May 02

"As a well-spent day brings happy sleep, so a life well spent brings happy death."

Leonardo da Vinci
(04/15/1452 – 05/02/1519)
Italian artist, writer, inventor, philosopher... the Original Renaissance Man (image courtesy of the Bridgeman Art Library)

"You philosophers are lucky men. You write on paper and paper is patient. Unfortunate Empress that I am, I write on the susceptible skins of living beings."

Catherine the Great
(05/02/1762 – 11/06/1796)
Russian leader

Georg Philipp Friedrich Freiherr von Hardenberg

"Love is the final end of the world's history, the Amen of the universe. "

Novalis
(05/02/1772 – 03/25/1801)
German writer

"Things they don't understand always cause a sensation among the English."

Alfred de Musset
(12/11/1810 – 05/02/1857)
French writer

"But there, everything has its drawbacks, as the man said when his mother-in-law died, and they came down upon him for the funeral expenses."

Jerome K. Jerome
(05/02/1859 – 06/19/1927)
English writer

"The nearest approach to immortality on earth is a government bureau."

James F. Byrnes
(05/02/1879 – 04/09/1972)
US Governor (SC)

"In automobile terms, the child supplies the power but the parents have to do the steering."

Dr. Benjamin Spock
(05/02/1903 – 03/15/1998)
US doctor, baby specialist

"Life is like eating artichokes, you have got to go through so much to get so little."

Thomas Aloysius Dorgan
(04/29/1877 – 05/02/1929)
US cartoonist (died near his birthday)

"We could have been millionaires; or milkmen; most probable of all, milers, generations of people who looked the enemy in the eye and ran like hell."

Leah Garchik
(05/02/1945 – )
US columnist , on her genealogy

"McCarthyism is Americanism with its sleeves rolled."

Joseph McCarthy
(11/14/1908 – 05/02/1957)
US Senator and Commie Hunter

"Longfellow is to poetry what the barrel-organ is to music."

Van Wyck Brooks
(02/16/1886 – 05/02/1963)
US historian, critic

"I refuse to admit I'm more than fifty-two, even if that does make my sons illegitimate."

Lady Astor
(05/19/1879 – 05/02/1964)
US zillionaire; first woman to sit in Parliament

"The worst was when my skirt fell down to my ankles—but I had on thick tights underneath."

Naomi Campbell
(05/02/1970 – )
English supermodel , on tragedy ; More Wisdom from the Supermodels

"I regret to say that we of the FBI are powerless to act in cases of oral-genital intimacy, unless it has is some way obstructed interstate commerce."

J. Edgar Hoover
(01/01/1895 – 05/02/1972)
US FBI director

"The next one."

George Pal
(02/01/1908 – 05/02/1980)
Hungarian animator , on which of his films was his favorite

"Any clod can have the facts, but having opinions is an art."

Charles McCabe
(??/??/1915 – 05/02/1983)
US writer

"Not many men have both good fortune and good sense."

Marilyn French
(11/21/1929 – 05/02/2009)
US writer