The Cynic's Almanac

So she tells us

2008-11-16T09:24:00.001-08:00

November 15, 1887 -- Poet Marianne Moore born. She wrote:

"The passion for setting people right is in itself an afflictive disease. Distaste which takes no credit to itself is best."

Now go, and sin no more

2008-11-07T08:54:00.000-08:00

Also on this day, in 1918, evangelist Billy Graham was born.

"Current evangelism is as far as one can go in the pursuit of faith without works. Graham has brought to perfection the notion of a global parish, that is, no parish at all. He is relieved of the need to make private visits, to gather boxes of old clothes in the church basement, to perform weddings, bury the dead, to encourage rummage-sales and pie-suppers. Not only is he relieved, but the saved are also...

"With their salvation kits, they are like patients making a single visit to a clinic and who are therefore recorded in the cure statistics." -- Elizabeth Hardwick.

Not at the same time, however

2008-11-07T08:46:00.000-08:00

French author and existentialist Albert Camus was born on this day in 1913. He said:

"A single sentence will suffice for modern man: He fornicated and read the papers."

Not a real kick for him

2008-11-07T08:42:00.000-08:00

November 6, 1869 -- First college football game played.

"To watch a football game is to be in prolonged neurotic doubt as to what you're seeing." -- Jacques Barzun.

Wonder if Rogers ever met this man

2008-11-04T08:37:00.001-08:00

Humorist Will Rogers was born on this day in 1897. Despite his immense popularity and his reputation for biting political commentary, not everyone was a fan.

"The bosom friend ofd senators and congressmen was about as daring as an early Shirley Temple movie." -- James Thurber.

Oh, be quiet and leave us alone

2008-11-04T08:29:00.000-08:00

November 3, 1901 -- French novelist and statesman Andre Malraux was born. He wrote:

"Men fear silence as they fear solitude, because both of them give them a glimpse of the terror of life's nothingness."

Welcome to November

2008-11-01T03:39:00.000-07:00

Holiday of the Month: Thanksgiving.

"Americans are a race of convicts and ought to be thankful for anything we allow them short of hanging." -- Samuel Johnson.

Truth is not always beautiful

2008-11-01T03:27:00.000-07:00

October 31 -- John Keats was born in 1795.

"I know that poetry is indispensable, but to what?" -- Jean Cocteau.

Fellow poet and contemporary Lord Byron called Keats "that dirty little blackguard."

He didn't even read his obituary

2008-10-30T09:51:00.000-07:00

English dramatist Richard Sheridan was born on this day in 1751. He wrote:

"The newspapers! Sir, they are the most villanous--licentious--abominable--infernal--not that I ever read them--no--I make it a rule never to look into a newspaper."

The unkindest cut

2008-10-30T09:44:00.000-07:00

October 29, 1882 -- English playwright Jean Giradoux was born. He wrote:

"Little by little, the pimps have taken over the world. They don't do anything, they don't make anything -- they just stand there and take their cut."

"Crass Materialism" wouldn't have the same ring

2008-10-28T04:25:00.000-07:00

The Statue of Liberty was dedicated on this day in 1886.

"You have put up in New York Harbor a monstrous idol which you call 'Liberty'." -- George Bernard Shaw.

2008-10-27T11:04:00.000-07:00

Irish poet Dylan Thomas was born on this day in 1914. He died at age 39, of acute alcohol poisoning. He once wrote:

"An alcoholic is someone you don't like who drinks as much as you do."

The couldn't bear it

2008-10-26T09:04:00.000-07:00

Thomas McCauley, English historian and essayist, was born on this day in 1800. He wrote:

"The Puritan hated bear-baiting, not because it gave pain to the bear, but because it gave pleasure to the spectators."

Brotherhood of the bewildered

2008-10-26T08:49:00.000-07:00

October 25, 1881 -- Pablo Picasso born.

"Abstract art: A product of the untalented, sold by the unprincipled to the utterly bewildered." -- Al Capp.

October 24 -- U. N. Day.

"Civilized man is born, lives and dies in slavery; at his birth he is confined in swaddling clothes; at death he is nailed in a coffin. So long as he retains the human form he is fettered by our institutions." -- Jean-Jacques Rouusseau.

Royalty of big screen and small

2008-10-26T08:41:00.000-07:00

October 23, 1925 -- Johnny Carson (pictured as Carnac the Magnificent) was born.

