You don’t have to be a full-fledged Trekkie to be familiar with the “Vulcan blessing” from Star Trek — “Live long and prosper” — or with the splay-fingered “Vulcan salute”…
“The power of Christ compels you!” – and the power of BTS, Kanye West, and Taylor Swift
EDITOR’S NOTE: In addition to ThisDayinQuotes.com, I write the QuoteCounterquote.com blog. That one is also about quotations, but has a different format. ThisDayinQuotes.com focuses on the origins and context of…
How August 26 became “Women’s Equality Day”
Each year since 1973, August 26th has been officially recognized as “Women’s Equality Day.” It’s a commemoration of the final approval of the Nineteenth Amendment to the U.S. Constitution. That…
“Turn off your mind, relax and float downstream…”
On August 8, 1966, Capitol Records released the Beatles album Revolver in the United States. (In the UK, the LP was released by Parlophone on August 5.) Revolver became an…
Ron Popeil created the Veg-o-Matic and inspired the Bass-O-Matic (but didn’t say “It slices! It dices!”)
When Ron Popeil titled his 1995 autobiographical book The Salesman of the Century it was not the kind of exaggeration used in the “As seen on TV” style of ads…
“Luke, I am your father!” — the most famous movie misquote ever?
On May 21, 1980, The Empire Strikes Back, the second film in the original Star Wars movie trilogy, had an initial release at a limited number of theaters in the…
“Elvis has left the building.”
Even people who aren’t Elvis Presley fans know the line “Elvis has left the building.” Credit for popularizing this famous quote goes to Al Dvorin, a Chicago bandleader and…
“About one-fifth of the people are against everything all of the time.”
Some observers have expressed surprise that two populist, anti-establishment candidates who many people view as “extremists” won sizeable percentages of the votes in the 2016 presidential primary elections. But in…
The origins of the “The Domino Effect”…
Contrary to what many sites on the Internet say, President Dwight D. Eisenhower did not coin the famous Cold War term “the Domino Effect.” He did use the phrase “falling…
“Open the pod bay doors, HAL.”
On April 6, 1968, director Stanley Kubrick’s visionary science fiction film 2001: A Space Odyssey was released to movie theaters nationwide in the United States. The film, developed from the…