May 3, 2014

Good Morning!

Today is the birthday of Niccolò Machiavelli (1469 – 1527) who said:

“Everyone sees what you appear to be, few experience what you really are.”

and

“Men are driven by two principal impulses, either by love or by fear.”

It is also the birthday of Jacob Riis (1849 – 1914) who said:

“When nothing seems to help, I go and look at a stonecutter hammering away at his rock, perhaps a hundred times without as much as a crack showing in it. Yet at the hundred and first blow it will split in two, and I know it was not that last blow that did it, but all that had gone before.”

and

“Oh, God! That bread should be so dear, And flesh and blood so cheap!”

Happy Birthday to Dodie Smith (1896 – 1990) who said:

“Noble deeds and hot baths are the best cures for depression.”

and

“I only want to write. And there's no college for that except life.”

and

“When I read a book, I put in all the imagination I can, so that it is almost like writing the book as well as reading it - or rather, it is like living it. It makes reading so much more exciting, but I don't suppose many people try to do it.”

Today is the birthday of William Inge (1913 – 1973) who said:

“Nobody is bored when he is trying to make something that is beautiful, or to discover something that is true.”

Birthday greetings to Pete Seeger (1919 – 2014) who said:

“Participation - that's what's gonna save the human race.”

and

“This banjo surrounds hate and forces it to surrender.”

and

“A good song reminds us what we're fighting for.”

and

“Singing with children in the schools has been the most rewarding experience of my life.”

Finally, it is the birthday of Ben Elton (1959 - ) who said:

“The internet was supposed to liberate knowledge, but in fact it buried it, first under a vast sewer of ignorance, laziness, bigotry, superstition and filth and then beneath the cloak of political surveillance. Now...cyberspace exists exclusively to promote commerce, gossip and pornography. And of course to hunt down sedition. Only paper is safe. Books are the key. A book cannot be accessed from afar, you have to hold it, you have to read it.”

and

“Artists don't create society, they reflect it”