"Talk is cheap because supply exceeds demand." -- Anonymous.

October 22 -- Actress Joan Fontaine was born in 1917. She won the Oscar (for Suspicion) on her birthday in 1941.

"Nothing would disgust me more, morally, than to receive an Oscar." -- (Director) Luis Bunuel.

Education makes the man

2008-10-26T08:33:00.000-07:00

October 21, 1833 -- Alfred Nobel (pictured) was born. He invented dynamite, and established the Nobel Prize.

"Prizes bring bad luck...They encourage hypocrisy." -- Charles Baudelaire.

October 20, 1859 -- American educator John Dewey was born.

"Education: the inculcation of the incomprehensible into the indifferent by the incompetent." -- John Maynard Keynes.

October 19, 1685 -- English physician and author Sir Thomas Browne was born. He wrote:

"Man is a noble animal, splendid in ashes, and pompous in the grave."

Philosophers, poets, playwrights and other putzes

2008-10-26T08:06:00.000-07:00

October 18, 1785 -- English poet and novelist Thomas Love Peacock was born. He wrote:

"Respectable means rich, and decent means poor. I should die if I heard my family called decent."

October 17, 1938 -- Daredevil Evel Knievel was born in 1938.

"No one ever went broke underestimating the taste of the American public." -- H. L. Mencken.

October 16, 1888 -- Playwright Eugene O'Neill was born. He wrote:

"I sometimes think that the United States...is the greatest failure the world has ever seen."

October 15, 1844 -- Philosopher Friedrich Nietzsche was born.

"(He was) an agile but unintelligent and abnormal German, possessed of the mania of grandeur." -- Leo Tolstoy.

An art we are constantly perfecting

2008-10-14T04:01:00.000-07:00

Birthday of Margaret Thatcher, former Prime Minister of England, born 1925.

"In general, the art of government consists in taking as much money as possible from one part of the citizens to give it to the other." -- Voltaire.

At least we're great

2008-10-13T09:46:00.000-07:00

Columbus Day.

"America is a mistake, a great mistake." -- Sigmund Freud.

The play is not the thing

2008-10-12T13:12:00.000-07:00

October 10, 1930 -- PLaywright Harold Pinter born.

"A good many inconveniences attend playgoing in any large cities, but the greatest of these is usually the play itself." -- Kenneth Tynan.

October 11, 1885 -- French essayist Francois Mauriac born. He wrote:

"What I fear is not being forgotten after my death, but, rather, not being enough forgotten."

And the Cubs suck, too

2008-10-12T13:07:00.000-07:00

October 8, 1871 -- Great Chicago fire occurred.

"(Chicago)...this vicious, stinking zoo...an elegant rockpile monument to everything cruel and stupid and corrupt in the human spirit." -- Hunter S. Thompson.

October 9, 1940. John Lennon born.

""Life is what happens when you are making other plans." -- John Lennon.

He never met Jerry Falwell

2008-10-12T13:02:00.000-07:00

October 5, 1703 -- American religious leader Jonathan Edwards born.

"He (Edwards) believed in the worst God, preached the worst sermons, and had the worst religion of any human being who ever lived on this continent." -- M. M. Richter.

October 6 -- Children's Day.

"All children are essentially criminal." -- Denis Diderot.

Saints alive!

2008-10-12T12:53:00.000-07:00

October 2, 1869 -- Mahatma Gandhi was born.

"It is alarming and also nauseating to see Mr. Gandhi...now posing as a fakir of the type well known in the East, striding half-naked up the steps of the viceregal palace." -- Winston Churchill.

October 3, 1900 -- American writer Thomas Wolfe was born.

"If it must be Thomas let it be Mann, and if it must be Wolfe let it be Nero, but never let it be Thomas Wolfe." -- Peter DeVries.

Welcome to October

2008-10-01T10:29:00.000-07:00

Event of the Month: World Series.

"A ball is man's most disastrous invention, not excluding the wheel." -- Robert Morley.

That's no lie

2008-10-01T10:23:00.000-07:00

September 29 -- Miguel de Cervantes was born in 1547. He wrote:

"Everyone is as God made him, and often a good deal worse."

September 30 -- Truman Capote (pictured) born in 1924.

"Truman Capote has made lying an art. A minor art." -- Gore Vidal.

America, love it or lump it

2008-09-28T04:42:00.000-07:00

September 25 is American Indian Day.

