Yesterday     Tomorrow

"He who has provoked the lash of wit, cannot complain that he smarts from it."

James Boswell
(10/29/1740 – 05/19/1795)
Scottish biographer

"Music is not written in red, white and blue. It is written in the heart's blood of the composer."

Dame Nellie Melba
(05/19/1861 – 02/23/1931)
Australian opera singer

"One reason I don't drink is that I want to know when I am having a good time."

Lady Nancy Witcher Langhorne Astor
(05/19/1879 – 05/02/1964)
US zillionaire; first woman to sit in Parliament

"Peace at home, peace in the world."

Mustafa Kemal Atatürk
(05/19/1881 – 11/10/1938)
Turkish military and political leader

"Nothing that is morally wrong can be politically right."

William E. Gladstone
(12/29/1809 – 05/19/1898)
British PM (30) (see other British PMs)

"I do not believe in sex distinction in literature, law, politics, or trade—or that modesty and virtue are more becoming to women than to men, but wish we had more of it everywhere."

Belva Lockwood
(10/24/1830 – 05/19/1917)
US attorney

"History is a people's memory, and without a memory, man is demoted to the lower animals."

Malcolm X
(05/19/1925 – 02/21/1965)
US spiritual leader

"All human beings have an innate need to hear and tell stories and to have a story to live by. . . . religion, whatever else it has done, has provided one of the main ways of meeting this abiding need."

Harvey Cox
(05/19/1929 – )
US theologian

"The thing that makes you exceptional, if you are at all, is inevitably that which must also make you lonely."

Lorraine Hansberry
(05/19/1930 – 01/12/1965)
US writer

"A friend of mine went to the Alpine Club, and said my larger one (portrait) was a conscious effort by you to show how long contact with camels had affected my face! But I explained that it wasn't my face which had been in contact with camels."

T. E. Lawrence
(08/15/1888 – 05/19/1935)
Welsh writer , to Augustus John

"[A successful parent is one] who raises a child who grows up and is able to pay for his or her own psychoanalysis."

Nora Ephron
(05/19/1941 – )
US writer (was married to Dan Greenburg, Carl Bernstein)

"I smash guitars because I like them."

Peter Townshend
(05/19/1945 – )
English singer, songwriter, guitarist (the Who)

"Mystics always hope that science will someday overtake them."

Booth Tarkington
(07/29/1869 – 05/19/1946)
US writer

"I once told this writer a story about how I met the guys in an elevator and found out we all had the same last name, so we decided to form a band."

Joey Ramone
(05/19/1952 – 04/15/2001)
US singer (Ramones)

"I did advertise for a holiday companion—capable widow, no sense of humour, some knowledge of haemorrhoids preferred—not a reply."

Victoria Wood
(05/19/1953 – )
English comic

"Uncle Carl Laemmle
Has a very large faemmle."

Ogden Nash
(08/19/1902 – 05/19/1971)
US poet , on nepotism in Hollywood

"Friendly attacks should begin with faint praise, but be careful not to use adjectives or phrases of which the publisher can make use in advertisements."

Sir John Betjeman
(08/28/1906 – 05/19/1984)
English writer

"Sex is a bad thing because it rumples the clothes."

Jacqueline Lee Bouvier Kennedy Onassis
(07/28/1929 – 05/19/1994)
US royalty (see other US First Ladies; was married to John F. Kennedy, Aristotle Onassis)

Yesterday     Tomorrow