7 famous space-related quotes launched on the date May 25th…

By an odd coincidence, some famous space-related quotations from several different sources are linked to the date May 25th.

On May 25, 1977, Star Wars — a movie by the then little-known director George Lucas — was released in the United States.

Yeah, yeah…I know. It’s now technically referred to as Star Wars: Episode IV - A New Hope.

But I saw it at my local movie theater when it first came out (several times) and I still think of it as the first Star Wars movie. I also still tend to think of it by its simple, original name.

As almost everyone on our planet knows, the opening crawl at the beginning starts with the famous words:

        “A long time ago in a galaxy far, far away...”

That same phrase was later used in the opening crawls in the five following movies in the Star Wars series.

Of course, Star Wars also coined the catchphrase “May the Force be with you” and various other quotes that are well known to science fiction fans.

Given the current fame of the words “May the Force be with you” it seems strange in retrospect that they are spoken only twice in the original film; first by the character General Dodonna (actor Alex McCrindle) and then, somewhat jokingly, by Han Solo (Harrison Ford).

Other popular quotes from that film include two lines by Obi-Wan Kenobi (actor Alec Guinness): “These are not the Droids you’re looking for” and “Use the Force, Luke!”

Another is the plea made by the holographic image of Princess Leia Organa (Carrie Fisher): “Help me, Obi-Wan Kenobi. You’re my only hope.”

On May 25, 1979, exactly two years after Star Wars debuted nationwide, the movie Alien was released in the U.S.

It was by directed by another director who was little-known at the time: Ridley Scott.

The tagline on the posters and ads for Alien launched another famous space quotation:

        “In space no one can hear you scream.”

Exactly 16 years before Star Wars debuted and 18 years before Alien hit American movie screens, President John F. Kennedy announced a vision for space travel that wasn’t science fiction.

On May 25, 1961, in a speech before a joint session of Congress, he famously announced:

“I believe this nation should commit itself to achieving the goal, before this decade is out, of landing a man on the moon and returning him safely to Earth.”

Kennedy didn’t live to see it, but America succeeded in achieving his goal in 1969, when NASA’s Apollo 11 astronauts landed on and returned from the moon.

The last of America’s six manned lunar landing missions was in 1972.

Ever since then, some of us have continued to hope that our government would pursue new manned trips to the moon.

It hasn’t. And, it won’t in the near future. President Barack Obama threw cold water on that hope in a speech on April 15, 2010.

Obama announced his support for “robotic exploration of the solar system” and kept open the option of future manned missions to Mars.

But he essentially told us to forget about new manned missions to the moon during his tenure in office.

“I understand that some believe that we should attempt a return to the surface of the Moon,” said Obama. “But I just have to say pretty bluntly here: We’ve been there before.”

Ironically, Obama gave this speech at the John F. Kennedy Space Center on Merritt Island, Florida.

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Related reading and viewing…

The (Pit) Bull Heard ‘Round the World…

Every four years, the American presidential election campaign generates a new batch of oft-cited political quotes.

On September 3, 2008, former Alaska Governor and Republican Vice Presidential nominee Sarah Palin uttered a line that was soon both famous and infamous.

That night at the Republican National Convention in St. Paul, Minnesota, Palin gave a much-anticipated speech.

During it, the self-described “hockey mom” uttered these immortal words:

       “You know, they say the difference between a hockey mom and a pit bull? Lipstick.”

The quip was widely repeated in news coverage and is now found in many books and on websites that collect famous quotations.

Interestingly, Palin didn’t create the “women + dog + lipstick” joke formula.

An earlier example appears in the 2005 book What Every Man Wants In A Woman / What Every Woman Wants In A Man, written by Texas televangelist Pastor John Hagee.

In that enlightening guide to male/female relations, Hagee wrote:

“Do you know the difference between a woman with PMS and a snarling Doberman pinscher? The answer is lipstick.”

I’m sure female readers of Hagee’s work enjoyed that knee slapper. (Amazingly, he followed it with an even worse one: “Do you know the difference between a terrorist and a woman with PMS? You can negotiate with a terrorist.”)

Of course, Palin’s version of the woman/canine analogy became the most famous.

After she said it, it was quoted, analyzed, praised and mocked for weeks in the news and around water coolers.

