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Freethought of The Day

Freethought events in history. Birthdays and quotes of famous freethinkers.
(Unless otherwise indicated, these are birthdates.)

January, February, March, April, May, June, July
August, September, October, November, December

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January
January 1Thomas Jefferson on "Wall of Separation," Ouida
January 2Isaac Asimov, Steve Benson
January 3Marcus Tullius Cicero (quote), Lucretia Mott
January 4Sigmund Freud (quote)
January 5Felix Manz (d.)
January 6Carl Sandburg
January 7Zora Neale Hurston, John E. Remsburg
January 8Stephen Hawking, Butterfly McQueen, Thomas Aikenhead (d.)
January 9Simone de Beauvoir
January 10Col. Ethan Allen
January 11Aldo Leopold, Alice Paul, G. W. Foote
January 12Ruth Hurmence Green, Jack London
January 13Ernestine L. Rose
January 14Steven Soderbergh, Andy Rooney
January 15Moliere, Martin Luther King, Jr.
January 16Thomas Jefferson (Virginia Statute for Religious Freedom)
January 17Benjamin Franklin
January 18A.A. Milne, Baron de Montesquieu, Peter Annet (d.)
January 19Edgar Allen Poe, Auguste Comte
January 20Giuseppe Verdi (quote)
January 21Helen H. Gardener
January 22Lord Byron, Gotthold Ephraim Lessing, Johan August Strindberg, Roe v. Wade decision
January 23Arthur Schopenhauer (quote)
January 24Frederick the Great, Joseph Mazzini Wheeler
January 25Virginia Woolf, Robert Burns
January 26Paul Newman, Jules Feiffer
January 27Jerome Kern, David Friedrich Strauss, Wolfgang Amadeus Mozart, Mikhail Baryshnikov
January 28Susan Sontag (quote), John Baskerville
January 29Thomas Paine, Robin Morgan, W.C. Fields, Frederick Delius, Albert Gallatin
January 30Peter Singer (quote)
January 31Rupert Hughes

February
February 1Langston Hughes, Terry Jones
February 2James Joyce, Ayn Rand, Havelock Ellis, Talleyrand-Perigord
February 3Gertrude Stein (a quote), James Michener
February 4Eugene M. Macdonald, Carl Brandes
February 5Michel de Montaigne (quote)
February 6Christopher Marlowe
February 7Charles Dickens, Sinclair Lewis
February 8John Ruskin, Philip Appleman
February 9Alice Walker, Amy Lowell, James Parton, Lucilio Vanini (burned to death)
February 10Eliza Lynn Linton
February 11Thomas Alva Edison, Lydia Marie Child, Leslie Nielsen
February 12Charles Darwin, Abraham Lincoln, George Meredith, Francois Bancel
February 13Robert Green Ingersoll and Eva Parker were married
February 14Frederick Douglass
February 15Galileo Galilei, Jeremy Bentham, Susan B. Anthony, Matt Groening
February 16Sir Francis Galton, Christopher Eccleston
February 17Giordano Bruno (killed for heresy)
February 18Bertrand Russell (quote)
February 19Svante August Arrhenius
February 20E.B. Foote
February 21Thomas Henry Huxley (quote)
February 22Edna St. Vincent Millay (quote), Luis Bunuel, George Washington, Arthur Schopenhauer, Josephine K. Henry, James Russell Lowell
February 23W.E.B. Du Bois
February 24George Augustus Moore, Grant Allen
February 25Anthony Burgess
February 26Tony Randall, Victor Hugo
February 27Henry Wadsworth Longfellow, John Steinbeck, Sonia Johnson
February 28Michel de Montaigne, Linus Pauling
February 29Ed Schempp

March
March 1Robert Lowell, Queen Caroline
March 2John Irving, Tom Wolfe (quote)
March 3William Godwin
March 4Mark Twain (quote)
March 5Rosa Luxemburg
March 6Bertrand Russell (quote)
March 7Luther Burbank
March 8Oliver Wendell Holmes, Jr., McCollum v. Board of Education
March 9Michael Kinsley
March 10H.L. Mencken (quote)
March 11Douglas Adams
March 12James Taylor, Edward Albee
March 13Joseph Priestley
March 14Albert Einstein, Judge Arnold Krekel
March 15David Cronenberg
March 16Maxim Gorky, James Madison, Rosa Bonheur
March 17Kate Greenaway, Moncure Daniel Conway, Marie Jeanne Roland de la Platiere, Alexander McQueen, Patrick Duffy
March 18Marilla M. Ricker, Weiss v. the District Board bible reading decision
March 19Bruce Willis, Sir Richard F Burton, Jean Astruc
March 20B.F. Skinner, Henrik Ibsen, Pamela Sargent, William Stewart Ross, Woman Rebel founded
March 21Blaise Pascal (quote)
March 22Stephen Sondheim, Stephen Pearl Andrews
March 23Erich Fromm, William Smith
March 24Robert Louis Heilbroner, Joel Barlow
March 25Gloria Steinem, Matilda Joslyn Gage, Robbie Fulks, Courtlandt Palmer
March 26Richard Dawkins, A.E. Housman, Robert Frost
March 27John Ballance
March 28Daniel C. Dennett, Ishmael Jaffree, Jane Rule, Neil Kinnock
March 29Eric Idle
March 30Mark Twain (quote)
March 31John Fowles, Hypatia Bradlaugh Bonner, Olive Schreiner, Marge Piercy (quote)

