April 5 is the birthday of Thomas Hobbes, born in Westport, Wilshire, England (1588). He is considered to be the father of modern political philosophy.
His uncle had money, and Hobbes was intellectually gifted, so he made it to Oxford. He won a post tutoring the son of an important noble family. During the civil wars of England, he fled for his life to France, where he continued to teach and study. He was a scientist, a mathematician, a translator of the classics, and a writer on the law.
But his thoughts on morality and politics are what we remember him for. He argued that all people are equal, but that we pursue our own self-interest, and so we are all at war with each other. He argued that in order to gain some security for ourselves as individuals, we will give up some of our rights to government. He believed government should protect us from our own selfishness, and that we should reject any government that doesn't. The best government, he said, would have the power of a sea monster — a leviathan — which is the name of his most famous book.
In Leviathan (1651) he wrote, "There is no such thing as perpetual tranquility of mind while we live here; because life itself is but motion, and can never be without desire, nor without fear, no more than without sense." FROM Writer's Almanac dot-org (American Public Media; Garrison Keillor).
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Also born on this date (Eldred Gregory Peck -- IMDb biography excerpt):
Eldred Gregory Peck was born in La Jolla, California, to Bernice Mary (Ayres) and Gregory Pearl Peck, a chemist and druggist in San Diego. He had Irish (from his paternal grandmother), English, and some German, ancestry. His parents divorced when he was five years old. An only child, he was sent to live with his grandmother. He never felt he had a stable childhood. His fondest memories are of his grandmother taking him to the movies every week and of his dog, which followed him everywhere. He studied pre-med at UC-Berkeley and, while there, got bitten by the acting bug and decided to change the focus of his studies. He enrolled in the Neighborhood Playhouse in New York and debuted on Broadway after graduation. His debut was in Emlyn Williams' play "The Morning Star" (1942). By 1943 he was in Hollywood, where he debuted in the RKO film Days of Glory (1944).
www.imdb.com/
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