This site is dedicated to the memory of Dr. Alan William Smolowe who gave birth to the creation of this database.
We who are prosperous and independent have not sufficient homogeneity to champion on the ground of a common creed, common stock, a common history, a common heritage of misfortune, the rights of the lowest and poorest Jew-peddler who flees, for life and liberty of thought, from Slavonic mobs.
But come, examine by every means each thing how it is clear, neither putting greater faith in anything seen than in what is heard, nor in a thundering sound more than in the clear assertions of the tongue, nor keep from trusting any of the other members in which there lies means of knowledge, but know each thing in the way in which it is clear.
What a strange development of patriotism that turns a thinking being into a loyal machine!
Democracy | Free press | Free speech | Opinion | Safe | Speech | War | World |
Gore Vidal, fully Eugene Luther Gore Vidal
At least when the Emperor Justinian, a sky-god man, decided to outlaw sodomy, he had to come up with a good practical reason, which he did. It is well known, Justinian declared, that buggery is a principal cause of earthquakes, and so must be prohibited. But our sky-godders, always eager to hate, still quote Leviticus, as if that looney text had anything useful to say about anything except, perhaps, the inadvisability of eating shellfish in the Jerusalem area.
Gore Vidal, fully Eugene Luther Gore Vidal
The first TV babies are now writing with a TV mind that has no attention span at all.
Objectivity | Opinion | World |
Do not mistake the rule of force for true power. Men are not shaped by force.
During the civil wars there appeared one, which makes too great a figure in story to be passed over in silence; I mean that of the redoubted Hudibras, an account of which Butler has transmitted to posterity in the following lines:
Evelyn Waugh, fully Evelyn Arthur St. John Waugh
I'm one of the blind alleys off the main road of procreation.
Conversation | Opinion |
H. L. Mencken, fully Henry Louis Mencken
The best years are the forties; after fifty a man begins to deteriorate, but in the forties he is at the maximum of his villainy.
Opinion |
t is better to ride a donkey that carries you than a horse that throws you.