April
April 1Milan Kundera, Abraham H. Maslow, Vladimir Pozner
April 2Emile Zola
April 3Mathilde Franziska Giesler Anneke, John Burroughs, Marlon Brando
April 4David Cross
April 5Thomas Hobbes, Algernon Charles Swinburne
April 6James D Watson
April 7Elihu Palmer, Abner Kneeland
April 8Yip Harburg, Barbara Leigh Smith Bodichon
April 9Paul Robeson, Charles Baudelaire, Tom Lehrer, Paul Krassner
April 10Thomas Allsop
April 11George Everett Macdonald
April 12Frederich Nietzsche (quote)
April 13Mattie Parry Krekel, Christopher Hitchens, Thomas Jefferson, George Jacob Holyoake
April 14Rod Steiger, Bruce Sterling
April 15Thomas Szasz
April 16Charlie Chaplin, Anatole France
April 17Isak Dinesen
April 18Clarence Darrow
April 19Bertrand Russell (quote)
April 20Robert G. Ingersoll (quote)
April 21H.L. Mencken (quote)
April 22Jack Nicholson, Mme. De Stael, Robert Patterson
April 23William Shakespeare, Joseph Turner, Peter Watson
April 24Clarence Darrow (quote)
April 25Justice William J. Brennan (quote)
April 26David Hume, Eugene Delacroix
April 27Edward Gibbon, Mary Wollstonecraft, Herbert Spence, Ulysses S. Grant
April 28Thomas Scott
April 29Uma Thurman
April 30Annie Dillard (quote)

May
May 1Joseph Heller
May 2Catherine the Great
May 3Anne Nicol Gaylor (quote)
May 4Thomas Henry Huxley, MD
May 5John Scopes (arrested), Karl Marx
May 6George Clooney, Sigmund Freud
May 7Johannes Brahms, Peter Illyich Tchaikovsky, Robert Browning
May 8Ella E Gibson
May 9Elizabeth Cady Stanton (quote)
May 10Charles Knowlton, MD
May 11Richard Feynman, Irving Berlin
May 12Katharine Hepburn, George Carlin, Florence Nightingale, Dante Gabriel Rosetti
May 13Robert G. Ingersoll (quote)
May 14Robert Owen
May 15Seymour Hersh (quote)
May 16Henry Fonda
May 17Ralph Waldo Emerson (quote)
May 18Bertrand Russell, Omar Khayyam (quote)
May 19Lorraine Hansberry
May 20Stephen Girard, Honore de Balzac, John Stuart Mill
May 21Alexander Pope
May 22G. A. Wells
May 23Margaret Fuller
May 24Rufus King Noyes, MD
May 25Ralph Waldo Emerson
May 26Ruth Green (quote)
May 27Isadora Duncan
May 28Epicurus (quote)
May 29John F. Kennedy (quote)
May 30Mikhail Bakunin
May 31Walt Whitman

June
June 1Mark Twain (quote)
June 2Barbara Smoker
June 3Edward Livingston Youmans, MD
June 4Wallace v. Jaffree , Angelina Jolie
June 5Adam Smith, Edme Marie Gustave Tridon
June 6William Ralph Inge
June 7Alice Hubbard
June 8Robert Schuman, Frank Lloyd Wright, Francis Crick
June 9Cole Porter
June 10Ambrose Bierce quote
June 11Richard Strauss, Joseph Lewis, Ben Jonson (quote)
June 12Harriet Martineau
June 13Herb Caen quote
June 14Margaret Bourke-White
June 15Mark Twain (quote)
June 16Joyce Carol Oates
June 17Abington Town School District v. Schempp
June 18Bertrand Russell (quote)
June 19Salman Rushdie, Elbert Hubbard, Torcaso v. Watkins
June 20 Nietzsche (quote)
June 21Jean-Paul Sartre, Ian McEwan
June 22Julian Huxley, Giuseppe Mazzini, Bill Blass
June 23Daniel Henry Chamberlain
June 24Ambrose Bierce
June 25George Orwell, Dan Barker
June 26Pearl Buck
June 27Emma Goldman
June 28Richard Rodgers, Ashley Montagu, Jean Jacques Rousseau
June 29H. L. Mencken (quote)
June 30J.B.S. Haldane (quote)