Even Democratic Presidential candidate Barack Obama couldn’t resist making a wisecrack that seemed to make a sly reference to it.

On September 10, 2008, while commenting on some of the policy “changes” proposed by Republican Presidential nominee Sen. John McCain, Obama used a version of an old joke about putting lipstick on pigs:

“That's not change,” he said of McCain’s proposals. “That's just calling the same thing something different. But you know, you can put lipstick on a pig. It's still a pig.”

Well, holy moly! That got the Republicans as mad as honked-off horny toads! So, they responded by calling Obama, among other things, a sexist pig.

Naturally, that made the Democrats as mad as a bull seeing red, so they responded by saying...

Nevermind. We had to listen to porcine puns and canine quips by politicians, headline writers and the TV pundits for weeks. It drove us all crazy. (Me anyway.) 

I’m giving the animal rights group PETA the last word on the great animal + lipstick analogy debate of 2008.

PETA posted an anti-animal testing Google Adsense ad that came up on some websites if you searched the phrase “lipstick on a pig.”

The ad said:

“Lipstick on a pig? Pigs shouldn’t have lipstick unless they’ve been kissed. Help Pigs now!”

And, may the gods help us voters live through the latest rancorous, insult-filled presidential campaign.

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Related reading and viewing…

As American as apple pie, cherry pie – and violence...

Apple trees are not native to America. They originated in Central Asia and were grown in Asia and Europe long before European colonists brought them to North America.

However, as explained in a post by the eminent word and phrase expert Barry Popik on his site, American-grown apples and American-style apple pies eventually became renowned for having a special sweetness and flavor.       

That led to the term “American apple pie,” which was used to distinguish American-style apple pies from pies made in other countries.

By the 1920s, the phrase “as American as apple pie” was floating around. By the 1940s it had become a common idiomatic expression.

There’s no famous quotation or date to cite for the origin of “as American as apple pie.” The exact origin is unknown.

But there is a notorious variation that’s linked to the date July 27.

On July 27, 1967, the black activist H. Rap Brown gave a rancorous speech at a press conference in Washington, D.C. that is widely cited as the origin of his well-known quote:

     “Violence is as American as cherry pie.”

In a way, it was the origin. However, that seven-word aphorism is the shortened, popularized version of what Brown said in his speech.

What he actually said that day was:

     “I say violence is necessary. Violence is a part of America’s culture. It is as American as cherry pie. Americans taught the black people to be violent. We will use that violence to rid ourselves of oppression if necessary. We will be free, by any means necessary.”

Ironically, at the time, Brown was Director of the Student Nonviolent Coordinating Committee (SNCC).

His fiery remarks at the July 27 press conference were, in part, a reaction to an announcement President Lyndon Johnson made that day.

Johnson announced that he was creating a special government commission formally titled “The National Advisory Commission on Civil Disorders.” It later came to be popularly known as The Kerner Commission, after its chair, Governor Otto Kerner of Illinois.

Johnson asked the 11-member Commission to determine the causes of the violent race riots that had swept through major American cities during the past few years, most recently in Newark and Detroit, and to recommend ways to stop such riots from happening in the future.

Brown decided to respond to this news by holding a press conference at SNCC’s Washington headquarters.

He scoffed at the idea that the causes of the riots were a mystery. “Rebellions are caused by conditions,” he said.

Then he made his famous comments about violence being necessary and as American as cherry pie and topped that off by adding: “If you give me a gun and tell me to shoot my enemy, I might just shoot Lady Bird.” (Referring to President Johnson’s wife, Claudia, whose popular nickname was “Lady Bird.”)
 
Brown went on to call President Johnson a “white honky cracker” and “a mad wild dog” and said that if America’s cities didn’t “come around” they “should be burned down.”

None of his comments that day gained the lasting notoriety of his cherry pie aphorism.

It’s not clear why he chose cherry pie instead of apple pie. But in his controversial 1969 autobiography Die Nigger Die!, Brown helped popularize his version of the saying by using it in the pithier form that’s often mistakenly attributed to his July 27, 1967 speech.

