Yesterday
Tomorrow
"To divide a cube into two other cubes, a fourth power or in general any power whatever into two powers of the same denomination above the second is impossible, and I have assuredly found an admirable proof of this, but the margin is too narrow to contain it."
Pierre de Fermat
(08/16/1601 01/12/1665)
French mathematician
, notes in the margin of his copy of Diophantus' Arithmetica
"It is the glory and merit of some men to write well, and of others, not to write at all."
Jean de la Bruyere
(08/16/1645 05/10 or 05/11/1696)
French scholar
"Suspect all extraordinary and groundless civilities."
Thomas Fuller
(06/19/1608 08/16/1661)
English writer
"Anybody who has any doubt about the ingenuity or the resourcefulness of a plumber never got a bill from one."
George Meany
(08/16/1894 01/10/1980)
US labor organizer
"Eagles come in all shapes and sizes, but you will recognize them chiefly by their attitudes."
E. F. Schumacher
(08/16/1911 09/04/1977)
German-born economist
"Television has made dictatorship impossible, but democracy unbearable."
Shimon Peres
(08/16/1923 )
Polish Prime Minister of Israel, Nobel Laureate
"Looking for enlightenment is like looking for a flashlight when all you need the flashlight for is to find the flashlight."
Lew Welch
(08/16/1926 05/23/1971)
US writer
"When you play music you discover a part of yourself that you never knew existed."
Bill Evans
(08/16/1929 09/15/1980)
US pianist
"Oh how sweet it is to hear one's own convictions from another's lips."
Frank Gifford
(08/16/1930 )
US football player, announcer
(married to Kathie Lee Gifford)
"It was so wonderful being on 'Batman,' because you could be nasty and mean, and in the fifties women could never (unless you were some 'B' picture actress) be mean, bad, and nasty. It was so satisfying; I can't tell you how satisfying it was."
Julie Newmar
(08/16/1933 )
US actor
"As Duke Ellington once said, 'The Battle of Waterloo was won on the playing fields of Elkton.'"
Babe Ruth
(02/06/1895 08/16/1948)
US baseball player
(the actual quote, often misattributed to the Duke of Wellington, was "The Battle of Waterloo was won on the playing fields of Eton")
"What most people don't seem to realize is that there is just as much money to be made out of the wreckage of a civilization as from the upbuilding of one."
Margaret Mitchell
(11/08/1900 08/16/1949)
US writer (Gone With the Wind)
"The introduction of religious passion into politics is the end of honest politics, and the introduction of politics into religion is the prostitution of true religion."
Douglas McGarel Hogg, Lord Hailsham
(02/28/1872 08/16/1950)
English politician
"I change my hairstyle every day for the show, I'm fastidious and vain about my nails and teeth and grooming and makeup, but a perfect body, forget it. Dust to dust, wuggies to wuggies."
Kathie Lee Gifford
(08/16/1953 )
French-born US TV person
(married to Frank Gifford)
"This is the most uncomfortable coffin I've ever been in."
Bela Lugosi
(10/20/1882 08/16/1956)
Hungarian actor
, to Ed Wood on one of his movie sets
"It is my indignant opinion that 90 percent of the moving pictures exhibited in America are so vulgar, witless and dull that it is preposterous to write about them in any publication not intended to be read while chewing gum."
Wolcott Gibbs
(03/15/1902 08/16/1958)
US writer
"I think a character in a comedy should not know they're in a comedy."
Steve Carell
(08/16/1962 )
US comic actor
"I'd like to borrow his body for just 48 hours. There are three guys I'd like to beat up and four women I'd like to make love to."
Jim Murray
(12/29/1919 08/16/1998)
US columnist
, on Muhammad Ali
"If we knew the meaning to everything that is happening to us, then there would be no meaning."
Idi Amin Dada
(01/01/1926 08/16/2003)
African dictator
"In no other society do they have one person play with all four limbs."
Max Roach
(01/10/1925 08/16/2007)
US drummer
Yesterday
Tomorrow