November 15

"Nature uses as little as possible of anything."

Johannes Kepler
(12/27/1571 – 11/15/1630)
German astronomer

"Don't talk to me about a man's being able to talk sense; everyone can talk sense—can he talk nonsense?"

William Pitt the elder
(11/15/1708 – 05/11/1778)
English statesman

"O, popular applause! what heart of man
Is proof against thy sweet, seducing charms?"

William Cowper
(11/15/1731 – 04/25/1800)
English writer

"The public seldom forgive twice."

Johann Casper Lavater
(11/15/1741 – 01/02/1801)
Swiss theologian

Acquaintance, describing an unpopular man: "He's his own worst enemy."
Franklin P. Adams: "Not while I'm around."
(11/15/1881 – 03/23/1960)
US writer

"It is a fair summary of history to say that the safeguards of liberty have been forged in controversies involving not very nice people."

Felix Frankfurter
(11/15/1882 – 02/22/1965)
US Supreme Court (see other Supreme Court justices)

"Utopian Turtletop."

Marianne Moore
(11/15/1887 – 02/05/1972)
US poet , suggested name for the car that became the Edsel

"I hate flowers—I paint them because they're cheaper than models and they don't move."

Georgia O'Keeffe
(11/15/1887 – 03/06/1986)
US artist

"I'll thcream and thcream and thcream till I'm thick."

Richmal Crompton
(11/15/1890 – 01/11/1969)
English writer

"This island is made mainly of coal and surrounded by fish. Only an organizing genius could produce a shortage of coal and fish at the same time."

Aneurin Bevan
(11/15/1897 – 07/06/1960)
Welsh politician , on Winston Churchill's England

"Too cheerful a morality is a loose morality; it is appropriate only to decadent peoples and is found only among them."

Émile Durkheim
(04/15/1858 – 11/15/1917)
French sociologist (image courtesy of the Bridgeman Art Library)

"A car crash harnesses elements of eroticism, aggression, desire, speed, drama, kinesthetic factors, the stylizing of motion, consumer goods, status—all these in one event. I myself see the car crash as a tremendous sexual event really: a liberation of human and machine libido (if there is such a thing)."

J. G. Ballard
(11/15/1930 – 04/19/2009)
China-born English writer

"Impossibilities are merely things of which we have not learned, or which we do not wish to happen."

Charles W. Chesnutt
(06/20/1858 – 11/15/1932)
US writer

"This is the age of insincerity. The movies had the misfortune to come along in the twentieth century, and because they appeal to the masses there can be no sincerity in them. Hollywood is tied hand and foot to the demands for artificiality of the masses all over the world."

Lionel Barrymore
(04/28/1878 – 11/15/1954)
US actor (brother of Ethel and John, uncle of John Drew, great-uncle of Drew)

"The secret of charm is bullsh*t."

Tyrone Power, Jr.
(05/05/1914 – 11/15/1958)
US actor

"Life in the twentieth century is like a parachute jump: you have to get it right the first time."

Margaret Mead
(12/16/1901 – 11/15/1978)
US anthropologist

"The first need of a free people is to define their own terms."

Stokely Carmichael
(06/29/1941 – 11/15/1998)
US civil-rights activist