In the book, Brown wrote (using a lower case “a” for America, to show his disdain):

     “This country was born on violence. Violence is as american as cherry pie. Black people have always been violent, but our violence has always been directed toward each other. If nonviolence is to be practiced, then it should be practiced in our community and end there. Violence is a necessary part of revolutionary struggle.”

As I write this, the President of the United States is a black man who is serving his second term in office.

H. Rap Brown (who changed his name to Jamil Abdullah Al-Amin while in prison for armed robbery in the 1970s) is now serving a life sentence in prison for murder.

He was convicted of killing African-American police officer Ricky Kinchen in 2000, during a shootout in Georgia that occurred when Kinchen tried to serve a warrant on him.

On July 19, 2013, President Barack Obama held a press conference at the White House to express his views on a Florida jury’s recent decision to acquit George Zimmerman of murder for shooting and killing the young black teenager Trayvon Martin.

The President acknowledged that race relations in America are better than they were when he was Trayvon’s age.

But he noted that racism in America clearly has not been eliminated.

More recent events in Ferguson, Missouri and elsewhere have seemed to give further credence to that view.

And, the continuing occurrence of gun-related homicides in the United states, affecting people of all races, seem to validate the view that violence is indeed still as American as cherry — or apple — pie.

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Related reading and viewing…

What were the “top quotes” of 2013?

I recently looked through a couple dozen lists of “top” and “best” quotes of 2013 and came to a disappointing conclusion.

In terms of truly memorable quotations that generated new idiomatic expressions and catchphrases or that will show up in future books of quotations, the year 2013 was pretty much a bust.

Browse through some of the lists of the supposed top or best quotes of 2013 at this link yourself and you’ll understand why I say that.

For example, as far as I can tell from the lists of the “top” or “best” political quotes of the year, no politician said anything in 2013 that will be cited by large numbers of history or quotation books years from now.

And, what line from a movie released in 2013 do you remember and hear people using regularly, the way people remember and make quips with lines like “May the Force be with you” or “I’ll be back” or “You can’t handle the truth”? If there were any, they’re not in the lists of the top or best movie lines of 2013 that I’ve seen.

Similarly, can you think of a catchphrase from a TV show that debuted in 2013 that has embedded itself in our language? Anything that will become as familiar as lines like “The thrill of victory and the agony of defeat” or “To boldly go where no man has gone before” or “Well isn’t that special?” I’m guessing not.

So, what are the top quotes of 2013?

The most widely-published annual list of “top quotes” is the one released by Yale University librarian Fred Shapiro, editor of the authoritative Yale Book of Quotations. It gets reprinted by thousands of newspapers and websites.

Shapiro has been issuing his list of the top quotes of the year since 2007. As he explained in a video on the Yale News website, his choices aren’t simply based on whether a quote has become “famous.” He says he also picks quotes that he views as historically important or revealing of the spirit of the times.

Even given those broader parameters, I think he had a lot better options to pick from in previous years.

You can read Shapiro’s complete 2013 list

at this link.

His number one quote of the year is a comment President Barack Obama made about the Affordable Health Care Act (a.k.a. “Obamacare”) at a news conference on November 14, 2013:

“With respect to the pledge I made that if you like your plan you can keep it: the way I put that forward unequivocally ended up not being accurate.”

With respect to Fred, that may be a historic admission but it’s not a very memorable quotation.

It’s a comment on a famous promise Obama repeated in various ways in 2009 and 2010, usually summarized as “If you like your health care plan, you can keep it.”

The most cited version is probably the one in his speech to the American Medical Association on June 15, 2009, in which he used the word period at the end for emphasis:

“If you like your health care plan, you’ll be able to keep your health care plan, period.”

That statement wasn’t given much notice in 2009 but, ironically, it did become a famous quote in 2013.

When Obamacare began to be implemented this past year, opponents of the plan discovered that some Americans would not actually be able to keep their existing health care plans if those plans didn’t meet certain minimum quality criteria in the law’s fine print.

So, during 2013, Republican politicians and pundits gleefully (and endlessly) reminded everyone that Obama had previously said if you like your health care plan, you could keep it. Politico.com actually dubbed it “The Lie of the Year” for 2013 — even though Obama didn’t say it in 2013.