July
July 1Edward Clodd
July 2Barbara G. Walker, Civil Rights Act, George Sand
July 3Charlotte Perkins Gilman
July 4Declaration of Independence signed, Frances Wright spoke publicly, Giuseppe Garibaldi, Kay Nolte Smith
July 5Samuel Butler (quote)
July 6Aleksandr Pushkin, Benjamin Underwood, Frida Kahlo
July 7Robert A. Heinlein, Josiah P. Mendum, Gustave Mahler
July 8Manoel Jose d' Arriaga
July 9Sherry Matulis
July 10Marcel Proust, Camille Pissarro
July 11John Q. Adams
July 12Henry David Thoreau, Pablo Neruda (quote)
July 13Harrison Ford
July 14Ingmar Bergman
July 15Iris Murdoch
July 16Oscar Wilde (quote)
July 17Robert G. Ingersoll (quote)
July 18William Makepeace Thackeray
July 19Seneca Falls Convention Anniversary
July 20E. Haldeman-Julius
July 21Anthony Collins
July 22Tom Robbins
July 23Samuel Porter Putnam
July 24Simon Bolivar
July 25Eric Hoffer
July 26Stanley Kubrick, Aldous Huxley, Lucy Colman, Daniel Everett
July 27Helen Taylor
July 28Anne Hutchinson (banished), 14th Amendment ratified, Meg Bowman
July 29Ron Reagan (quote)
July 30Veblen Thorstein
July 31Paul D. Boyer

August
August 1Herman Melville, Jean Baptiste LaMarck
August 2Bill Gates (quote)
August 3Rupert Brooke
August 4Percy Bysshe Shelley, Helen Thomas
August 5Clara Bewick Colby, Guy de Maupassant
August 6Alfred Tennyson
August 7James Randi
August 8Abbie Hoffman (quote)
August 9Sigmund Freud (quote)
August 10Alain (quote)
August 11Robert G. Ingersoll
August 12Lillie Devereux Blake
August 13Felix Adler
August 14John Galsworthy
August 15Maria Deraismes
August 16Mathew Tindal
August 17Montesquieu (quote)
August 18Robert Taylor
August 19Pierre Jean de Beranger, Gene Roddenberry (quote)
August 20H. L. Mencken (quote)
August 21Barry Goldwater (quote)
August 22Claude Debussy, Dorothy Parker (quote)
August 23Anatole France (quote)
August 24Elizabeth Cady Stanton (quote)
August 25Horace Seaver
August 26Women's Equality Day, Barbara Ehrenreich, Zona Gale, Robert Walpole
August 27Voltaire (quote)
August 28Johann Wolfgang von Goethe, Leo Tolstoy
August 29Xenophanes (quote)
August 30Ted Williams, Mary Shelley
August 31Anatole France (quote)

September
September 1Freethought Today, Chapman Cohen
September 2Denis Diderot (quote)
September 3Viktor E. Lennstrand (Swedish freethought rally)
September 4Sam Harris (quote)
September 5Jean de La Bruyere (quote)
September 6Frances Wright, Jane Addams, Bruno Bauer
September 7John Morley (quote)
September 8Elizabeth Cady Stanton (quote)
September 9Michel de Montaigne (quote)
September 10Stephen J. Gould
September 11Jessica Mitford
September 12H. L. Mencken
September 13Ellen Battelle Dietrick (quote)
September 14Margaret Sanger
September 15Porfirio Diaz
September 16Viscount Bolingbroke
September 17Theodore Schroeder
September 18Lance Armstrong, Catherine Fahringer, Jose Manuel Balmaceda (died)
September 19Frances Farmer, Jean Baptiste Delambre
September 20Upton Sinclair, Robert Emmet (died)
September 21H. G. Wells, Etta Semple, James Watson
September 22Parker Pillsbury, Eva Ingersoll
September 23Ani DiFranco, Victoria Woodhull
September 24F. Scott Fitzgerald
September 25Theophile de Viau (died), Dmitriy Shostakovich
September 26George Gershwin, Charles Bradlaugh
September 27Norman Mailer (quote)
September 28Georges Clemenceau, Robert Stout, Prosper Merimee
September 29Salman Rushdie (quote)
September 30Matilda Joslyn Gage (quote)

