January 26

"To limit the press is to insult a nation; to prohibit reading of certain books is to declare the inhabitants to be either fools or slaves."

Claude-Adrien Helvetius
(01/26/1715 – 12/26/1771)
French philosopher ("de l'Esprit")

"There surely is in human nature an inherent propensity to extract all the good out of all the evil."

Benjamin Haydon
(01/26/1786 – 06/22/1846)
English artist ("Arthur Wellesley, 1st Duke of Wellington")

"The joy I felt as the prospect before me of being the instrument destined to take away from the world one of its greatest calamities [smallpox] was so excessive that I found myself in a kind of reverie."

Edward Jenner
(05/17/1749 – 01/26/1823)
English doctor

"I promise to keep on living as though I expected to live forever. Nobody grows old by merely living a number of years. People grow old by deserting their ideals. Years may wrinkle the skin, but to give up wrinkles the soul."

General Douglas MacArthur
(01/26/1880 – 04/05/1964)
US military

"The universe is a big place, perhaps the biggest."

Philip Jose Farmer
(01/26/1918 – 02/25/2009)
US writer ("Riverworld") , writing as "Kilgore Trout"

"The embarrassing thing is that the salad dressing is outgrossing my films."

Paul Newman
(01/26/1925 – 09/26/2008)
US actor
(was married to Joanne Woodward)

"You wouldn't ask Rodin to make an ugly sculpture, or me to make a film with an ugly woman. That's my style, that's my nature."

Roger Vadim
(01/26/1928 – 02/11/2000)
French director ("And God Created Woman")
(was married to Brigitte Bardot, Jane Fonda)

"Christ died for our sins. Dare we make his martyrdom meaningless by not committing them?"

Jules Feiffer
(01/26/1929 – )
US cartoonist

"How do you catch a knuckleball? You wait until it stops rolling, then go pick it up."

Bob Uecker
(01/26/1934 – )
US baseball player

"A wee child toddling in a wonder world, I prefer to their dogma my excursions into the natural gardens where the voice of the Great Spirit is heard in the twittering of birds, the rippling of mighty waters, and the sweet breathing of flowers. If this is Paganism, then at present, at least, I am a Pagan."

Zitkala-Sa
(02/22/1875 – 01/26/1938)
US native writer, musician ("Dreams and Thunder: Stories, Poems, and the Sun Dance Opera")

"What this country needs is more unemployed politicians."

Angela Davis
(01/26/1944 – )
US activist

"Masturbation is the thinking man's television."

Christopher Hampton
(01/26/1946 – )
English writer ("The Philanthropist")

"I would rather turn my head and cough than see any part of 'Patch Adams' again."

Gene Siskel
(01/26/1946 – 02/20/1999)
US critic

"Without Christian education, without the principles of Christ inculcated into young life, we are simply rearing pagans."

Peter Marshall
(05/27/1902 – 01/26/1949)
Scottish-US religious leader

"There was a lot of cocaine on the console—and it wasn't necessarily the band's. That was a problem. And we weren't allowed any input on the mix."

Eddie Van Halen
(01/26/1955 – 10/06/2020)
Dutch guitarist (Van Halen)
(was married to Valerie Bertinelli; also see David Lee Roth, Sammy Hagar)

"You have to stay in shape. My grandmother, she started walking five miles a day when she was 60. She's 97 today and we don't know where the hell she is."

Ellen DeGeneres
(01/26/1958 – )
US comic actor
(was partner of Anne Heche; married to Portia de Rossi)

"Long tresses down to the floor can be beautiful, if you have that, but learn to love what you have."

Anita Baker
(01/26/1958 – )
US singer

"You miss 100 percent of the shots you never take."

Wayne Gretzky
(01/26/1961 – )
Canadian hockey great

"I remember just before going onto the soundstage, I'd look in my dressing room mirror and stretch myself to my full 5'5" or 5'6"—whatever it was—to make me appear taller and to make me able to dominate all the others and to mow them down with my size."

Edward G. Robinson
(12/12/1893 – 01/26/1973)
Romanian actor

"There are three periods in life: youth, middle age and 'how well you look.'"

Nelson Rockefeller
(07/08/1908 – 01/26/1979)
US zillionaire, Governor (NY), Vice President (41)
(grandson of John D. Rockefeller, Sr.; son of John D. Rockefeller, Jr.)

"In a crisis, don't hide behind anything or anybody. They're going to find you anyway."

"Bear" Bryant
(09/11/1913 – 01/26/1983)
US football coach

"The clock, not the steam engine, is the key machine of the modern industrial age."

Lewis Mumford
(10/19/1895 – 01/26/1990)
US writer ("The City in History")

José Vicente Ferrer de Otero y Cintr&oacuten;

"The truth is, I made a few good movies in the fifties, then went into freefall."

Jose Ferrer
(01/08/1912 – 01/26/1992)
Puerto Rican actor
(was married to Uta Hagen, Rosemary Clooney twice, and two others)

"The real essence of art turned out to be not something high up and far off—it was right inside my ordinary daily self—If a musician wants to become a finer artist, he must first become a finer person."

Shinichi Suzuki
(10/17/1898 – 01/26/1998)
Japanese violinist, teacher

"That's like the Queen Mary losing a deck chair."

Al McGuire
(09/07/1928 – 01/26/2001)
US basketball coach , on 300-lb center Geoff Crompton losing 15 lbs.

"It's all a compost heap. You just put down a layer of humus that helps other stuff grow. Your work will all be forgotten, but it will help stuff grow."

Murray J. Edelman
(11/05/1919 – 01/26/2001)
US writer ("The Symbolic Uses of Politics")

"Only little boys and old men sneer at love."

Louis Auchincloss
(09/27/1917 – 01/26/2010)
US writer ("The Cat and the King")