Indeed, there is only one quotation on Fred Shapiro’s list of the top quotes of 2013 that I think will likely be considered a “famous quote” in the future. It’s actually famous already, in the sense of being familiar to most reasonably aware people and frequently cited, mocked and satirized.

But it was also uttered prior to 2013.

It’s the oft-parodied remark made by Wayne LaPierre, CEO of the National Rifle Association, at a press conference on December 21, 2012:

     “The only thing that stops a bad guy with a gun is a good guy with a gun.”

Shapiro included it on this year’s list because it was uttered after he issued his 2012 list in mid-December of last year.

So, I’m guessing that in his list of the top quotes of 2014, Fred may include a few that were uttered shortly after he issued his 2013 list.

One is now paraphrased as “Santa is white.”

That’s the shortened version of some immediately controversial and widely-covered remarks made by Fox News anchor Megyn Kelly on December 11, 2013.

Responding to an article she’d read which said the constant depiction of Santa Claus as a white man makes some black children feel uncomfortable and excluded, Kelly opined:

     “For all you kids watching at home, Santa just is white. But this person is maybe just arguing that we should also have a black Santa. But, you know, Santa is what he is...Just because it makes you feel uncomfortable doesn’t mean it has to change. You know, I mean, Jesus was a white man too. He was a historical figure; that’s a verifiable fact – as is Santa, I want you kids watching to know that.”

Kelly later said her remarks were intended to be humorous, but nobody really believed it. And, mentions of “Santa is white” quickly became — and will likely remain — a popular target of scorn and satire by Liberals and comedians in the future.

There were some other politically-incorrect statements by another TV celebrity that came to light after Shapiro’s issued his list of top quotes for this year.

Yep, I’m referring to the remarks that Phil Robertson, star of the Duck Dynasty reality TV show, made about homosexuals and African Americans in an interview in the January 2014 issue of GQ magazine, which actually hit newsstands and made news in December of 2013.

As you’ve probably heard (unless you’ve been living off the grid somewhere), Robertson compared homosexuality to bestiality. He also suggested that homosexuals won’t get into heaven.

Specifically, when asked what he thought was sinful, Robertson is quoted as responding:

     “Start with homosexual behavior and just morph out from there. Bestiality, sleeping around with this woman and that woman and that woman and those men,” he says. Then he paraphrases Corinthians: “Don’t be deceived. Neither the adulterers, the idolaters, the male prostitutes, the homosexual offenders, the greedy, the drunkards, the slanderers, the swindlers—they won’t inherit the kingdom of God. Don’t deceive yourself. It’s not right.”

Robertson also managed to offend African Americans in his GQ interview, saying:

     “I never, with my eyes, saw the mistreatment of any black person. Not once. Where we lived was all farmers. The blacks worked for the farmers. I hoed cotton with them. I’m with the blacks, because we’re white trash. We’re going across the field.... They’re singing and happy. I never heard one of them, one black person, say, ‘I tell you what: These doggone white people’—not a word!... Pre-entitlement, pre-welfare, you say: Were they happy? They were godly; they were happy; no one was singing the blues.”

The Duck Dynasty patriarch’s comments generated a ton of press and controversy.

I don’t know if they’ll show up in future editions of Bartlett’s or the Yale Book of Quotations. But given the attention they generated, I will be surprised if Fred Shapiro doesn’t mention them in his next annual list of top quotes.

Happy New Year from This Day in Quotes!

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Related reading…

The Top Quotes of 2012 – and some of the top “top quotes” lists of 2012…

Every December, various pundits, writers and media outlets publish lists of what they consider to be the the year’s “top” or “best” quotations — either in general or within a certain realm, such as politics, sports or movies.

Recently, I’ve been perusing some of the lists of quotes from 2012.

The one that’s most widely cited is the top ten quotes of the year list compiled by quote maven Fred Shapiro, associate librarian at Yale Law School and author of the authoritative Yale Book of Quotations.

Now in it’s seventh year, Shapiro’s list gets reprinted by hundreds of newspapers and thousands of websites.

His 2012 list includes several quotes by President Barack Obama and two by his Republican challenger in the 2012 presidential election, Mitt Romney.

In this case, Mitt actually won.

