January |
"Those who are contented and at ease when the occasion comes and live in accord with the course of Nature cannot be affected by sorrow or joy. This is what the ancients called release from bondage. Those who cannot release themselves are so because they are bound by material things."
- Chuang Tzu
(c. 369-286 BC)
Chinese philosopher
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February |
"One forges one's style on the terrible anvil of daily deadlines."
- Émile Zola
(1840-1902)
French novelist |
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March |
"A man is a wolf rather than a man to another man, when he hasn't yet found out what he is like."
- Plautus
(c.250-184 BC)
Roman comic dramatist
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April |
"Long experience has taught me that to be criticized is not always to be wrong."
- Sir Anthony Eden
(1897-1977)
British Prime Minister, 1955-57
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May |
"I smoked my first cigarette and kissed my first woman on the same day. I have never had time for tobacco since."
- Arturo Toscanini
(1867-1957)
Italian conductor
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June |
"Give a critic an inch, he'll write a play."
- John Steinbeck
(1902-1968)
American novelist
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July |
"Everyone's quick to blame the alien."
- Aeschylus
(525 -456 BC)
Greek tragedian
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August |
"'Tis wonderful how soon a piano gets into a log hut on the frontier. "
- Ralph Waldo Emerson
(1803-82)
American philosopher and poet
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September |
"The AIDS epidemic has rolled back a big rotting log and revealed all the squirming life underneath it, since it involves, all at once, the main themes of our existence: sex, death, power, money, love, hate disease and panic. No American phenomenon has been so compelling since the Vietnam War."
- Edmund White
(1940-)
American writer and critic |
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October |
"It is exciting to have a real crisis on your hands when you have spent half of your political life dealing with humdrum issues like the environment."
on the Falklands campaign, 1982
- Margaret Thatcher
(1925-)
British Conservative stateswoman; Prime Minister 1979-90 |
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November |
"Humour is emotional chaos remembered in tranquility."
- James Thurber
(1894-1961)
American humorist
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December |
On seeing Niagara Falls, Mahler exclaimed: "Fortissimo at last!"
- Gustav Mahler
(1860-1911)
Czech-born, Austrian composer
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