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"The Schleswig-Holstein question is so complicated, only three men in Europe have ever understood it. One was Prince Albert, who is dead. The second was a German professor who became mad. I am the third and I have forgotten all about it."
Lord Palmerston
(10/20/1784 – 10/18/1865)
English statesman
(died near his birthday)
"Life isn't all beer and skittles, but beer and skittles, or something better of the same sort, must form a good part of every Englishman's education."
Thomas Hughes
(10/20/1823 – 03/22/1896)
English writer
"La vie est la farce à mener par tous.
Life is the farce which we all must lead."
Arthur Rimbaud
(10/20/1854 – 11/10/1891)
French writer
"Anyone who has begun to think places some portion of the world in jeopardy."
John Dewey
(10/20/1859 – 06/01/1952)
US educator, philosopher
"On two occasions I have been asked [by members of Parliament], 'Pray, Mr. Babbage, if you put into the machine wrong figures, will the right answers come out?' I am not able rightly to apprehend the kind of confusion of ideas that could provoke such a question."
Charles Babbage
(12/26/1792 – 10/20/1871)
English mathematician
"I guess I'm pretty much of a lone wolf. I don't say I don't like people at all but, to tell you the truth I only like it then if I have a chance to look deep into their hearts and their minds."
Bela Lugosi
(10/20/1882 – 08/16/1956)
Hungarian actor
"Wild animals never kill for sport. Man is the only one to whom the torture and death of his fellow creatures is amusing in itself."
James A. Froude
(04/23/1818 – 10/20/1894)
English historian
"Happy is said to be the family which can eat onions together. They are, for the time being, separate from the world, and have a harmony of aspiration."
Charles Dudley Warner
(09/12/1829 – 10/20/1900)
US writer
"The two women exchanged the kind of glance women use when no knife is handy."
Frederick Dannay
(10/20/1905 – 09/03/1982)
US? mystery writer
(as "Ellery Queen," with Manfred Lee)
"I always wanted to get into politics, but I was never light enough to make the team."
Art Buchwald
(10/20/1925 – 01/18/2007)
US journalist
"When great changes occur in history, when great principles are involved, as a rule the majority are wrong."
Eugene Debs
(11/05/1855 – 10/20/1926)
US labor organizer
"If Shakespeare had had to go on an author tour to promote Romeo and Juliet, he never would have written Macbeth."
Dr. Joyce Brothers
(10/20/1928 – )
US shrink, columnist
"If I knew I was going to live this long, I'd have taken better care of myself."
Mickey Mantle
(10/20/1931 – 08/13/1995)
US baseball great
"I am beginning to suspect all elaborate and special systems of education. They seem to me to be built upon the supposition that every child is a kind of idiot who must be taught to think."
Annie Sullivan
(04/14/1866 – 10/20/1936)
US educator
(notably of Helen Keller)
"I'd sing and shake my leg a bit, and it looked like I was doing something."
Wanda Jackson
(10/20/1937 – )
US singer
"When My Love Comes Back from the Ladies' Room, Will I Be Too Old To Care?"
Lewis Grizzard
(10/20/1946 – 03/20/1994)
US comic
, song title
"The only deadly sin I know is cynicism."
Henry Stimson
(09/21/1867 – 10/20/1950)
US Secretary of War
"I'm barely prolific and incredibly lazy."
Tom Petty
(10/20/1953 – )
US singer, songwriter
"It comes down to the fact that you supply the blue, and they supply the other colors and mix them with your blue, and maybe there's some blue left in the painting and maybe there isn't. Maybe there wasn't supposed to be any there in the first place. So have some fun and make a good blue and walk away."
Viggo Mortensen
(10/20/1958 – )
US actor
(was married to Exene Cervenka)
"Once upon a time my political opponents honored me as possessing the fabulous intellectual and economic power by which I created a world-wide depression all by myself."
Herbert Hoover
(08/10/1874 – 10/20/1964)
US President (31)
(see all US Presidents)
"So what if I'm smokin' weed onstage and doing what I gotta do? It's not me shooting nobody, stabbing nobody, killing nobody. It's a peaceful gesture and they have to respect that and appreciate that."
Snoop Dogg
(10/20/1972 – )
US rapper
"Tits and sand—that's what we used to call sex and violence in Hollywood."
Burt Lancaster
(11/02/1915 – 10/20/1994)
US actor
"Those magazine dieting stories always have the testimonial of a woman who wore a dress that could slip-cover New Jersey in one photo and thirty days later looked like a well-dressed thermometer."
Peg Bracken
(02/25/1918 – 10/20/2007)
US writer
"If I were asked for a one-line answer to the question 'What makes a woman good in bed?' I would say, 'A man who is good in bed.'"
Bob Guccione
(12/17/1930 – 10/20/2010)
US magazine editor
Yesterday
Tomorrow
"Travellers, like poets, are mostly an angry race."
Sir Richard Francis Burton