He gained the #1 spot on Shapiro’s list for what became one of the most infamous, clueless and damaging political quotations ever uttered:

“There are 47 percent of the people who will vote for the president no matter what…who are dependent upon government, who believe that they are victims…These are people who pay no income tax…and so my job is not to worry about those people. I’ll never convince them that they should take personal responsibility and care for their lives.”

Romney made those remarks at a private fundraiser in Boca Raton, Florida on May 17, 2012. However, they didn’t hit the news until September 17, when a secretly-recorded video of what he said at the fundraiser was released by Mother Jones magazine.

When the story broke, it created a major political firestorm that the Obama campaign stoked to the max.

Romney’s “47 percent” gaffe is also cited by several lists of the top political quotes of 2012.

Many observers believe that quotation played a significant role in turning key swing voters against Romney, by making it appear (or maybe by making it clear) that he didn’t care about the opinions, votes or lives of nearly half of all Americans.

Shapiro’s list of the top 10 quotes of 2012 also includes another gaffe by Romney (“binders full of women”), three quotes by Obama (most notably his “you didn’t build that” quote), Missouri Senatorial candidate Todd Akin’s radioactive “legitimate rape” quote, South Korean rapper PSY’s “Oppan Gangnam style” video meme, a comment by Federal Reserve Chairman Ben Bernanke that popularized the term “fiscal cliff,” and several others that are primarily of interest to political junkies.

Fred left out what I would count as one of the top 10 quotes of the year, but it did make the #1 position in ESPN Playbook’s 2012 “Sports Quotes of the Year” list.

It’s the memorable response by Washington Nationals outfielder

Bryce Harper when a reporter implied that the 19-year-old rookie might take advantage of Canada’s lower drinking age when he played in Toronto and have a beer.

During a a press event on June 13, 2012, a Toronto TV reporter asked Harper: “You got a favorite beer?” 

Harper answered drily:

      “That’s a clown question, bro.” 

It quickly became a viral meme and a popular new all-purpose retort to stupid questions.

There are actually quite a few lists of the top sports quotes of 2012 online.

Some are for hard core fans of certain sports — like the lists of top quotes by and about golfer Tiger Woods or the top quotes by Zlatan Ibrahimovic, the Swedish soccer star (i.e., star of the sport known as football in every country except the US).

As a movie buff, I was interested in reading the lists of top movie quotes of 2012. From what I can tell, almost none seem to have reached the level of being widely-repeated, long-lasting pop culture quotations.

There is one notable exception, mentioned in the list compiled by movie critic Chris Knight:

       “May the odds be ever in your favor.”

It’s a catchphrase from the hugely popular science fiction film The Hunger Games, based on the hugely popular novel by Suzanne Collins. 

Although you may not know that quote, millions of Hunger Game fans do and it’s cited on hundreds of thousands of websites. (Actually, it appears to be millions based on the Google search hit stats for the phrase.)

There are a number of lists of the “dumbest” or “stupidest” quotes of 2012 online. A large percentage of those are political in nature. So, whether you think the quotes they include are dumb or stupid depends largely on your political leanings.

I found many lists of top 2012 quotes by “celebrities.” They mostly include quotes by people from the realms of TV, movies, fashion or music and those “personalities” who are basically famous for being famous.

I guess such celebrity quote lists are of interest to people who know who the latest celebrities are and are fascinated by what “celebs” do and say. I don’t and am not. So, I quickly got bored reading those lists.

There are also some lists of 2012 quotes of interest to geeks and wonks. Having qualities of both, I found those more intriguing.

For example, there are two “Top Tech Quotes of 2012” lists I like: one on the New Yorker magazine site, complied by Nicholas Thompson and one on the C/NET website, compiled by Jonathan Skillings.

My favorite quote from Thompson’s is “Turn left into the water” — which he cites as the best line from a Tumblr page devoted to the epic failure of Apple’s map app.

My favorite from Skillings:

       “I'm safely on the surface of Mars. GALE CRATER I AM IN YOU!!! #MSL.”

That was the historic tweet by the Curiosity Rover when it landed in the Gale Crater on the surface of Mars on August 6, 2012.

As a kid in the 1950s, I wondered if there was intelligent life on Mars.

As I was reading some of the lists of the top political and celebrity quotes of 2012, I was reminded of the old joke about whether there’s any on earth.

