This site is dedicated to the memory of Dr. Alan William Smolowe who gave birth to the creation of this database.
Benevolence is not in word and in tongue, but in deed and in truth. It is a business with men as they are, and with human life as drawn by the rough hand of experience. It is a duty which you must perform at the call of principle; though there be no voice of eloquence to give splendor to your exertions, and no music of poetry to lead your willing footsteps through the bowers of enchantment. It is not the impulse of high and ecstatic emotion. It is an exertion of principle. :You must go to the poor man’s cottage, though no verdure flourish around it, the gentleness of its murmurs. If you look for the romantic simplicity of fiction you will be disappointed; but it is your duty to persevere in spite of every discouragement. Benevolence is not merely a feeling but a principle; not a dream of rapture for the fancy to indulge in, but a business for the hand to execute.
Benevolence | Business | Character | Duty | Experience | Gentleness | Impulse | Life | Life | Man | Men | Music | Poetry | Simplicity | Truth | Will | Business |
Fiction is no longer a mere amusement; but transcendent genius, accommodating itself to the character of the age, has seized upon this province of literature, and turned fiction from a toy into a mighty engine.
Age | Character | Genius | Literature |
G. K. Chesterton, fully Gilbert Keith Chesterton
Truth must necessarily be stranger than fiction; for fiction is the creation of the human mind and therefore congenial to it.
John Hersey, fully John Richard Hersey
Journalism allows it's readers to witness history. Fiction gives its readers an opportunity to live it.
History | Opportunity | Wisdom | Witness |
Art is a staple of mankind - never a by-product of elitism. So urgent, so utterly linked with the pulse of feeling that it becomes the singular sing of life when every other aspect of civilization fails... Like hunger and sex, it is a disposition of the human cell - a marvelous fiction of the brain which recreates itself as something as mysterious as mind. Art is consistent with every aspect of every day in the life of every people.
Art | Civilization | Day | Hunger | Life | Life | Mankind | Mind | People | Wisdom | Art |
Nothing is more free than the imagination of man; and though it cannot exceed that original stock of ideas furnished by the internal and external senses, it has unlimited power of mixing, compounding, separating, and dividing these ideas, in all the varieties of fiction and vision. It can feign a train of events, with all the appearance of reality, ascribe to them a particular time and place, conceive them as existent, and paint them out of itself with every circumstance, that belongs to any historical fact, which it believes with the greatest certainty.
Appearance | Events | Ideas | Imagination | Man | Nothing | Power | Reality | Time | Vision | Wisdom |
Anthony Ashley Cooper, 3rd Earl of Shaftesbury
Truth is the most powerful thing in the world, since even fiction itself must be governed by it, an can only please by its resemblance. The appearance of reality is necessary to make any passion agreeably represented, and to be able to move others we must be moved ourselves, or at least seem to be so, upon some probably grounds.
Imagination and fiction make up more than three quarters of our real life.
Imagination | Life | Life |
Frédéric Bastiat, fully Claude Frédéric Bastiat
Government is the great fiction through which everybody endeavors to live at the expense of everybody else.
Mikhail Bakunin, fully Mikhail Alexandrovich Bakunin
All temporal or human authority stems directly from spiritual and/or divine authority. But authority is the negation of freedom. God, or rather the fiction of God, is the consecration and the intellectual and moral source of all slavery on earth, and the freedom of mankind will never be complete until the disastrous and insidious fiction of a heavenly master is annihilated.
Authority | Consecration | Earth | Freedom | God | Mankind | Slavery | Will |
Mikhail Bakunin, fully Mikhail Alexandrovich Bakunin
Our first work must be the annihilation of everything as it now exists. The old world must be destroyed and replaced by a new one. When you have freed your mind from the fear of God, and that childish respect for the fiction of right, then all the remaining changes that bind you-property, marriage, morality, and justice-will snap asunder like threads... Any dictatorship can have only one aim; self-perpetuation.
Fear | God | Justice | Marriage | Mind | Morality | Property | Respect | Right | Self | Will | Work | World | Respect | Old |
We might as well give up the fiction that we can argue any view. For what in me is pure Conviction is simple Prejudice in you.
Arthur Helps, fully Sir Arthur Helps
If you understand your own age, read the works of fiction produced in it. People in disguise speak freely.
Age | Disguise | People | Understand |
Doris Lessing, fully Doris May Lessing, born Doris May Tayler
There is no doubt fiction makes a better job of the truth.
Edward Albee, fully Edward Franklin Albee
A play is fiction - and fiction is fact distilled into truth.
Play |
Science is my territory, but science fiction is the landscape of my dreams.
Science |
The human understanding is of its own nature prone to suppose the existence of more order and regularity in the world than it finds. And though there be many things in nature which are singular and unmatched, yet it devises for them parallels and conjugates and relatives which do not exist. Hence the fiction that all celestial bodies move in perfect circles, spirals and dragons being (except in name) utterly rejected.
Existence | Nature | Order | Understanding | World |
There's an aspect of things which I find amusing: the flow back and forth between science and science fiction, which has been an important part of my life. I started out reading science fiction and then became a scientist, and that set the slant on my scientific work. I like to make connections between life and cosmology and astronomy. Science fiction raises all these interesting possibilities and has had some influence on science in the last 25 years – not only in the area of SETI, but also in other ways.
G. K. Chesterton, fully Gilbert Keith Chesterton
Literature is a luxury; fiction is a necessity.