Oprah Winfrey (1954- )

Oprah Winfrey (1954- )

Oprah Winfrey (born Orpah Gail Winfrey on January 29, 1954) is an American media proprietor, talk show host, actress, producer and philanthropist. Winfrey is best known for her self-titled, multi-award-winning talk show, which has become the highest-rated program of its kind in history and was nationally syndicated from 1986 to 2011. She has been ranked the richest African American of the 20th century, the greatest black philanthropist in American history, and was for a time the world's only black billionaire. She is also, according to some assessments, the most influential woman in the world.

Winfrey was born into poverty in rural Mississippi to a teenage single mother and later raised in an inner-city Milwaukee neighborhood. She experienced considerable hardship during her childhood, claiming to be raped at age nine and becoming pregnant at 14; her son died in infancy. Sent to live with the man she calls her father, a barber in Tennessee, Winfrey landed a job in radio while still in high school and began co-anchoring the local evening news at the age of 19. Her emotional ad-lib delivery eventually got her transferred to the daytime-talk-show arena, and after boosting a third-rated local Chicago talk show to first place, she launched her own production company and became internationally syndicated.

Credited with creating a more intimate confessional form of media communication, she is thought to have popularized and revolutionized the tabloid talk show genre pioneered by Phil Donahue, which a Yale study claims broke 20th century taboos and allowed LGBT people to enter the mainstream. By the mid 1990s, she had reinvented her show with a focus on literature, self-improvement, and spirituality. Though criticized for unleashing confession culture, promoting controversial self-help ideas, and an emotion-centered approach she is often praised for overcoming adversity to become a benefactor to others. From 2006 to 2008, her support of Barack Obama, by one estimate, delivered over a million votes in the close 2008 Democratic primary race.

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Quotes·Quotation by Oprah Winfrey

Advice

¶ What we dwell on is who we become.

Dance

¶ Every day brings a chance for you to draw in a breath, kick off your shoes, and dance.

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http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Oprah_Winfrey

Edward Abbey (1927-1989)

Edward Abbey

Edward Paul Abbey (29 January 1927 – 14 March 1989) was an American writer noted for his advocacy of environmental issues and criticism of public land policies.

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@ Growth for the sake of growth is a cancerous madness.
Edward Abbey, Desert Solitaire, "Water", p. 114 (1968)

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http://en.wikiquote.org/wiki/Edward_Abbey

W. C. Fields (1880-1946)

W. C. Fields (1880-1946)

William Claude Dukenfield (January 29, 1880[1] – December 25, 1946), better known as W. C. Fields, was an American comedian, actor, juggler and writer.[2] Fields' comic persona was a misanthropic and hard-drinking egotist, who remained a sympathetic character despite his snarling contempt for dogs, children, and women.

The characterization he portrayed in films and on radio was so strong it was generally identified with Fields himself. It was maintained by the publicity departments at Fields' studios (Paramount and Universal) and was further established by Robert Lewis Taylor's biography, W.C. Fields, His Follies and Fortunes (1949). Beginning in 1973, with the publication of Fields' letters, photos, and personal notes in grandson Ronald Fields' book W.C. Fields by Himself, it was shown that Fields was married (and subsequently estranged from his wife), and financially supported their son and loved his grandchildren.

However, Fields' friend Madge Evans, an actress, told a visitor in 1972 that Fields so deeply resented intrusions on his privacy by curious tourists walking up the driveway to his Los Angeles home that he would hide in the shrubs by his house and fire BB pellets at the trespassers' legs. Some years later, Groucho Marx told a similar story on his live performance album, An Evening with Groucho.

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Quotes·Quotations by W. C. Fields

Attitudes

¶ I am free of all prejudice. I hate everyone equally.

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References

[1]^ "Conflicts over the true facts of W.C. Fields' life begin at the moment he was born. His original biographer, Taylor, even got this wrong, dating his birth at 9 April 1879, which would have made him an authentic bastard, as his parents were only married on 18 May of the same year. According to family lore, the Great Man was born on 29 January 1880". Louvish, Simon Man on the Flying Trapeze: The Life and Times of W. C. Fields. Faber & Faber, 1999. ISBN 0-393-04127-1 p. 28.
[2]^ Obituary Variety, January 1, 1947, page 46.

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http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/W._C._Fields

Boris Pasternak (1890-1960)

Boris Pasternak (1890-1960)

Boris Leonidovich Pasternak (Russian: Бори́с Леони́дович Пастерна́к; 10 February [O.S. 29 January] 1890 – 30 May 1960) was a Russian language poet, novelist, and literary translator. In his native Russia, Pasternak's anthology My Sister Life, is one of the most influential collections ever published in the Russian language. Furthermore, Pasternak's theatrical translations of Goethe, Schiller, Pedro Calderón de la Barca, and William Shakespeare remain deeply popular with Russian audiences.

Outside Russia, Pasternak is best known for authoring Doctor Zhivago, a novel which spans the last years of Czarist Russia and the earliest days of the Soviet Union. Banned in the USSR, Doctor Zhivago was smuggled to Milan and published in 1957. Pasternak was awarded the Nobel Prize for Literature the following year, an event which both humiliated and enraged the Communist Party of the Soviet Union. In the midst of massive campaign against him by both the KGB[citation needed] and the Union of Soviet Writers, Pasternak reluctantly agreed to decline the Prize. In his resignation letter to the Nobel Committee, Pasternak stated the reaction of the Soviet State was the only reason for his decision.

By the time of his death from lung cancer in 1960, the campaign against Pasternak had severely damaged the international credibility of the U.S.S.R. He remains a major figure in Russian literature to this day. Furthermore, tactics pioneered by Pasternak were later continued, expanded, and refined by Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn and other Soviet dissidents.

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Quotes·Quotation

Life

Man is born to live, not to prepare for life. Life itself, the phenomenon of life, the gift of life,is so breathtakingly serious!

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http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Boris_Pasternak