"America is the only nation in history which miraculously has gone directly from barbarism to degeneration without the usual interval of civilization." -- Georges Clemenceau.

September 26: Poet T. S. Eliot was born Sept. 26, 1880. He wrote:

"Human kind cannot bear very much reality."

September 27: American Revolutionary War patriot Samuel Adams was born Sep. 27, 1722.

"The 100-percent American is 99 percent an idiot." -- George Bernard Shaw.

On September 28, 1841, Georges Clemenceau himself (see above) was born. He was a French statesman. Another French statesman, Charles DeGaulle, had this to say a century later, though not apropos of Clemenceau:

"Since a politician never believes what he says, he is surprised when others believe him."

We don't want to be alone

2008-09-28T04:30:00.000-07:00

September 23: Actor Mickey Rooney was born Sept. 23, 1920. He is in the Guinness Book of World Records for having the longest career of any actor ever. He was also married eight times.

"The dread of loneliness is greater than the fear of bondage, so we get married." -- Cyril Connolly.

September 24: Author F. Scott Fitzgerald was born Sep. 24, 1896. He wrote:

"It is in the thirties that we want friends. In the forties we know they won't save us any more than love did."

A separate peace

2008-09-22T09:09:00.000-07:00

Lord (Phillip Stanhope, 4th Earl of) Chesterfield, British statesman and wit, was born on this day in 1794. He wrote:

"The only real and lasting peace between a man and his wife is doubtless a separation."

And then he dies

2008-09-22T09:03:00.001-07:00

September 21 -- Author H. G. Wells was born Sept. 21, 1866. He wrote:

"Man is a brute...a blind prey to impulses...victim to endless illusions, which make his mental existence a burden, and fill his life with barren toil and trouble."

He's too modest -- Answered Prayers was #1

2008-09-19T03:33:00.001-07:00

American author William Golding (Lord of the Flies)was born on this day in 1911.

"Lord of the Flies was one of the great rip-offs of our time." -- Truman Capote.

Then we have eternity to look forward to

2008-09-18T04:09:00.000-07:00

Greta ("I vant to be alone") Garbo was born on this day in 1905.

"Our life is a sentence of perpetual solitary confinement." -- Aldous Huxley.

Today is Citizenship Day!

2008-09-17T04:36:00.000-07:00

"The ideas of the average decently informed person are so warped, and out of perspective, and ignorant, and entirely perverse and wrong and crude...that the task of discussing anything with him seriously is simply appalling." -- Arnold Bennett.

And desperately trying to catch up

2008-09-16T04:54:00.000-07:00

Birthday of actress Lauren Bacall, born 1924. She was married to Humphrey Bogart.

"The whole world is about three drinks behind." -- Bogart.

No clemensy for Cooper

2008-09-15T07:14:00.000-07:00

Birthday of James Fenimore Cooper (see yesterday's entry). Mark Twain, after taking a look into Cooper's ouevre, wrote a famous essay.

"Cooper's art has some defects," Twain wrote. "In one place in 'Deerslayer,' and in the restricted space of two-thirds of a page, Cooper has scored 114 offenses against literary art out of a possible 115. It breaks the record.

"There are nineteen rules governing literary art in domain of romantic fiction -- some say twenty-two. In 'Deerslayer,' Cooper violated eighteen of them."

To read the complete essay, visit
James Fenimore Cooper's Literary Offenses

The Last of J. F. Cooper

2008-09-14T11:30:00.000-07:00

James Fenimore Cooper, the most popular American writer of the early 19th century, died on this day in 1851, one day short of his birthday. He was born Sept. 15, 1789. He wrote:

"The tendencies of democracies are, in all things, to mediocrity."

Sounds like he needed a pat on the back

2008-09-13T04:29:00.000-07:00

J. B. Priestley, English novelist, critic and broadcaster, was born on this day in 1894. He wrote:

"The men who are forever slapping one on the back and saying that everything will come right are bad enough, but more intolerable are those persons who will persist in slapping humanity itself on the back and regarding all life with an unchanging grin of approval."

He wasn't the first to think of that

2008-09-12T04:34:00.000-07:00

H. L. Mencken, one of the patron saints of cynics, was born on this day in 1880. He wrote:

"My guess is that well over fifty percent of the human race goes through life without having a single original thought."