October
October 1Annie Besant
October 2John Stuart Mill (quote)
October 3Gore Vidal
October 4Susan Sarandon (quote)
October 5Denis Diderot
October 6Alfred Naquet, Emily Cape
October 7Sir Harold Kroto
October 8John Le Carre (quote)
October 9John Lennon, Guiseppe Verdi, Roger Williams (banished)
October 10Julia Sweeney, Harold Pinter, Henry Cavendish, Fridjof Nansen
October 11Eleanor Roosevelt
October 12Christopher Reeve (quote)
October 13Lenny Bruce (quote)
October 14Katha Pollitt, E. E. Cummings
October 15Friedrich Nietzsche, John Kenneth Galbraith, P. G. Wodehouse
October 16Oscar Wilde, Eugene O'Neill, Lilian Leland
October 17John Wilkes
October 18James Madison (quote)
October 19Alton Lemon
October 20John Dewey
October 21Samuel Taylor Coleridge, Martin Gardner, Ursula LeGuin, Tariq Ali
October 22Doris Lessing
October 23George Santayana (quote)
October 24Charles Darwin (quote)
October 25Georges Bizet, Pierre Eugene Marcelin Berthelot
October 26Thomas Jefferson (quote)
October 27Michael Servetus (executed), Sharlot Hall, Niccolo Paganini, Klas Pontus Arnoldson
October 28Elsa Lanchester
October 29Edward Truelove
October 30John Adams
October 31John Keats

November
November 1Pat Condell
November 2Annie Laurie Gaylor, Burt Lancaster
November 3Andre Malraux
November 4Eden Phillpotts, Maud Ingersoll
November 5Ella Wheeler Wilcox, Eugene V. Debs, Harriet Law
November 6Pat Tillman, Vashti Cromwell McCollum, Francis Ellingwood Abbot
November 7Marie S. Curie, Albert Camus
November 8Edmund Halley
November 9Carl Sagan, Ivan Turgenev, Robert Dale Owen
November 10Freidrich von Schiller
November 11Kurt Vonnegut, Joseph McCabe
November 12Elizabeth Cady Stanton, Auguste Rodin
November 13Robert Louis Stevenson, Ayaan Hirsi Ali
November 14Aaron Copland, Jawaharlal Nehru, J.M. Robertson
November 15Gora, William Pitt
November 16George Seldes
November 17Voltairine de Cleyre
November 18Margaret Atwood, Pierre Bayle
November 19 Jodie Foster
November 20Thomas Chatterton
November 21Bjork, Voltaire
November 22George Eliot
November 23Marie Bashkirtseff, Margaret Knight
November 24Scott Joplin, Benedict Spinoza
November 25Anne Nicol Gaylor, Andrew Carnegie
November 26Thomas Paine (quote)
November 27Eugene Ionesco (quote)
November 28William Blake, Friedrich Engels, Sir Leslie Stephen
November 29Percy Bysshe Shelly (quote)
November 30Mark Twain, John Toland, Louise Victorine Ackermann

December
December 1Woody Allen
December 2Kristin Lems
December 3Julianne Moore, Joseph Conrad
December 4Thomas Carlyle, Samuel Butler
December 5Sonia Johnson excommunicated, "Witches Bull" issued
December 6Ralph Waldo Emerson (quote)
December 7Heywood C. Broun
December 8Baron d' Holbach, James Thurber, Bjornstjerne Bjornson
December 9John Malkovich, Richard Carlile
December 10Emily Dickinson (quote), William Lloyd Garrison
December 11Ellen Key, Max Born (quote), Hector Berlioz
December 12Gustave Flaubert, Jay Gorney
December 13Queen Silver
December 14Titus Voelkel
December 15Bill of Rights ratified
December 16Arthur C. Clarke, George Santayana, Ludwig van Beethoven
December 17Frances Hamerstrom, Marquise du Chatelet
December 18Pedro Pablo Abaraca Aranda
December 19Denis Diderot (quote)
December 20George Jacob Holyoake (quote)
December 21Frank Zappa, Rebecca West, Anne Nicol Gaylor (quote)
December 22Robert G. Ingersoll ("Christmas Sermon")
December 23Elmina D. Slenker, D.M. Bennett, Francisco Manuel do Nascimento
December 24Matthew Arnold, John Morley
December 25Leo Pfeffer, Quentin Crisp, Clara Barton
December 26Steve Allen
December 27Marlene Dietrich
December 28Susan B. Anthony (quote)
December 29Ferdinand Magellan (quote)
December 30Marilla M. Ricker (quote)
December 31Henri Matisse

January, February, March, April, May, June, July
August, September, October, November, December

Click here to browse by name.
Click here to browse by topic.