March 26

"The want of a thing is perplexing enough, but the possession of it is intolerable."

John Vanbrugh
(01/24/1664 – 03/26/1726)
English architect, writer

"I like your opera. I think I will set it to music."

Ludwig van Beethoven
(12/16/1770 – 03/26/1827)
German composer , to a fellow composer

"My inclination to go by Air Express is confirmed by the crash they had yesterday, which will make them more careful in the immediate future."

A. E. Housman
(03/26/1849 – 04/30/1936)
English scholar

"Home is the place where, when you have to go there, they have to take you in."

Robert Frost
(03/26/1874 – 01/29/1963)
US poet

"Do I contradict myself?
Very well, then I contradict myself,
I am large, I contain multitudes."

Walt Whitman
(05/31/1819 – 03/26/1892)
US poet

"How can I possibly dislike a sex to which Your Majesty belongs?"

Cecil Rhodes
(07/05/1853 – 03/26/1902)
English statesman , on Queen Victoria's suggestion that he disliked women

"Computers are like Old Testament gods; lots of rules and no mercy."

Joseph B. Campbell
(03/26/1904 – 10/31/1987)
US writer

"What is to give light must endure burning."

Viktor Frankl
(03/26/1905 – 09/02/1997)
Austrian psychiatrist

"I always said little Truman had a voice so high it could only be detected by a bat."

Tennessee Williams
(03/26/1911 – 02/25/1983)
US writer

"Why are numbers beautiful? It's like asking why is Beethoven's Ninth Symphony beautiful. If you don't see why, someone can't tell you. I know numbers are beautiful. If they aren't beautiful, nothing is."

Paul Erdos
(03/26/1913 – 9/20/1996)
Hungarian mathematician

"The military don't start wars. Politicians start wars."

General William Westmoreland
(03/26/1914 – 07/18/2005)
US military

"Life begets life. Energy creates energy. It is by spending oneself that one becomes rich."

Sarah Bernhardt
(10/22/1844 – 03/26/1923)
French actor

"Slaying the dragon of delay is no sport for the short-winded."

Sandra Day O'Connor
(03/26/1930 – )
US Supreme Court Justice (see other Supreme Court justices)

"They, that unnamed 'they,' they've knocked me down but I got up. I always get up—and I swear when I went down quite often I took the fall; nothing moves a mountain but itself. They, I've long ago named them me."

Gregory Corso
(03/26/1930 – 01/17/2001)
US writer

"I've never really verbalized this before, and that's the honest truth, but I've always seen Spock as a spiritual figure. He's a searcher for values, for ethics, for insight."

Leonard Nimoy
(03/26/1931 – )
US actor

"You see a lot of smart guys with dumb women, but you hardly ever see a smart woman with a dumb guy."

Erica Jong
(03/26/1942 – )
US writer

"He laughs best who laughs last,
the wiseacres vow;
but I am impatient,
I want to laugh now."

Carolyn Wells
(06/18/1869 – 03/26/1942)
US writer

"Hair has always been important."

Diana Ross
(03/26/1944 – )
US singer

"A fully-equipped duke costs as much to keep up as two Dreadnoughts; and dukes are just as great a terror and they last longer."

David Lloyd George
(01/17/1863 – 03/26/1945)
British P.M. (36) (see other British PMs)

"I would think nothing of tipping over a table with a whole long spread on it just because there was turkey roll on the table and I had explicitly said, 'No turkey roll.'"

Steven Tyler
(03/26/1948 – )
US singer (Aerosmith) (father of Liv Tyler)

"Sometimes between takes, I'll spin to disorient myself."

Martin Short
(03/26/1950 – )
Canadian comic, actor (SNL)

"It was a blonde, a blonde to make a bishop kick a hole in a stained glass window."

Raymond Chandler
(07/23/1888 – 03/26/1959)
US writer

"One day I wish that all the people of the world, all the males, females, blacks, whites, purples, whatever, and all of the adults and children would all come together and get it on."

James Iha
(03/26/1968 – )
US guitarist, singer (Smashing Pumpkins, Perfect Circle) ; also see Billy Corgan, D'Arcy Wretzky, Jimmy Chamberlain, Melissa auf der Maur, and Courtney Love

"I love criticism just so long as it's unqualified praise."

Noel Coward
(12/16/1899 – 03/26/1973)
English writer

"If you can spend a perfectly useless afternoon in a perfectly useless manner, you have learned how to live."

Lin Yutang
(10/10/1895 – 03/26/1976)
Chinese writer

"A small silence came between us, as precise as a picture hanging on the wall."

Jean Stafford
(07/01/1915 – 03/26/1979)
US writer (was married to A. J. Liebling)

"When in doubt, faint."

Keira Knightly
(03/26/1985 – )
English actor border="0">

"An erection at will is the moral equivalent of a valid credit card."

Dr. Alex Comfort
(02/10/1920 – 03/26/2000)
US pop psychologist, writer ("The Joy of Sex")

"Citizen participation is a device whereby public officials induce nonpublic individuals to act in a way the officials desire."

Daniel Moynihan
(03/16/1927 – 03/26/2003)
US politician

"I adored Hollywood because I'd always wanted to be a movie star. Maybe in some funny Freudian way, it was my way of getting more attention than my baby sister, who was pretty with curly hair. We all have drives we don't completely understand."

Jan Sterling
(04/03/1921 – 03/26/2004)
US actor

"A lie can be halfway round the world before the truth has got its boots on."

James Callaghan
(03/27/1912 – 03/26/2005)
British PM (47) (see other British PMs) (died near his birthday)