October 05

"I have only a small flickering light to guide me in the darkness of a thick forest. Up comes a theologian and blows it out."

Denis Diderot
(10/05/1713 – 07/30/1784)
French philosopher, encyclopedist

"Well, there doesn't seem anything else for an ex-President to do but to go into the country and raise big pumpkins."

Chester Allen Arthur
(10/05/1830 – 11/18/1886)
US President (21), VP (20) (see all US Presidents, VPs)

"There's a difference between beauty and charm. A beautiful woman is one I notice. A charming woman is one who notices me."

John Erskine
(10/05/1879 – 06/02/1951)
US educator, writer, musician

"It was not her sex appeal but the obvious relish with which she devoured the hamburger that made my pulse begin to hammer with excitement."

Ray Kroc
(10/05/1902 – 01/14/1984)
US restaurant magnate (McDonald's) , on meeting his wife

"The pain goes away on payday."

Larry Fine
(10/05/1902 – 01/24/1975)
US stooge (Also see Moe Howard, Curly Howard)

"Not since Atilla the Hun swept across Europe leaving 500 years of total blackness has there been a man like Lee Marvin."

Joshua Logan
(10/05/1908 – 07/12/1988)
US actor

"People who spend most of their natural lives riding iron bicycles over the rocky roadsteads of this parish get their personalities mixed up with the personalities of their bicycles as a result of the interchanging of the atoms of each of them and you would be surprised at the number of people in these parts who nearly are half people and half bicycles."

Flann O'Brien
(10/05/1911 – 04/01/1966)
Irish writer

"Boiled down to essentials, she is a plain mortal with large feet."

Herbert Kretzmer
(10/05/1925 – )
S. African journalist, lyricist , on Greta Garbo

"We judge ourselves by our motives and others by their actions."

Dwight Morrow
(01/11/1873 – 10/05/1931)
US statesman

"Hope is not the conviction that something will turn out well but the certainty that something makes sense, regardless of how it turns out."

Vaclav Havel
(10/05/1936 – )
Czech President

"Some people are born on third base and go through life thinking they hit a triple."

Barry Switzer
(10/05/1937 – )
US baseball coach

"Most of the things worth doing in the world had been declared impossible before they were done."

Louis D. Brandeis
(11/13/1856 – 10/05/1941)
US Supreme Court Justice (see other Supreme Court justices)

"Music can't change the world."

Sir Bob Geldof
(10/05/1951 – )
English singer (Boomtown Rats)

"Everybody is a book of blood. Wherever we're opened, we're red."

Clive Barker
(10/05/1952 – )
English writer

"But television handcuffs you, man. Now everyone telling me what I CAN'T do, what I CAN say, what I SHOULD do, and asking, `Are blacks gonna be mad at you? Are whites gonna accept you?'"

Bernie Mac
(10/05/1957 – 08/09/2008)
US comic

"If you don't learn history accurately, how can you learn?"

Maya Ying Lin
(10/05/1959 – )
US architect, sculptor (designed US Vietnam vet and civil rights memorials)

"As far as his love numbers go, I'm afraid someone who sings like he's got a throat infection is not going to get me smooching."

Laura Lee Davies
(10/05/1963 – )
English music writer , on Bryan Adams

"Watch what people are cynical about, and one can often discover what they lack."

Harry Emerson Fosdick
(05/24/1878 – 10/05/1969)
US religious guy

"Make the hard ones look easy and the easy ones look hard."

Walter Hagen
(12/21/1892 – 10/05/1969)
US golfer

"Titanic was never a burden. I am amazed that I was involved in a movie of such epic proportions. It is wonderful to be in India, for example, in the foothills of the Himalayas, and to have an 80-year-old man come up to me and, through squinted eyes, say 'Titanic.'"

Kate Winslet
(10/05/1975 – )
English actor

"There's always a race against time. I don't think for one moment that life gets better. How can it? One's body starts to fall apart."

Gloria Grahame
(11/28/1923 – 10/05/1981)
US actor

"We used it, I think, as a testing grounds of sorts. We paid a terrible price in dead. We wasted our treasure, at least $130 billion. We destroyed towns and cities to save them. We decimated populations and lands through defoliation. We have no one to blame but ourselves."

Mike Mansfield
(03/16/1903 – 10/05/2001)
US senator (MT) , on Vietnam

"If it weren't for pickpockets, I'd have no sex life at all."

Rodney Dangerfield
(11/22/1921 – 10/05/2004)
US comic