This site is dedicated to the memory of Dr. Alan William Smolowe who gave birth to the creation of this database.
Only a person having trusted and worthy friend's lives and dwells in happiness on this earth.
Ursula Le Guin, fully Ursula Kroeber Le Guin
Atro had once explained to him how this was managed, how the sergeants could give the privates orders, how the lieutenants could give the privates and the sergeants orders, how the captains... and so on and so on up to the generals, who could give everyone else orders and need take them from none, except the commander in chief. Shevek had listened with incredulous disgust. You call that organization? he had inquired. You even call it discipline? But it is neither. It is a coercive mechanism of extraordinary inefficiency--a kind of seventh-millennium steam engine! With such a rigid and fragile structure what could be done that was worth doing? This had given Atro a chance to argue the worth of warfare as the breeder of courage and manliness and weeder-out of the unfit, but the very line of his argument had forced him to concede the effectiveness of guerrillas, organized from below, self-disciplined. But that only works when the people think they're fighting for something of their own--you know, their homes, or some notion or other, the old man had said. Shevek had dropped the argument. He now continued it, in the darkening basement among the stacked crates of unlabeled chemicals. He explained to Atro that he now understood why the Army was organized as it was. It was indeed quite necessary. No rational form of organization would serve the purpose. He simply had not understood that the purpose was to enable men with machine guns to kill unarmed men and women easily and in great quantities when told to do so.
Only a small part of the interior of the memex is devoted to storage, the rest to mechanism. Yet if the user inserted 5000 pages of material a day it would take him hundreds of years to fill the repository, so he can be profligate and enter material freely.
Ursula Le Guin, fully Ursula Kroeber Le Guin
The world is in balance… To light a candle is to cast a shadow.
Flexibility | Meaning | Precision | Precision | Flexibility |
Drama assumes an order. If only so that it might have -- by disrupting that order -- a way of surprising.
Good | Instinct | Lying | People | Politics | Public | Temptation | Temptation |
The scene changes but the aspirations of men of good will persist.
Body | Knowledge | Men | Nature | Responsibility | Understand |
Unbelief, in distinction from disbelief, is a confession of ignorance where honest inquiry might easily find the truth. - "Agnostic" is but the Greek for "ignoramus."
Woodrow Wilson, fully Thomas Woodrow Wilson
Again and again mothers who lost their sons in France have come to me, and, taking my hand, have not only shed tears upon it, but they have added, `God bless you, Mr. President! Why should they pray God to bless me? I advised the Congress to create the situation that led to the death of their sons. I ordered their sons overseas. I consented to their sons' being put in the most difficult part of the battle line, where death was certain...Why should they weep upon my hand and call down the blessings of God upon me? Because they believe that their boys died for something that vastly transcends any of the immediate and palpable objects of the war. They believe, and rightly believe, that their sons saved the liberty of the world.
Existence | Instinct | Men | Race | Self-preservation |
We need to become national, not by any conscious effort, such as implies attitudinizing and constraint, but by simply accepting our own life. It is not desirable to go out of one’s way to be original, but it is to be hoped that it may lie in one’s way. Originality is simply a fresh pair of eyes. If you want to astonish the whole world, said Rahel, tell the simple truth. It is easier to excuse a thousand defects in the literary man who proceeds on this faith, than to forgive the one great defect of imitation in the purist who seeks only to be English. As Wasson has said, “The Englishman is undoubtedly a wholesome figure to the mental eye; but will not twenty million copies of him do, for the present?” We must pardon something to the spirit of liberty. We must run some risks, as all immature creatures do, in the effort to use our own limbs. Professor Edward Channing used to say that it was a bad sing for a college boy to write too well; there should be exuberances and inequalities. A nation which has but just begun to create a literature must sow some wild oats. The most tiresome vaingloriousness may be more hopeful than hypercriticism and spleen. The follies of the absurdest spread-eagle orator may be far more promising, because they smack more of the soil, than the neat Londonism of the city editor who dissects him.
Culture | Faith | Little | Need | People | Pride | Slavery | War | Will |
Tom Robbins, fully Thomas Eugene "Tom" Robbins
In a universe that was perceived as inherently divine, where sacred animals munched sacred plants in groves of sacred trees, where holy rivers spilled from the laps of mountains that were Gods, to nurture a life was a lovely and important thing.
Tom Robbins, fully Thomas Eugene "Tom" Robbins
I believe in everything; nothing is sacred, I believe in nothing; everything is sacred, …Ha Ha Ho Ho Hee Hee.
By accident most strange, bountiful Fortune (Now, my dear lady) hath mine enemies Brought to this shore; and by my prescience I find my zenith doth depend upon A most auspicious star, whose influence If now I court not, but omit, my fortunes Will ever after droop.