That's why we can't leave them alone

2008-09-11T08:40:00.000-07:00

Master of the short story O'Henry (William Sidney Porter) was born on this day in 1862. He wrote:

"If men knew how women pass the time when they are alone, they'd never marry."

Well, there are hermit crabs

2008-09-10T03:11:00.000-07:00

American critic Cyril Connolly was born on this day in 1903. He wrote:

"What would one think of dogs' monasteries, hermit cats, vegetarian tigers?"

And we're making history right now

2008-09-09T02:05:00.000-07:00

The great Russian novelist Leo Tolstoy was born on this day in 1828. He wrote:

"History is nothing but a collection of fables and useless trifles, cluttered up with a mass of unnecessary figures and proper names."

That's actually St. Augustine's slogan

2008-09-08T07:42:00.000-07:00

The first permanent "New World" settlement was established In St. Augustine, Florida on this day in 1565.

"Cities are the abyss of the human species." -- Jean-Jacques Rousseau.

Poor Sarah Palin

2008-09-07T08:47:00.000-07:00

Today: Queen Elizabeth I was born on this day in 1533.

"Being a woman is a terribly difficult trade, since it consists primarily in dealing with men." -- Joseph Conrad.

Yesterday: The first Pilgrims set sail for the new world on Sept. 6, 1620.

"There is no such thing as an American. They are all exiles uprooted, transplanted and doomed to sterility." -- Evelyn Waugh.

Is he kid-ding?

2008-09-05T13:49:00.000-07:00

Outlaw Jesse James was born on this day in 1841.

"Jesse James shot children, but only in fact, not in folklore." -- John Greenway.

Cynicism about cynicism

2008-09-04T08:54:00.000-07:00

French author and statesman Francois-Rene de Chateuabriand was born on this day in 1768. He wrote:

"One is not superior merely because one sees the world in an odious light."

To be something else than everyone else

2008-09-03T08:10:00.001-07:00

Poet e. e. cummings, he of the no-punctuation-marks/no-capitalization style, died on this day in 1962. He wrote:

"To be nobody-but-myself--in a world which is doing its best, night and day, to make you everybody else..."

To learn about Cummings's last words, Visit Farewells

I knew he was going to say that

2008-09-02T07:52:00.000-07:00

American critic and animal-rights activist Cleveland Amory was born on this day in 1917. He wrote:

"We still say ESP is spinach and stands for Essentially Silly People."

The curse of the drinking class

2008-09-01T04:12:00.001-07:00

Happy Labor Day!

"I think there is far too much work done in the world, that immense harm is caused by the belief that work is virtuous." -- Bertrand Russell.

Or when he is disposed

2008-08-31T12:10:00.000-07:00

Violinist Itzhak Perlman was born on this day in 1945.

"When a man is not disposed to hear musick, there is not a more disagreeable Sound in Harmony than that of a violin." -- Richard Steele.

Her book was the talk of the town

2008-08-30T07:23:00.000-07:00

Mary Shelley, author of Frankenstein, was born on this day in 1797. She said:

"I like a man who talks me to death, provided he is amusing; it saves so much trouble."

Or a grain of sand between a baboon's toes

2008-08-29T13:09:00.000-07:00

Writer and poet (and father of the Supreme Court justice of the same name) Oliver Wendell Holmes was born on this day in 1809. He wrote:

"I see no reason for attributing to man a significant difference in kind from that which belongs to a baboon or a grain of sand."

Yesterday was the birthday of Johann Wolfgang von Goethe, the greastest German writer of all. He was born August 28, 1749. He wrote:

"Man errs, 'til his strife is over."

We'll certainly never learn

2008-08-27T02:32:00.000-07:00

German philosopher G. W. F. (Georg Wilhelm Friedrich) Hegel was born on this day in 1770.

"What experience and history teach is this," Hegel wrote, "--that people and governments never have learned anything from history."

Yesterday was Women's Equality Day!

"Woman may be said to be an inferior man." -- Aristotle.

Sorry, we forgot all about it. You know how us men are always slighting our women.

Sincerely yours, Samuel Clemens

2008-08-25T13:46:00.000-07:00

American author Bret Harte (The Outcasts of Poker Flat) was born on this day in 1836.

"He hadn't a sincere fiber in him," Mark Twain wrote of Harte. "I think his heart was merely a pump and had no other function."

