This site is dedicated to the memory of Dr. Alan William Smolowe who gave birth to the creation of this database.
Did he smile his work to see? Did he who made the lamb make thee?
For the world, as seen in materialist view from the Right, scarcely differs from the same world seen in materialist view from the Left. The question become chiefly: who is to run that world in whose interests, or perhaps, at best, who can run it more efficiently? Something of this implication is fixed in the book’s dictatorial tone, which is much its most striking feature. Out of a lifetime of reading, I can recall no other book in which a tone of overriding arrogance was so implacably sustained. Its shrillness is without reprieve. Its dogmatism is without appeal.… From almost any page of Atlas Shrugged, a voice can be heard, from painful necessity, commanding, “To a gas chamber—go!”
Civilization | Mankind | Will | World |
Toscanini was hailing a great artist, but that voice was more than a magnificent personal talent. It was the religious voice of a whole religious people — probably the most God-obsessed (and man-despised) people since the ancient Hebrews.
Ability | Corruption | Evil | Fate | Little | Man | Mankind | Men | Soul | Weakness | Will | Witness | Fate | Intellect |
The mass of Americans, who vehemently made known their views in (and during) a recent general election, know perfectly well that they are not living in a reign of terror and that they seldom look behind a door for anything more frightening than an umbrella.
Balance | Mankind | Politics | Power | War | Will | World | Crisis |
My children, as long as you live, the shadow of the Hiss Case will brush you. In every pair of eyes that rests on you, you will see pass, like a cloud passing behind a woods in winter, the memory of your father - dissembled in friendly eyes, lurking in unfriendly eyes.
The caucus is a sort of representative meeting which sits voting and voting till they have cut out all the known men against whom much is to be said, and agreed on some unknown man against whom there is nothing known, and therefore nothing to be alleged.
Government | Mankind | Reason | World | Government | Understand |
The mystic reverence, the religious allegiance, which are essential to a true monarchy, are imaginative sentiments that no legislature can manufacture in any people.
Benevolence | Good | Mankind | Melancholy | Question |
If you have to prove you are worthy of credit, your credit is already gone.
Action | Argument | Art | Benevolence | Evil | Good | Life | Life | Mankind | Melancholy | Men | People | Philanthropy | Question | War | Will | World | Art |
These costs are now being incurred in amounts that will cause shareholders to earn far less than they historically have.
Some books are undeservedly forgotten none are undeservedly remembered.
Industry is the only true source of wealth, and there was no industry in Rome. By day the Ostia road was crowded with carts and muleteers, carrying to the great city the silks and spices of the East, the marble of Asia Minor, the timber of the Atlas, the grain of Africa and Egypt; and the carts brought nothing out but loads of dung. That was their return cargo. London turns dirt into gold. Rome turned gold into dirt.
All doctrines relating to the creation of the world, the government of man by superior beings, and his destiny after death, are conjectures which have been given out as facts, handed down with many adornments by tradition, and accepted by posterity as revealed religion. They are theories more or less rational which uncivilized men have devised in order to explain the facts of life, and which civilized men believe that they believe.
Mankind | Philosophy | Religion | Spirit | Success | System |
The art of any propagandist and agitator consists in his ability to find the best means of influencing any given audience, by presenting a definite truth, in such a way as to make it most convincing, most easy to digest, most graphic, and most strongly impressive.