinking than anybody, but I never dreamed of trying to write in the Whitman manner.
 * Karl Shapiro, in "Karl Shapiro, The Art of Poetry No. 36", interviewed by Robert Phillips in Paris Review No. 99 (Spring 1986)

 * When I was young I once found a book in a Dutch translation, 'The leaves of Grass'. It was the first time a book touched me by its feeling of freedom and open spaces, the way the poet spoke of the ocean by describing a drop of water in his hand. Walt Whitman was offering the world an open hand (now we call it democracy) and my 'Monument for Walt Whitman' became this open hand with mirrors, so you can see inside yourself.
 * Karel Appel, as quoted in ‘Karel Appel – the complete sculptures’, eds. Harry de Visser / Roland Hagenberg, Edition Lafayette, New York 1990, p. 93

 * When I read the poetry of Walt Whitman, I could understand why he answered the question, “Do I contradict myself?" with "Very well then I contradict myself. I am large, I contain multitudes."
 * Cornel West Brother West: Living and Loving Out Loud, A Memoir (2009)

title: Walt Whitman


text:
Wikiquote:Themebot

ThemeBot is a proposed automatic theme-generator bot.

Algorithm
This bot would do the following:
 * For each page linked from List of people by name (except for List of people by occupation).
 * Parse each quote or Tranliteration / Translation.
 * For each noun or verb (or some subset to be decided on):
 * If a theme page does not exist for that word, create one.
 * Change the noun or verb on the person page into a link to the theme page. (i.e. prefix it with and suffix it with.
 * If the quote from the person page does not yet exist in the list of quotes on the theme page, add it in alphabetical order. (If another quote already exists on the theme page with more than 90% of the same words, replace it instead of adding a near duplicate. This would prevent the same quote being added if minor changes were made to it such as fixing of typos.)

Note that quotes could be added to theme pages manually and they would not be deleted by the ThemeBot.

If this was created and worked well, it could be possible to add quotes based on related terms rather than exact word matches e.g. a quote containing the word Christianity could be added to the Religion theme page. The link to the theme page would then be Christianity.

Issues with the ThemeBot
Add Pros, Cons, and Retorts as appropriate.
 * Pro: most of the manual creation of theme based pages could be automated which would allow us to concentrate on increasing the number of person pages.
 * Con: too many themes may easily be created, swamping Wikiquote with thousands of themes.
 * Retort: initially we could restrict it to creating theme pages for a smallish, specified list of words. This list could be increased over time. Maybe we could have a Requested Themes page to see what themes people want.
 * Retort: A requested theme page is rather pointless, as one could just as easily add the theme manually.
 * Also: the percentage of theme based pages in Wikiquote as a whole would decrease as the number of people pages increased into the thousands.
 * Con: duplicate or near duplicate quotes may still be added if the number of same words drops below 90%.
 * Retort: these could be removed manually when noticed, and would not be added again by the ThemeBot.
 * Con: not all quotes would be parsed correctly if they were not entered according to the template.
 * Retort: if in doubt, ThemeBot could ignore them.

And a <-- pagetheme: theme1, theme2; --> + <-- pagealso: synonym1, antonym1; --> for a page-wide theme. As soon as a page submit (Save page) takes place the ThemeBot could then parse that one page and updates the links, and it would have meaningful themes.
 * Alternative: Unless having the bot use a lookup list for synonyms the number of generated themes will be silly if all nouns are used. And with multiple languages to be included how will this be parsed, as indeed Marco d'Itri remarked below. Suggestion, use a visible tag for quotes themselves:
 * See also: more pages on Theme

Hooloovoo 18:20 Jan 2, 2004 (UTC) sorry for the expansive addition :)

Votes for or against the concept

 * For: Nanobug, Formulax, Angela
 * Against: Fonzy (for the moment maybe in a year.), LittleDan (all bot-made content is IMO worthless), Marco d'Itri (parsing natural language for concepts is hard... what about adding hidden theme metadata to quotes or whole pages?), Basil Fawlty (themes will be added as needed, such is the nature of a wiki), Gaurav, Kalki, Technopilgrim

Current status
In-limbo: If and when we have a significant majority of people for the proposal design and then coding will commence. This seems unlikely to happen in the short to medium term.

Comments

 * "People willing to help with the coding." What does that mean? I'm willing to help, but I don't know much PHP (I'm assuming that's what's going to be used?). I'm kinda learning as I go with PHP. In short, I'm willing, but I don't know if I'm useable. --Sasha--

 * A bot cannot possibly have enough intelligence to determine the theme of a quote just by parsing it for nouns and verbs. Is the following about God or love? No: "My God, I love Monet." It would make much more sense to allow the contributor to create links in the quote based on its theme.  A bot should simply check each theme page for "what links here" and grab the appropriate quote. "We will fight them on the beaches..." is not about beaches!  It would better look like We will fight them on the beaches..."  A bot could easily determine that the quote applies to the themes England, WWII, and war by checking "what links here" on those theme pages.  --Steve Sliva--

People willing to help with the coding

 * Nanobug

Implementation considerations

 * Frequency of bot: off-peak so as not to interfere with normal editing.
 * Output: strictly limited initially and only increased slowly over time.
 * Language written in: ?.

Additional Links

 * Wikipedia:Bots - bots are bad, at least some of the time.
 * Rambot - the classic Wikipedia bot.

title: Wikiquote:Themebot