Born this week
Sunday May 31st, 2026
Marilyn Monroe
June 1926 – August 5, 1962
A woman can't be alone. She needs a man. A man and a woman support and strengthen each other. She just can't do it by herself.
Marilyn Monroe (born Norma Jeane Mortenson; June 1, 1926 - August 5, 1962) was an American actress, model, and singer, who became a major ...
Walt Whitman
May 31, 1819 – March 26, 1892
The art of art, the glory of expression and the sunshine of the light of letters, is simplicity.
Walter "Walt" Whitman was an American poet, essayist and journalist. A humanist, he was a part of the transition between transcendentalism ...
Mignon McLaughlin
June 6, 1913 – December 20, 1983
A woman telling her true age is like a buyer confiding his final price to an Armenian rug dealer.
Mignon McLaughlin was an American journalist and author. In the 1950s, she began publishing aphorisms that were later collected in three ...
Christopher Lasch
June 1932 – February 14, 1994
Every age develops its own peculiar forms of pathology, which express in exaggerated form its underlying character structure.
Christopher Lasch was a well-known American historian, moralist, and social critic. Mentored by William Leuchtenburg at Columbia ...
Pierre Corneille
June 6, 1606 – October 1684
Oh rage! Oh despair! Oh age, my enemy!
Pierre Corneille was a French tragedian, and one of the three great seventeenth-century French dramatists, along with Molière and Racine. ...
Thomas Hardy
June 2, 1840 – January 11, 1928
If Galileo had said in verse that the world moved, the inquisition might have let him alone.
Thomas Hardy, OM was an English novelist and poet. A Victorian realist in the tradition of George Eliot, he was influenced both in his ...
Fred Allen
May 31, 1894 – March 17, 1956
An advertising agency is 85 percent confusion and 15 percent commission.
Fred Allen was an American comedian whose absurdist, topically pointed radio show made him one of the most popular and forward-looking ...
Marquis de Sade
June 2, 1740 – December 2, 1814
'Til the infallibility of human judgements shall have been proved to me, I shall demand the abolition of the penalty of death.
Donatien Alphonse François de Sade, better known as the Marquis de Sade, was a French aristocrat, revolutionary politician, philosopher ...
Norman Vincent Peale
May 31, 1898 – December 24, 1993
When you pray for anyone you tend to modify your personal attitude toward him.
Dr. Norman Vincent Peale was a minister and author and a progenitor of "positive thinking".
Thomas Mann
June 6, 1875 – August 12, 1955
For I must tell you that we artists cannot tread the path of Beauty without Eros keeping company with us and appointing himself as our guide.
Paul Thomas Mann was a German novelist, short story writer, social critic, philanthropist, essayist, and the 1929 Nobel Prize in Literature ...
John Maynard Keynes
June 5, 1883 – April 21, 1946
Education: the inculcation of the incomprehensible into the indifferent by the incompetent.
John Maynard Keynes, 1st Baron Keynes, CB, FBA, was a British economist whose ideas have fundamentally affected the theory and practice of ...
William Ralph Inge
June 6, 1860 – February 26, 1954
Whoever marries the spirit of this age will find himself a widower in the next.
William Ralph Inge KCVO was an English author, Anglican priest, professor of divinity at Cambridge, and Dean of St Paul's Cathedral, which ...
Adam Smith
June 5, 1723 – July 17, 1790
All money is a matter of belief.
Adam Smith was a Scottish moral philosopher and a pioneer of political economy. One of the key figures of the Scottish Enlightenment, Smith ...
Sydney Smith
June 3, 1771 – February 22, 1845
Have the courage to be ignorant of a great number of things, in order to avoid the calamity of being ignorant of everything.
Sydney Smith was an English wit, writer and Anglican cleric.
John Drinkwater
June 1882 – March 25, 1937
Poetry is the communication through words of certain experiences that can be communicated in no other way.
John Drinkwater (1 June 1882 - 25 March 1937) was an English poet and dramatist. He was born in Leytonstone, London, and worked as an ...
Brigham Young
June 1801 – August 29, 1877
Any young man who is unmarried at the age of twenty one is a menace to the community.
Brigham Young was an American leader in the Latter Day Saint movement and a settler of the Western United States. He was the President of ...
Rosalind Russell
June 4, 1907 – November 28, 1976
Taking joy in living is a woman's best cosmetic.
Rosalind Russell was an American actress of stage and screen, known for her role as fast-talking newspaper reporter Hildy Johnson in the ...
Edwin Way Teale
June 2, 1899 – October 18, 1980
Time and space - time to be alone, space to move about - these may well become the great scarcities of tomorrow.
Edwin Way Teale was an American naturalist, photographer and Pulitzer Prize-winning writer. Teale's works serve as primary source material ...
Allen Ginsberg
June 3, 1926 – April 5, 1997
My own experience is that a certain kind of genius among students is best brought out in bed.
Irwin Allen Ginsberg was an American poet and one of the leading figures of both the Beat Generation of the 1950s and the counterculture ...
Richard Cobden
June 3, 1804 – April 2, 1865
But it is my happiness to be half Welsh, and that the better half.
Richard Cobden was an English manufacturer and Radical and Liberal statesman, associated with two major free trade campaigns, the Anti-Corn ...
Ruth Benedict
June 5, 1887 – September 17, 1948
I gambled on having the strength to live two lives, one for myself and one for the world.
Ruth Fulton Benedict was an American anthropologist and folklorist. She was born in New York City, attended Vassar College and graduated ...
Robert Falcon Scott
June 6, 1868 – March 29, 1912
Hunger and fear are the only realities in dog life: an empty stomach makes a fierce dog.
Robert Falcon Scott, CVO was a British Royal Navy officer and explorer who led two expeditions to the Antarctic regions: the Discovery ...
John Masefield
June 1878 – May 12, 1967
Coming in solemn beauty like slow old tunes of Spain.
John Edward Masefield, OM was an English poet and writer, and Poet Laureate of the United Kingdom from 1930 until his death in 1967. He is ...
Martha Washington
June 2, 1731 – May 22, 1802
I've learned from experience that the greater part of our happiness or misery depends on our dispositions and not on our circumstances.
Martha Dandridge Custis Washington was the wife of George Washington, the first president of the United States. Although the title was not ...
William Pitt
June 4, 1855 – May 25, 1918
Unlimited power corrupts the possessor.
William Pitt was an architect, public servant and politician working in Victoria, Australia, in the later part of the 19th century and ...