Tense: past absurd

2008-08-24T10:52:00.000-07:00

Sir Max Beerbohm, English author and caricaturist, was born on this day in 1872. A pair of his caricatures is shown here. The self-portraits "The Theft" depicts him stealing a book from the library in 1894; "The Restitution" shows him returning that book in 1920.

Beerbohm wrote:

"There is always something rather absurd about the past."

Dust off your dancing shoes

2008-08-23T12:11:00.000-07:00

August 22, 1893: American author and wit Dorothy Parker was born. A poem by her:

Leave for her a red young rose,
Go your way and save your pity;
She is happy, for she knows
That her dust is very pretty.

August 23, 1912: Dancer Gene Kelly born.

"Dancing? Oh, dreadful. How it is ever adopted in a civilized country I cannot find out." -- Fanny Burney.

Disguising the real issue, etc.

2008-08-23T11:59:00.001-07:00

August 19, 1902: Poet Ogden Nash was born. Here's a verse:

They take a paper and they read the headlines,
So they've heard of unemployment and they've heard of breadlines,
And they philanthropically cure them all
By getting up a costume charity ball.

August 20, 1980: The first solo ascent of Mt. Everest was made on this date.

"Keep you down, and have breakfast while the asinine hunters after the picturesque go braying up the hill." -- Willam Makepeace Thackeray.

August 21, 1878: The American Bar Association was formed.

"Lawyers are the only persons in whom ignorance of the law is not punished." -- Jeremy Bentham.

August 15-17

2008-08-17T09:05:00.000-07:00

August 15, 1785: Thomas DeQuincey, English author and opium eater, was born. He wrote:

"The peace of nature and of the innocent creatures of God seems to be secure and deep, only so long as the presence of man and his restless and unquiet spirit are not there to trouble its spirit."

August 16, 1920: Poet Charles Bukowski was born. He wrote:

“Boring damned people. All over the earth. Propagating more boring damned people. What a horror show. The earth swarmed with them.”

August 17, 1893: Actress Mae West was born.

"All wickedness is little but to the wickedness of a woman." -- Ecclesiates.

August 12-14

2008-08-16T13:34:00.000-07:00

This week's milestones:

August 12, 1881: Movie director Cecil B. DeMille was born.

"It is my indignant opinion that 90 percent of the moving pictures exhibited in America are so vulgar, witless and dull that it preposterous to write about them in any publication not intended to be read while chewing gum." -- Woolcott Gibbs (1902-1958).

August 13, 1899: Movie director Alfred Hitchcock was born.

"Conversation is the enemy of good wine and food," Hitchcock said.

August 14, 1867: Birthdate of English author John Galsworthy, who wrote:

"Idealism increases in direct proportion to one's distance from the problem."

So sign up right here on the dotted line

2008-08-11T15:02:00.000-07:00

"There is many a boy here today who looks on war as all glory, but, boys, it is all hell." -- Speech by William Tecumseh Sherman, Columbus, Ohio, August 11, 1880.

Ants get in trouble when they take antacid

2008-08-06T12:12:00.000-07:00

Poet Alfred Lord Tennyson was born on this day in 1809. He wrote:

"What is it all but a trouble of ants
In the gleam of a million million of suns?"

He's nuts, I should hope

2008-08-05T13:28:00.000-07:00

First use of the atom bomb on this day in 1945.

"Cursed is every one who placeth his hope in man." -- St. Augustine.

Where's everybody going?

2008-08-04T14:20:00.001-07:00

Poet Percy Bysshe Shelley was born on this day in 1792. He wrote:

The rapid, blind
And fleeting generations of mankind.

Get ready for the Dog Days!

2008-08-03T13:51:00.000-07:00

"If you pick up a starving dog and make him prosperous, he will not bite you. That is the principal difference between a dog and a man." -- Mark Twain.

Patently absurd

2008-07-31T01:24:00.000-07:00

The first U. S. patent was issued on this day in 1790.

"Inventor, n.: A person who makes an ingenious arrangement of wheels, levers and springs, and believes it civilization." -- Ambrose Bierce.

Creeds have no credence

2008-07-30T09:53:00.000-07:00

Novelist Emily Bronte (Wuthering Heights) was born on this day in 1818. She wrote this poem:

Vain are the thousand creeds
That move men's hearts;
Unutterably vain;
Worthless as withered weeds,
Or idlest frost amid the boundless main.

Let's get rid of it then, by all means

2008-07-29T12:17:00.000-07:00

American humorist Don Marquis, creator of Archie & Mehitabel, was born on this day in 1878. He wrote:

"The only obstacle to the progress of the human race is the human race."

