Born in 1922 – Kurt Vonnegut, American soldier and author.

“I will come to a time in my backwards trip when November eleventh, accidentally my birthday, was a sacred day called Armistice Day. When I was a boy, and when Dwayne Hoover was a boy, all the people of all the nations which had fought in the First World War were silent during the eleventh minute of the eleventh hour of Armistice Day, which was the eleventh day of the eleventh month.

It was during that minute in nineteen hundred and eighteen, that millions upon millions of human beings stopped butchering one another. I have talked to old men who were on battlefields during that minute. They have told me in one way or another that the sudden silence was the Voice of God. So we still have among us some men who can remember when God spoke clearly to mankind.

Armistice Day has become Veterans Day. Armistice Day was sacred. Veterans Day is not.

So I will throw Veterans Day over my shoulder. Armistice Day I will keep. I don’t want to throw away any sacred things.”

                                                       –from Breakfast of Champions

Born in 1818 – Ivan Turgenev, Russian author and playwright.

“Most people can’t understand how others can blow their noses differently than they do.”

“Whatever a person may pray for, that person prays for a miracle. Every prayer comes down to this – Almighty God, grant that two times two not equal four.”

Born in 1913 – Albert Camus, French novelist, philosopher, and journalist.

“Every time I hear a political speech or I read those of our leaders, I am horrified at having, for years, heard nothing which sounded human. It is always the same words telling the same lies. And the fact that men accept this, that the people’s anger has not destroyed these hollow clowns, strikes me as proof that men attribute no importance to the way they are governed; that they gamble – yes, gamble – with a whole part of their life and their so called ‘vital interests.”