Happy New Year from ThisDayinQuotes.com. And, good luck to all of us in 2013.

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Further reading, viewing and listening…

The Top Quotes of the Year in 2009

Below, in chronological order, are my picks for the top quotations of 2009 — the quotes that seemed to get the most attention during the past year in the news and elsewhere.

There were more than would fit into a top 10 list. So, I’ll call them The Top 10 Quotes of 2009 – Plus a Few.

“I hope he fails.” Rush Limbaugh Conservative talk show host Comment about newly-elected President Barack Obama, on his radio show, January 16, 2009.

“I do believe that marriage should be between a man and a woman, no offense to anybody out there. But that’s how I was raised and I believe that it should be between a man and a woman.” Carrie Prejean Miss USA beauty pageant contestant and winner (later fired) Answer when asked by pageant judge Perez Hilton whether she believed in gay marriage, during the Miss USA contest, April 19, 2009.

“My hope is, is that as a consequence of this event, this ends up being what’s called ‘a teachable moment.’” President Barack Obama Comment to the press on July 24, 2009 about the uproar over his remark two days earlier that “The Cambridge police acted stupidly” when they arrested Harvard scholar Henry Louis Gates, Jr. President Obama’s use helped popularize the already existing term “teachable moment.”

“Obama...has a deep-seated hatred for white people...This guy is, I believe, a racist.” Glenn Beck Conservative talk show host Commenting on President Obama’s comments about the arrest of Henry Louis Gates, in a discussion on the FOX News Network, July 28, 2009.

“The America I know and love is not one in which my parents or my baby with Down Syndrome will have to stand in front of Obama’s ‘death panel.’” Sarah Palin Former Alaska Governor Post on her Facebook site on August 7, 2009, which first brought attention to the term “death panels.” She then gave it even more exposure in an op-ed she wrote that was published in the Wall Street Journal on September 8, 2008.

“We should not have a government program that determines if you're going to pull the plug on grandma.” Republican Senator Chuck Grassley Adding a new catchphrase to the rhetoric used to attack the Democrats’ health care plan, at a town meeting in his home state of Iowa on August 12, 2009.  Four days later, President Obama publicly scoffed at claims that he or the Democrats wanted to “pull the plug on grandma” or create “death panels.”

“You lie!” Republican Congressman Joe Wilson The instantly infamous words yelled by the South Carolina Congressman as President Barack Obama was addressing Congress on the health care plan, on September 9, 2009.

“I’m really happy for you, I’mma let you finish, but Beyonce had one of the best videos of all time.” Musician Kanye West His rude rant after grabbing the microphone from award winner Taylor Swift at the MTV Video Music Awards on September 13, 2009 (creating the much-parodied meme “I’mma let you finish”).

“I know it wasn’t ‘rape’ rape. I think it was something else, but I don’t believe it was ‘rape’ rape.” Actress Whoopi Goldberg Defending director Roman Polanski on ABC-TV’s show The View, on September 28, 2009, by attempting to portray his admitted rape of a thirteen year old girl in 1977 as, er, something else.

“If you get sick, America, the Republican health care plan is this: Die quickly.” Democratic Congressman Alan Mark Grayson Remark by the Florida Congressman on the floor of the House on September 29, 2009, making “die quickly” the controversial Democratic counterpoint to “death panels,” “pull the plug on grandma” and “You lie!”

“Nothing tastes as good as skinny feels.” British “Supermodel” Kate Moss Her answer when asked if she had a motto, in an interview published by the “fashion Bible” Women’s Wear Daily on November 13, 2009, prompting righteous outrage from anti-anorexia groups.

“We have a social purpose...[I’m] doing God’s work.” Lloyd Blankfein Chairman and CEO of the investment firm Goldman Sachs Defending himself and the financial industry, despite their role in creating the current financial crisis, in an interview published by The Sunday Times on November 8, 2009.

“The system worked.” Janet Napolitano Secretary of Homeland Security Her comment in a CNN interview on December 27, 2009 about the Nigerian terrorist who managed to board a plane with explosives, but failed in his attempt to blow up a planeload of Americans on Christmas Day. Napolitano’s absurd assessment was quickly repudiated by President Barack Obama.

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