May 26

"People wish their enemies dead, but I do not; I say give them the gout, give them the stone!"

Lady Mary Wortley Montagu
(05/26/1689 – 08/21/1762)
English writer

"But me thought it lessened my esteem of a king, that he should not be able to command the rain."

Samuel Pepys
(02/23/1633 – 05/26/1703)
English writer

"A poet is a man who puts up a ladder to a star and climbs it while playing a violin."

Edmond de Goncourt
(05/26/1822 – 07/16/1896)
French writer , brother of Jules-Alfred Hout de Goncourt

"So that's what hay looks like."

Queen Mary
(05/26/1867 – 03/24/1953)
English royalty , on evacuation from the palace during WWII

"I can't see what Jack Warner can do with an Oscar—it can't say yes."

Al Jolson
(05/26/1886 – 10/23/1950)
US actor

"The camera is an instrument that teaches people how to see without a camera."

Dorothea Lange
(05/26/1895 – 10/11/1965)
US photographer

"I stick to simple themes. Love. Hate. No nuances. I stay away from psychoanalyst's couch scenes. Couches are good for one thing."

John Wayne
(05/26/1907 – 06/11/1979)
US actor

"No man is lonely while eating spaghetti."

Robert Morley
(05/26/1908 – 06/03/1992)
English actor

"Who wants to see me as 'Hamlet'? Very few. But millions want to see me as Frankenstein so that's the one I do."

Peter Cushing
(05/26/1913 – 08/11/1994)
English actor

"They weren't really weddings, just long costume parties."

Peggy Lee
(05/26/1920 – 01/21/2002)
US singer , on three of her weddings

"Worry affects the circulation, the heart, the glands, the whole nervous system. I have never known a man who died from overwork, but many who died from doubt."

Charles Horace Mayo
(07/19/1865 – 05/26/1939)
US physician (brother of William James Mayo)

"I always thought he sounded just like Yogi Bear."

Mick Ronson
(05/26/1946 – 04/30/1993)
English guitarist , on Bob Dylan

"I can't talk about myself. I just can't. I know I've influenced people, and I'm proud of that. But as I see it, I really haven't done anything. I haven't saved anybody from a burning building."

Pam Grier
(05/26/1949 – )
US actor

"My daddy, he was somewhere between God and John Wayne."

Hank Williams, Jr.
(05/26/1949 – )
US singer, songwriter

"America's one of the finest countries anyone ever stole."

Bob Goldthwait
(05/26/1962 – )
US comic actor (was engaged to Nikki Cox)

"With the number of people I ignore, I'm lucky I work at all in this town."

Helena Bonham Carter
(05/26/1966 – )
English actor (great-granddaughter of Herbert Henry Asquith; LTR with Tim Burton)

"A dying man needs to die, as a sleepy man needs to sleep, and there comes a time when it is wrong, as well as useless, to resist."

Stewart Alsop
(05/17/1914 – 05/26/1974)
US journalist (brother of Joseph Alsop, Jr.)

"Every man is born as many men and dies as a single one."

Martin Heidegger
(09/29/1889 – 05/26/1976)
German philosopher (LTR with Hannah Arendt)

"He did not suffer from a poor education; he suffered from the belief that he had a poor education."

George Wildman Ball
(12/21/1909 – 05/26/1994)
US United Nations rep , on Lyndon Johnson

"In the Top Forty, half the songs are secret messages to the teen world to drop out, turn on, and groove with the chemicals and light shows at discotheques."

Art Linkletter
(07/17/1912 – 05/26/2010)
Canadian humorist