The Internet created a new way for quotations to become famous, including many that would probably might not be well known otherwise. (It also created a new way for misquotes…
Year: 2016
“I’m sick and tired of being sick and tired.”
Like virtually all African Americans who grew up in Mississippi during the first half of the 20th century, Fannie Lou Hamer endured many injustices in her life. Some went beyond…
“I coulda been a contender!”
When On the Waterfront was first released to American movie theaters on July 28, 1954, the film’s director, Elia Kazan, was worried about how well it would do on opening…
“I had a lover’s quarrel with the world.”
The great American poet Robert Frost died in 1963, when he was 88 years old. But he wrote his epitaph more than two decades before that, in a poem titled…
“A wife is to submit graciously to…her husband.”
In 1998, the leaders of the Southern Baptist Convention decided to update the provisions of the “Baptist Faith and Message,” a set of principles adopted in 1925 to provide guidance…
“When you call me that, SMILE!”
When the groundbreaking Western novel The Virginian by Owen Wister was first published on May 28, 1902, no one could have known that it would become so famous — or…
“Old soldiers never die, they just fade away.”
On April 19, 1951, General Douglas MacArthur made a high-profile “farewell address” to a joint meeting of both houses of Congress. Eight days earlier, he’d been fired as the top…
Oh, the irony! Tax Day is also a legal anniversary of “Plop, plop, fizz, fizz…”
America’s federal income tax was first created by Congress in 1861, to help fund the Union Army during the Civil War. The original deadline set for paying the tax was…
Wayne LaPierre’s (in)famous “jack-booted government thugs” quote…
For many decades after the National Rifle Association was founded in 1871, a main focus of the group was on urging and teaching gun safety, to help reduce gun-related accidents.…