This site is dedicated to the memory of Dr. Alan William Smolowe who gave birth to the creation of this database.
Gore Vidal, fully Eugene Luther Gore Vidal
If we succeed in cleaning up the environment, we donÂ’t have enough money for war. But Americans are basically pro-war. WeÂ’re a violent people and we like it.
Who knows but life be that which men call death, and death what men call life?
Who so neglects learning in his youth loses the past and is dead to the future.
Even disasters violent that infect humans infect fatigue after a while, and donations winds do not retain strongly always, it is impossible to endure if lucky forever, since all things are changing and exchange positions with each other, the best men trusts constantly in the hopes, and despair vulnerable.
The violent desire of pleasing in the person reproved, may otherwise change into a despair of doing it, while he finds himself censured for faults he is not conscious of. A mind that is softened and humanized by friendship cannot bear frequent reproaches; either it must sink under the oppression, or abate considerably of the value and esteem it had for him who bestows them.
I confess my extreme embarrassment: I do not know in what capacity I was asked to talk about him, that for many years I live far away from what Anatole France called the city of the books, I who for many years (and through no fault of my own) do not I have only one book on the shelf of Benedetto Croce and I do my work on the ground floor, away from the upper echelons of philosophy and scholarly criticism. Benedetto Croce I met, I met him several times in Florence before the last war, when to ask to see him and talk to him was not devoid of some inconvenience. I think it was Bonciani the hotel and later in the house of Luigi Russo . And the other two times I have visited the Cross, in Naples, in his house, in the last years of his life.
The new man is born too old to tolerate the new world. The present conditions of life have not yet erased the traces of the past. We run too fast, but we still do not move enough. He looks but he does not contemplate, he sees but he does not think. He runs away from time, which is made of thought, and yet all he can feel is his own time, the present.
Individual | Life | Life | Solitude |
We are generally so much pleased with any little accomplishments, either of body or mind, which have once made us remarkable in the world, that we endeavor to persuade ourselves it is not in the power of time to rob us of them. We are eternally pursuing the same methods which first procured us the applauses of mankind. It is from this notion that an author writes on, though he is come to dotage; without ever considering that his memory is impaired, and that he hath lost that life, and those spirits, which formerly raised his fancy and fired his imagination. The same folly hinders a man from submitting his behavior to his age, and makes Clodius, who was a celebrated dancer at five-and-twenty, still love to hobble in a minuet, though he is past threescore. It is this, in a word, which fills the town with elderly fops and superannuated coquettes.
Human nature | Life | Life | Man | Nature | Nothing | Will |
Let them that are happy talk of piety; he that would work his adversary woe must take no account of laws.
Glory | Life | Life | Think | Understand |
But poets were not considered dangerous and they were advised to exercise self-censorship. At most, poets were requested not to write at all. I took advantage of this negative liberty.