This site is dedicated to the memory of Dr. Alan William Smolowe who gave birth to the creation of this database.
H. L. Mencken, fully Henry Louis Mencken
Eugenics is the theory that charm in a woman is the same as charmed in a prize-fighter.
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There was an air of indifference about them, a calm produced by the gratification of every passion; and through their manners were suave, one could sense beneath them that special brutality which comes from the habit of breaking down half-hearted resistances that keep one fit and tickle one?s vanity?the handling of blooded horses, the pursuit of loose women.
Day | Fate | God | Hate | Life | Life | Nothing | Fate | God |
In business or in life, don't follow the wagon tracks too closely.
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H. L. Mencken, fully Henry Louis Mencken
Every failure teaches a man something, to wit, that he will probably fail again next time.
When all was over at the cemetery Charles returned to the house. There was no one downstairs. He went up into the bedroom and saw her dress hanging up at the foot of the bed. Then, leaning against the secretaire, he remained there till it was dark, lost in sorrowful meditation. After all, she had loved him.
H. L. Mencken, fully Henry Louis Mencken
Before a man speaks it is always safe to assume that he is a fool. After he speaks, it is seldom necessary to assume it.
Gustavo Dudamel and the Teresa Carreño Youth Orchestra
I want to work with the big orchestras. I want to have a big family.
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Why was it? Who drove you to it?' She replied, 'It had to be, my dear!' 'Weren't you happy? Is it my fault? I did all I could!' 'Yes, that is true ? you are good ? you.
Gustavo Dudamel and the Teresa Carreño Youth Orchestra
Recently, I went to a disco with friends, and all the young people were saying, 'Dudamel, we want to go to your concert, but it's impossible because it's sold out.' It's really amazing.
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H. L. Mencken, fully Henry Louis Mencken
A Sunday school is a prison in which children do penance for the evil conscience of their parents.
There is no truth except in its relation, that is to say, the fashion in which we perceive the objects.
H. L. Mencken, fully Henry Louis Mencken
In any combat between a rogue and a fool the sympathy of mankind is always with the rogue.
Life | Life | Television |
H. L. Mencken, fully Henry Louis Mencken
I believe that all government is evil, and that trying to improve it is largely a waste of time.
Hal Borland, formally Harold Glen Borland
To know after absence the familiar street and road and village and house is to know again the satisfaction of home.
H. L. Mencken, fully Henry Louis Mencken
No one ever went broke underestimating the taste of the American public.
Man by working and fabricating and building a world inhabited only by himself would still be a fabricator, though not homo faber: he would have lost his specifically human quality and, rather, be a god - not, to be sure, the Creator, but a divine demiurge as Plato described him in one of his myths.
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H. L. Mencken, fully Henry Louis Mencken
Popularity: The capacity for listening sympathetically when men boast of their wives and women complain of their husbands.
The main objection to the theory of pure visualization is our thesis that the non-Euclidean axioms can be visualized just as rigorously if we adjust the concept of congruence. This thesis is based on the discovery that the normative function of visualization is not of visual but of logical origin and that the intuitive acceptance of certain axioms is based on conditions from which they follow logically, and which have previously been smuggled into the images. The axiom that the straight line is the shortest distance is highly intuitive only because we have adapted the concept of straightness to the system of Eucidean concepts. It is therefore necessary merely to change these conditions to gain a correspondingly intuitive and clear insight into different sets of axioms; this recognition strikes at the root of the intuitive priority of Euclidean geometry. Our solution of the problem is a denial of pure visualization, inasmuch as it denies to visualization a special extralogical compulsion and points out the purely logical and non-intuitive origin of the normative function. Since it asserts, however, the possibility of a visual representation of all geometries, it could be understood as an extension of pure visualization to all geometries. In that case the predicate "pure" is but an empty addition, since it denotes only the difference between experienced and imagined pictures, and we shall therefore discard the term "pure visualization." Instead we shall speak of the normative function of the thinking process, which can guide the pictorial elements of thinking into any logically permissible structure.
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We may remember what the Romans... thought a cultivated person ought to be: one who knows how to choose his company among men, among things, among thoughts, in the present as well as in the past.