Born in 1814 – Mikhail Bakunin, Russian anarchist, philosopher and theorist.

“No theory, no ready-made system, no book that has ever been written will save the world. I cleave to no system. I am a true seeker.”

Also: Agnès Varda

Born in 1874 – G. K. Chesterton, English essayist, poet, and playwright.

“Let us say…(there is) a fence or gate erected across a road. The more modern type of reformer goes gaily up to it and says, ‘I don’t see the use of this; let us clear it away.’ To which the more intelligent type of reformer will do well to answer: ‘If you don’t see the use of it, I certainly won’t let you clear it away. Go away and think. Then, when you can come back and tell me that you do see the use of it, I may allow you to destroy it.'”

Previously: Chesterton on ‘Education’.

Born in 1945 – Bruce Cockburn, Canadian singer-songwriter and guitarist.

Previously: Cockburn, here and here.

Born in 1907 – Marion Morrison, better known as John Wayne, American actor, director, and producer.

“Courage is being scared to death but saddling up anyway.”

Also: Dorthea Lange

Born in 1803 – Ralph Waldo Emerson, American poet and philosopher.

“The purpose of life is not to be happy. It is to be useful, to be honorable, to be compassionate, to have it make some difference that you have lived and lived well.”

Also: Raymond Carver

Born in 1940 – Joseph Brodsky, Russian-American poet and essayist.

“There are worse crimes than burning books. One of them is not reading them.”

“By failing to read or listen to poets, society dooms itself to inferior modes of articulation, those of the politician, the salesman, or the charlatan.”

Born in 1921 – Andrei Sakharov, Russian physicist and academic.

“Stalinism exhibited a much more subtle kind of hypocrisy and demagogy, with reliance not on an openly cannibalistic program like Hitler’s but on a progressive, scientific, and popular socialist ideology.
This served as a convenient screen for deceiving the working class, for weakening the vigilance of the intellectuals and other rivals in the struggle for power, with the treacherous and sudden use of the machinery of torture, execution, and informants, intimidating and making fools of millions of people, the majority of whom were neither cowards nor fools. As a consequence of this ‘specific fea­ture’ of Stalinism, it was the Soviet people, its most active, talented, and honest representatives, who suffered the most terrible blow.”

Also: Albrecht Dürer

Born in 1799 – Honoré de Balzac, French novelist and playwright.

“Equality may be a right, but no power on earth can convert it into fact.”
–La Duchesse de Langeais (1834)

Born in 1898 – Julius Evola, Italian philosopher and painter.

“The Americans’ ‘open-mindedness,’ which is sometimes cited in their favor, is the other side of their interior formlessness. The same goes for their ‘individualism.’ Individualism and personality are not the same: the one belongs to the formless world of quantity, the other to the world of quality and hierarchy. The Americans are the living refutation of the Cartesian axiom, ‘I think, therefore I am’: Americans do not think, yet they are. The American ‘mind,’ puerile and primitive, lacks characteristic form and is therefore open to every kind of standardization.”

In 1927, Andrew Philip Kehoe, treasurer of the school board in Bath Township, Michigan, detonated bombs at the Bath Consolidated School, killing thirty-eight children and six adults and injuring fifty-eight.

Also, in 2018 a seventeen-year-old student opened fire in Santa Fe High School in Santa Fe, Texas, killing eight students and two teachers; thirteen others were injured.

Also, in 1980: Mt. St. Helens erupted