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
The only way I can describe the extent of my anxiety is to say that I felt as if I we're pregnant with a rock.
Genius |
Gore Vidal, fully Eugene Luther Gore Vidal
"You got to meet everyone — Jackie Kennedy, William Burroughs." People always put that sentence the wrong way around. I mean, why not put it the true way, that these people got to meet me, and wanted to? Otherwise it sounds like I spent my life hustling around trying to meet people: "Oh, look, there's the governor."
Need |
Gore Vidal, fully Eugene Luther Gore Vidal
The great unmentionable evil at the center of our culture is monotheism. From a barbaric Bronze Age text known as the Old Testament, three anti-human religions have evolved — Judaism, Christianity, Islam. These are sky-god religions. They are, literally, patriarchal — God is the Omnipotent Father — hence the loathing of women for 2,000 years in those countries afflicted by the sky-god and his earthly male delegates. The sky-god is a jealous god, of course. He requires total obedience from everyone on earth, as he is in place not for just one tribe but for all creation. Those who would reject him must be converted or killed for their own good. Ultimately, totalitarianism is the only sort of politics that can truly serve the sky-god's purpose.
Gore Vidal, fully Eugene Luther Gore Vidal
It is vice to go to bed with someone you are not married to or have someone of your own sex or to get money for having sex with someone who does not appeal to you - incidentally, the basis of half the marriages of my generation.
Need | Omnipotence | Order |
Eugene V. Debs, fully Eugene Victor Debs
Your Honor, years ago I recognized my kinship with all living beings, and I made up my mind that I was not one bit better than the meanest on earth. I said then, and I say now, that while there is a lower class, I am in it, and while there is a criminal element I am of it, and while there is a soul in prison, I am not free.
Gore Vidal, fully Eugene Luther Gore Vidal
All children alarm their parents, if only because you are forever expecting to encounter yourself.
Gore Vidal, fully Eugene Luther Gore Vidal
Asked who was the worst president, he responded, Oh, there were so many of them. Certainly the silliest was Reagan. The most empty. [George H.W.] Bush is in the running for the worst.
Gore Vidal, fully Eugene Luther Gore Vidal
The important thing is not the object of love, but the emotion itself.
Eternal | Good | Need | Punishment | Religion | Society | Society |
When one with honeyed words but evil mind persuades the mob, great woes befall the state.
Generosity | God | Need | God |
The idea of a poem European music and colorful had been in Bell , as well as instinct, a matter of culture, but some had been accompanied or preceded, in him, a practice some more 'inert and passive of the new isms found in air. Even futurism official had demanded, as the innovators of the century, to break the windows, to renew the air. Bell, however, had chosen the finest masters of those followed by his provisional initiators. Repudiated by instinct the more mechanical, more elencativa of liberalism fashion, and went, one can safely say this also in fact, to the most reliable sources of that movement, from Whitman toRimbaud . He reported on his own, in art and life, a matter of style in a matter of consciousness and was aware of representing, in his time and in its environment, a new voice, different.
Genius |
As to deliberate mortifications -- I take it you do feel satisfied that you accept fully those God sends. That being so, you might perhaps do one or two little things, as acts of love, and also as discipline. I suggest by preference the mortification of the tongue -- as being very tiresome and quite harmless to the health. Careful guard on all amusing criticisms of others, on all complaints however casual or trivial.
Evelyn Glennie, fully Evelyn Elizabeth Ann Glennie
Before my teen years, I was losing my hearing pretty quickly, and I was getting very, very angry. I was beginning to become an angry person because of that.
Need |
Evelyn Waugh, fully Evelyn Arthur St. John Waugh
Then I knew that the sign I had asked for was not a little thing, not a passing nod of recognition, and a phrase came back to me from my childhood of the veil of the temple being rent from top to bottom.
This power of being outwardly genial and inwardly austere, which is the real temper, depends entirely upon the time set apart for personal religion. It is always achieved if courageously and faithfully sought; and there are no heights of love and holiness to which it cannot lead.
Need |
Evelyn Waugh, fully Evelyn Arthur St. John Waugh
CORDELIA: I hope I've got a vocation. CHARLES: I don't know what that means. CORDELIA: It means you can be a nun. If you haven't a vocation it's no good however much you want to be; and if you have a vocation, you can't get away from it, however much you hate it.
Evelyn Glennie, fully Evelyn Elizabeth Ann Glennie
The audience plays a huge part in how a piece will actually form. They really allow the performers to walk a tightrope in a way that never seems to happen in the privacy of your own four walls. I'm listening to the audience, and they're listening to me.