This site is dedicated to the memory of Dr. Alan William Smolowe who gave birth to the creation of this database.
Virginia Woolf, nee Stephen, fully Adeline Virginia Woolf
Who shall measure the heat and violence of a poet's heart when caught and tangled in a woman's body?
Heart |
Ask not the name of him who asks you for a bed. It is especially he whose name is a burden to him, who has need of an asylum (room).
Humanity |
Which do you admire, the slain or the slayer, Caesar or Brutus? Generally people are for the slayer. Hurrah for Brutus! He slew. That's virtue. Virtue, but folly too...The Brutus who slew Caesar was in love with a statue of a little boy. This statue was by the Greek sculptor Strongylion, who also designed that statue of an Amazon called the beautiful limbed, Euknemos, which Nero carried with him on his journeys. This Strongylion left nothing but two statues which put Brutus and Nero in harmony. Brutus was in love with one and Nero with the other.
History | Past | Philosophy |
Upton Sinclair, fully Upton Beall Sinclair, Jr.
I discover that hardly a week passes that someone does not start a new cult, or revive an old one; if I had a hundred life-times I could not know all the creeds and ceremonies, the services and rituals, the litanies and liturgies, the hymns, anthems and offertories of Bootstrap-lifting.
Control | Freedom | Mind | Opinion | People | Present | Problems | Race |
Ursula Le Guin, fully Ursula Kroeber Le Guin
Dangerous! Vea laughed radiantly. What an utterly marvelous compliment! Why am I dangerous, Shevek? Why, because you know that in the eyes of men you are a thing, a thing owned, bought, sold. And so you think only of tricking the owners, of getting revenge.
There can be no doubt that distrust of words is less harmful than unwarranted trust in them. Besides, to distrust words, and indict them for the horrors that might slumber unobtrusively within them --isn't this, after all, the true vocation of the intellectual?
V. S. Pritchett, fully Sir Victor Sawdon Pritchett
Great artists are always far-seeing. They easily avoid the big stumbling blocks of fact. They rely on their own simplicity and vision. It is fact-fetichism that has given us those scores and scores of American books on America, the works of sociologists, anthropologists, topical problem hunters, working-parties and statisticians, which in the end leave us empty. Henry James succeeds because he rejects information. He was himself the only information he required.
Ursula Le Guin, fully Ursula Kroeber Le Guin
The power of the harasser, the abuser, the rapist depends above all on the silence of women.
Government | Land | Nothing | Government | Afraid | Learn |
Ursula Le Guin, fully Ursula Kroeber Le Guin
They knew that their anarchism was the product of a very high civilization, of a complex diversified culture, of a stable economy and a highly industrialized technology that could maintain high production and rapid transportation of goods. However vast the distances separating settlements, they held to the ideal of complex organicism.
Children | Despair | Evil | Happy | Pain | People | Praise | Treason | Trouble | Happiness |
Drama assumes an order. If only so that it might have -- by disrupting that order -- a way of surprising.
Good | Instinct | Lying | People | Politics | Public | Temptation | Temptation |
Vauvenargues, Luc de Clapiers, Marquis de Vauvenargues NULL
Disbelief his enthusiasm and superstition.
Thomas Malthus, fully Thomas Robert Malthus
To remedy the frequent distresses of the common people, the poor laws of England have been instituted; but it is to be feared that though they may have alleviated a little the intensity of individual misfortune, they have spread the general evil over a much larger surface.
Power |
Thomas Malthus, fully Thomas Robert Malthus
But such consumption is not consistent with the actual habits of the generality of capitalists.The great object of their lives is to save a fortune, both because it is their duty to make a provision for their families, and because they cannot spend an income with so much comfort to themselves, while they are obliged perhaps to attend a counting house for seven or eight hours a day...There must therefore be a considerable class of persons who have both the will and power to consume more material wealth then they produce, or the mercantile classes could not continue profitably to produce so much more than they consume.
Waste |
Thomas Malthus, fully Thomas Robert Malthus
The tendency to a virtuous attachment is so strong that there is a constant effort towards an increase of population.
Power |
Thornton Wilder, fully Thornton Niven Wilder
When you're safe at home you wish you were having an adventure; when you're having an adventure you wish you were safe at home.
God | Understanding | Wants | God | Happiness |