LIfe, freedom and lies

2008-07-27T10:12:00.000-07:00

Catching up some more:

July 25: Today is Constitution Day in Puerto Rico.

"When people are free to do as they choose, they usually imitate each other." -- Eric Hoffer.

July 26: George Bernard Shaw was born July 26, 1856. He wrote:

"Life is a disease; and the only difference between one man and another is the stage of the disease at which he lives."

Today: English author Hilaire Belloc (pictured above) was born on July 27, 1870. He wrote:

"The moment a man talks to his fellows he begins to lie."

A Cynics Primer: B-C-D

2008-07-27T09:54:00.000-07:00

Catching up again:

July 22: Poet Stephen Vincent Benet was born July 22, 1898. He wrote:

We do not fight for the real but for the shadows we make;
A flag is a piece of cloth and a words is a sound.

July 23: American mystery writer Raymond Chandler (pictured above) was born July 23, 1880. He wrote:

"Television is just one more facet of that considerable segment of our society that never had any standard but the soft buck." And also:

"It is pretty obvious that the debasement of the human mind caused by a constant flow of fraudulent advertising is no trivial thing. There is more than one way to conquer a country."

For more on Chandler, visit Today in Farewells

July 24: Alexandre Dumas pere was born July 24, 1802.

"Nobody has read everything of Dumas, not even Dumas himself." -- Anonymous.

No hemming and hawing

2008-07-21T10:53:00.000-07:00

Ernest Hemingway was born on this day in 1899.

"Always ready to lend a helping hand to the one above him." -- F. Scott Fitzgerald on Hemingway.

Moon of the Day

2008-07-20T10:21:00.000-07:00

Man landed on the moon on this day in 1969.

"The sun and the moon and the stars would have long ago disappeared...had they happened to be within the reach of predatory human hands." -- Havelock Ellis.

Bless the beasts, the children

2008-07-19T09:04:00.000-07:00

July 17: Art Linkletter, TV host of Kids Say the Darndest Things, was born July 17, 1912.

"I must have been an insufferable child; all children are." -- George Bernard Shaw.

July 18: English author William Makepeace Thackeray was born July 18, 1811.

"Thackeray," said fellow writer John Ruskin, "settled like a meat-fly on whatever one had got for dinner, and made one sick of it."

More birthdays missed

2008-07-17T07:38:00.001-07:00

Rough week -- hospital stay, family travails. To catch up:

July 11: American humorist/essayist E. B. White was born July 11, 1899. He wrote:

"Our idea of a cultured person is a person who doesn't want to live in a community of cultured persons."

July 12: Henry David Thoreau was born on July 12, 1817. He wrote in Walden:

"I have lived some thirty years on this planet, and I have yet to hear the first syllable of valuable or even earnest advice from my seniors."

July 13: Julius Caesar born in 100 BC.

"So long as men worship the Caesars and Napoleons, Caesars and Napoleons will duly rise and make them miserable." -- Aldous Huxley.

July 14: Gerald Ford was born July 14, 1913.

"Gerry Ford was a nice guy, but he played too much football with his helmet off." -- Lyndon B. Johnson.

July 15: Rembrandt was born on this day in 1606.

"That which probably hears more stupidities than anything else in the world is a painting in a museum." -- Jules de Goncourt.

Birthdays missed

2008-07-10T08:25:00.000-07:00

Catching up:

July 8: John D. Rockefeller (shown here) was born on this day in 1839.

"The rich are the scum of the earth in every country." -- G. K. Chesterton.

July 9: Romance novelist Barbara Cartland was born on this day in 1901.

"If you want to get rich from writing, write the sort of thing that's read by persons who move their lips when they're reading to themselves." -- Don Marquis.

And today: French novelist Marcel Proust was born on July 10, 1871.

"I think he (Proust) was mentally defective." -- Evelyn Waugh.

Life is a circus

2008-07-05T09:05:00.000-07:00

P. T. (for Phineas Taylor) Barnum was born on this day in 1810. He, of course, uttered the immemorial words:

"There's a sucker born every minute."

Happy Fourth of July!

2008-07-04T10:05:00.000-07:00

“Liberty means responsibility. That is why most men dread it.” – George Bernard Shaw.

The absurdity is that it goes on and on

2008-07-03T12:43:00.000-07:00

The great writer Franz Kafka was born on this day in 1883.

