This site is dedicated to the memory of Dr. Alan William Smolowe who gave birth to the creation of this database.
Stanislaw Lec, fully Stanisław Jerzy Lec, born Baron Stanisław Jerzy de Tusch-Letz
You can close your eyes to reality but not to memories.
Have faith in your dreams and someday your rainbow will come smiling through. No matter how your heart is grieving, if you keep believing, the dream that you wish will come true.
Perception | Right | Vice |
The stupendous Fourth Estate, whose wide world-embracing influences what eye can take in?
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The artillery of the press has been leveled against us, charged with whatsoever its licentiousness could devise or dare. These abuses of an institution so important to freedom and science are deeply to be regretted...
Thomas Mann, fully Paul Thomas Mann
Hold fast the time! Guard it, watch over it, every hour, every minute! Unregarded it slips away, like a lizard, smooth, slippery, faithless, a pixy wife. Hold every moment sacred. Give each clarity and meaning, each the weight of thine awareness, each it’s true and due fulfillment.
Existence | Grief | Life | Life | Passion | Writing | Vice |
Thomas Mann, fully Paul Thomas Mann
Is not life in itself a thing of goodness, irrespective of whether the course it takes for us can be called a 'happy' one?
Calvinism is the belief (1) That there are three Gods (2) That good works, or the love of our neighbor are nothing (3) That faith is everything, and the more incomprehensible the proposition, the more merit in its faith (4) That reason in religion
We fight not to enslave, but to set a country free, and to make room upon the earth for honest men to live in.
Will Rogers, fully William Penn Adair "Will" Rogers
The Ministry in all denominations are the poorest paid workers in the world. They would form a union and demand more pay, but they don’t get enough to pay dues into a union so they can’t form one.
Will Rogers, fully William Penn Adair "Will" Rogers
The platform will always be the same, promise everything, deliver nothing.
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Werner Heisenberg, fully Werner Karl Heisenberg
The most difficult problem - concerning the use of the language arises in quantum theory. Here we have at first no simple guide for correlating the mathematical symbols with concepts of ordinary language: and the only thing we know from the start is the fact that our common concepts cannot be applied o the structure of the atoms.
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Those who are truly alive are kindly and unsuspecting in their human relationships and consequently endangered under present conditions. They assume that others think and act generously, kindly and helpfully, in accordance with the laws of life. This natural attitude, fundamental to healthy children as well as primitive man, inevitably represents a great danger in the struggle for a rational way of life as long as the emotional plague subsists, because the plague-ridden impute their own manner of thinking and acting to their fellow men. A kindly man believes that all men are kindly, while one infected with the plague believes that all men lie and cheat and are hungry for power. In such a situation, the living are at an obvious disadvantage. When they give to the plague-ridden they are sucked dry, then ridiculed or betrayed.
Warren Buffett, fully Warren Edward Buffett, aka Oracle of Omaha
Over the years, our current businesses, in aggregate, should deliver modest growth in operating earnings. But they will not in themselves produce truly satisfactory gains. We will need major acquisitions to get that job done.
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W. H. Auden, fully Wystan Hugh Auden
A writer, or at least a poet, is always being asked by people who should know better: Whom do you write for? The question is, of course, a silly one, but I can give it a silly answer. Occasionally I come across a book which I feel has been written especially for me and for me only. Like a jealous lover I don’t want anybody else to hear of it. To have a million such readers, unaware of each other’s existence, to be read with passion and never talked about, is the daydream, surely, of every author.
Virtue | Virtue | Friendship | Friends | Vice |
W. D. Ross, fully Sir William David Ross
We apprehend that conscientiousness or benevolence is good with as complete certainty, directness, and self-evidence as we ever apprehend anything.
W. E. H. Lecky, fully William Edward Hartpole Lecky
Under these circumstances, there has arisen in society a figure which is certainly the most mournful, and in some respects the most awful, upon which the eye of the moralist can dwell. That unhappy being whose very name is a shame to speak; who counterfeits with a cold heart the transports of affection, and submits herself as the passive instrument of lust; who is scorned and insulted as the vilest of her sex, and doomed, for the most part, to disease and abject wretchedness and an early death, appears in every age as the perpetual symbol of the degradation and sinfulness of man. Herself the supreme type of vice, she is ultimately the most efficient guardian of virtue. But for her, the unchallenged purity of countless happy homes would be polluted, and not a few who, in the pride of their untempted chastity, think of her with an indignant shudder, would have known the agony of remorse and of despair. On that one degraded and ignoble form are concentrated the passions that might have filled the world with shame. She remains, while creeds and civilizations rise and fall, the eternal priestess of humanity, blasted for the sins of the people.
Voltaire, pen name of François-Marie Arouet NULL
Atheist: A name given by theologians to whoever differs from them in their ideas concerning the divinity, or who refuses to believe in it in the form of which, in the emptiness of their infallible pates, they have resolved to present it to him. As a rule an Atheist is any or every man who does not believe in the God of the Priest.
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