BellaOnline Forums Home and Garden Water Gardens Thought of the day

Bella Abzug (1920-1998)
First Jewish Congresswoman, Bella Abzug was known for her wide-brimmed hats and fiery personality, as well as her work for feminism, peace, and civil liberties.

� I've been described as a tough and noisy woman, a prize fighter, a man-hater, you name it. They call me Battling Bella, Mother Courage, and a Jewish mother with more complaints than Portnoy.

Famous women's birthdays today:

HENRIETTE WYETH-1907-ARTIST. OFTEN CALLED "FIRST LADY OF AMERICAN ART". LLA 1990=PRESENTED BY HELEN HAYES
SARAH BERNHARDT (1844-1923) CLASSIC ACTRESS
JOAN FONTAINE-1917-ACTRESS
CATHERINE DENEUVE-1943-ACTRESS, MODEL

� Love is that condition in the human spirit so profound that it allows me to survive, and better than that, to thrive with passion, compassion, and style.

� There is nothing so pitiful as a young cynic because he has gone from knowing nothing to believing nothing.

� The main thing in one's own private world is to try to laugh as much as you cry.

Maya Angelou

Isabel Allende (1942-)

Isabel Allende, a novelist and journalist, left Chile with her husband and children when her uncle, Chilean president Salvador Allende, was overthrown in a coup. After a time in Venezuela, Isabel Allende came to live and write in the United States.

Selected Isabel Allende Quotations

� How can one not speak about war, poverty, and inequality when people who suffer from these afflictions don't have a voice to speak?

� We live in an era where masses of people come and go across a hostile planet, desolate and violent. Refugees, emigrants, exiles, deportees. We are a tragic contingent.

� Write what should not be forgotten.

� While you are experimenting, do not remain content with the surface of things. Don't become a mere recorder of facts, but try to penetrate the mystery of their origin.

� Erotica is using a feather, pornography is using the whole chicken.

� For women the best aphrodisiacs are words.

Marian Anderson (1902-1993)

An African American singer, Marian Anderson found more success and fame in Europe than America until in 1939 the DAR (Daughters of the American Revolution) refused to allow her to sing in their Constitution Hall in Washington, DC. In part because of the public attention brought by this incident, Marian Anderson became one of the best-known African American women of the 20th century.
Daughters of the American Revolution (DAR)

Marian Anderson

Selected Marian Anderson Quotations

� I could not run away from the situation. I had become, whether I liked it or not, a symbol, representing my people. I had to appear.

� I forgave the DAR many years ago. You lose a lot of time hating people.

� the Sisterhood is in all of us. It is every woman who is keeping the dream alive. And the oldest dreamkeepers, the Grandmothers, are in danger at this very moment. We must write and we must act to keep the knowledge and the powers of woman alive.

Lynn Andrews

There is material enough in a single flower for the ornament of a score of cathedrals.

John Ruskin (1851)

Diane Arbus (1923-1971)

Diane Arbus was a photographer and also taught at Parsons School of Design, Rhode Island School of Design, and Cooper Union. After early work in fashion photography, Diane Arbus became known more for her portraits of unusual subjects and for her portraits of celebrities.

Selected Diane Arbus Quotations

� I really believe there are things nobody would see if I didn't photograph them.

� There are things which nobody would see unless I photographed them.

� Everybody has that thing where they need to look one way but they come out looking another way and that's what people observe. You see someone on the street and essentially what you notice about them is the flaw.

� It gets to seem as if way back in the Garden of Eden after the Fall, Adam and Eve had begged the Lord to forgive them and He, in his boundless exasperation, had said, ''All right, then. Stay. Stay in the Garden. Get civilized. Procreate. Muck it up.'' And they did.

Elizabeth Arden (1884 - 1966)
Elizabeth Arden sold cosmetics -- but she really sold "youth and beauty" to the women of her time. Elizabeth Arden was her adopted name, chosen from the first name of her first partner, and the title of a Tennyson poem.

Selected Elizabeth Arden Quotations

� There's only one Elizabeth like me and that's the Queen.

� I only want people around me who can do the impossible.

� Dear, never forget one little point. It's my business. You just work here.

� I pick good women, but I haven't had any luck with my men.

� Nothing that costs only a dollar is worth having.

Hannah Arendt (1906-1975)

Hannah Arendt, a political philosopher, specialized in analyzing the rise of totalitarianism, with special attention to Nazi Germany.

Selected Hannah Arendt Quotations

� The sad truth is that most evil is done by people who never make up their minds to be either good or evil.

� The defiance of established authority, religious and secular, social and political, as a world-wide phenomenon may well one day be accounted the outstanding event of the last decade.

� The right to marry whoever one wishes is an elementary human right compared to which "the right to attend an integrated school, the right to sit where one pleases on a bus, the right to go into any hotel or recreation area or place of amusement, regardless of one's skin or color or race" are minor indeed. Even political rights, like the right to vote, and nearly all other rights enumerated in the Constitution, are secondary to the inalienable human rights to "life, liberty and the pursuit of happiness" proclaimed in the Declaration of Independence; and to this category the right to home and marriage unquestionably belongs. [i[[Dissent, Winter 1959]