"The meaning of life is that it stops," Kafka wrote.

Birthday of the Month: Henry Ford (July 12, 1863)

2008-07-02T10:30:00.000-07:00

"I have always considered considered that the substitution of the internal-combustion machine for the horse marked a very gloomy milestone in the progress of mankind.” – Winston Churchill.

That's why she took a man's name

2008-07-02T09:49:00.000-07:00

Novelist George Sand (Amandine Aurore Lucile Dupin, Baronne Dudevant) was born on July 1, 1804.

"I have had my bellyful of great men," she wrote. "In real life they are nasty creatures, persecutors, temperamental, despotic, bitter and suspicious."

And tomorrow is another day in cynicism

2008-06-30T11:38:00.001-07:00

Margaret Mitchell's novel, Gone With the Wind, was published on this day in 1936. It became a movie in 1939.

"Frankly, my dear, I don't give a damn." -- Rhett Butler.

Out of the mouths of babes

2008-06-28T09:26:00.000-07:00

Antoine de Saint-Exupery, French aviator and writer (The Little Prince), was born on this day in 1900.

"Grown-ups never understand anything for themselves," he wrote, "and it's tiresome for children to be always and forever explaining things to them."

The war on civilization

2008-06-27T05:02:00.000-07:00

World War I began on this day in 1914; it ended on this date also, in 1919.

"You can't say that civilization don't advance--in every war they kill you in a new way." -- Will Rogers.

Also on this day, philosopher and writer Jean-Jacques Rousseau was born in 1778. His Confessions can be said to have given birth to the autobiography.

“(Rousseau is)surely the blackest and most atrocious villain, beyond comparison, that now exists in the world.” – David Hume.

This day in hysteria

2008-06-26T04:43:00.000-07:00

Edward Gibbon completed The History of the Decline and Fall of the Roman Empire on this day in 1787. The six-volume work was the labor of almost 15 years. On the occasion he wrote:

"It was on the ...night of the 27th of June, 1787, between the hours of eleven and twelve, that I wrote the last lines of the last page in a summer-house in my garden. ... I will not dissemble the first emotions of joy on the recovery of my freedom; and perhaps the establishment of my fame. But my pride was soon humbled, and a sober melancholy was spread over my mind by the idea that I had taken my everlasting leave of an old and agreeable friend."

In Decline and Fall Gibbon wrote:

"History is little more than the register of the crimes, follies and misfortunes of mankind."

The call of the wild accusation

2008-06-23T19:27:00.000-07:00

Ambrose Bierce, author of The Devil's Dictionary and the patron saint of cynics, was born on this day in 1842.

"Bierce would bury his best friend with a sigh of relief, and express satisfaction that he was done with him." -- Jack London.

Cioran 101

2008-06-20T04:07:00.000-07:00

E. M. Cioran, a Romanian writer who wrote in French, died on this day in 1995. A sampling of Cioran:

"When we must make a crucial decision, it is extremely dangerous to consult anyone else, since no one sincerely wishes us well."

"Religions, like the ideologies that have inherited their vices, are reduced to crusades against humor."

"To love one's neighbor is inconceivable. Does one ask a virus to love another virus?"

"Happiness and misery make me equally wretched."

"Believing in God dispenses one from believing in anything else."

"Friendship has scope and interest only for the young. For an older person, what he dreads most is being survived by his friends."

Cioran was born in Transylvania. he said that gypsy music made him "mad with melancholy." His father was a gloomy priest. His mother's last note to him ended:

"Whatever people try to do, they'll regret it sooner or later."

For more by Cioran on death and thoughts of death, visit Farewells

Never gone with the wind

2008-06-19T04:41:00.000-07:00

The great movie critic Pauline Kael was born on this day in 1919. She died in 2001.

"There are so many things that we, have lived through them, or passed over them, never want to think about again," Kael wrote. "But in movies nothing is cleaned away, sorted out, purposely discarded. There's a kind of hopelessness about it: what does not deserve to last lasts, and so it all begins to seem one big pile of junk."

Still the kings

2008-06-18T13:31:00.000-07:00

Paul McCartney born on this day in 1942.

"The Beatles are not merely awful...They are so unbelievably horrible, so appallingly unmusical, so dogmatically insensitive to the magic of the art, that they qualify as crowned heads of anti-music." -- William F. Buckley.

"Well, you know, a lot of Americans are unbalanced." -- Paul McCartney.

Creeping along on all fours

2008-06-17T04:38:00.000-07:00

The first commercial around-the-world flight began on this day in 1947. And on this day in 1972, the Watergate scandal was uncovered.

"The more humanity advances, the more it is degraded." -- Gustave Flaubert.

Maybe his comment is just a monstrous joke

2008-06-16T08:27:00.000-07:00

Birthday of novelist Joyce Carol Oates, born June 16, 1937.

"She's a joke monster." -- Truman Capote.

Capote really doesn't exist

2008-06-11T07:03:00.000-07:00

Birthday of novelist and Nobel Prize-winner Saul Bellow, born 1915.

"Saul Bellow is a nothing writer. He doesn't exist." -- Truman Capote.

Also born on this day: Playwright Ben Jonson, born 1572. He was a contemporary of Shakespeare (and the actual author of some of his plays, some people believe. Jonson wrote:

“Fortune, that favors fools.”

Here's looking at you, later

2008-06-10T08:36:00.000-07:00

Alcoholics Anonymous was founded on this day in 1910.

"I drink to make other people interesting." -- George Jean Nathan.

And also that you're not young

2008-06-09T06:31:00.001-07:00

Today is Senior Citizens Day in Oklahoma.

"The only good thing about old age is you're not dead." -- Lily Tomlin.

Can we talk?

2008-06-08T17:15:00.000-07:00

Birthday of comedienne Joan Rivers, born in 1933.

"What a sad business is being funny!" -- Charlie Chaplin.

He withdrew, to save his soul -- and his neck

2008-06-07T00:42:00.001-07:00

Artist Paul Gauguin was born on this day in 1848.

"Fame! What a vain word, and what a vain recompense!" he wrote. "I think only of withdrawing myself far from men, and in consequence far from fame."

"Don't talk to me of Gauguin. I'd like to wring the fellow's neck!" -- Paul Cezanne.

Sorry I can't go with you

2008-06-06T06:23:00.000-07:00

German writer Thomas Mann (The Magic Mountain) was born on this day in 1875. He wrote:

"What we call mourning for our dead is perhaps not so much grief at not being able to call them back as it is grief at not being able to want to do so."

For more on this subject, visit Farewells

Today is World Environment Day!

2008-06-05T06:34:00.001-07:00

"Nature is one with rapine, a harm no preacher can heal;
The mayfly is torn by the swallow, the swallow speared by the shrike,
And the whole little wood where I sit is a world of plunder and prey."

-- Alfred, Lord Tennyson

A Bentley of an insult

2008-06-04T06:05:00.000-07:00

George III, King of England, was born on this day in 1738.

George the Third
Ought never to have occurred.
One can only wonder
At so grotesque a blunder.

Edmund Clerihew Bentley

It's a real social vacuum

2008-06-03T09:27:00.000-07:00

First U. S. spacewalk on this date in 1965.

"Outer space is no place for a person of breeding." -- Lady Violet Bonham Carter.

But everybody goes

2008-06-02T14:16:00.000-07:00

English novelist Thomas Hardy was born on this day in 1840. In his novel Jude the Obscure, as his hero lay dying alone, Hardy wrote:

"Nobody came, because nobody does."

Or a noisy headache in a long street

2008-06-01T12:52:00.000-07:00

English poet (and onetime Poet Laureate) John Masefield was born on this day in 1878. He wrote:

"Life is a long headache in a noisy street."

They sometimes make me sick when I eat them, though

2008-05-31T04:29:00.001-07:00

Poet Walt Whitman was born on this day in 1819.

"Animals do not make me sick discussing their duty to God," Whitman wrote.

I've no burning desire to be one

2008-05-30T11:46:00.000-07:00

On this day in 1431, Joan of Arc was burned at the stake for heresy.

"It is too readily assumed that 'non-attachment' is not only better than a full acceptance of earthly life, but that the ordinary man only rejects it because it is too difficult; in other words, that the average human being is a failed saint. It is doubtful whether this is true.

"Many people genuinely do not wish to be saints, and it is probable that some who achieve or aspire to sainthood have never felt much temptation to be human beings.

"If one could follow it to its psychological roots, one would, I believe, find that the main motive for 'non-attachment' is a desire to escape from the pain of living." -- George Orwell.

To read about another famous death on this day, visit Farewells