This site is dedicated to the memory of Dr. Alan William Smolowe who gave birth to the creation of this database.
If you ask a member of this generation two simple questions: "How do you want the world to be in fifty years?" and "What do you want your life to be like five years from now?" the answers are quite often preceded by "Provided there is still a world" and "Provided I am still alive." To the often-heard question, ?Who are they, this new generation?? one is tempted to answer, Those who hear the ticking. And to the other question, Who are they who utterly deny them? the answer may well be, Those who do not know, or refuse to face, things as they really are.
Will |
H. L. Mencken, fully Henry Louis Mencken
We are, in fact, a nation of evangelists; every third American devotes himself to improving and lifting up his fellow-citizens, usually by force; the messianic delusion is our national disease.
Living beings, men and animals, are not just in the world, they are of the world, and this precisely because they are subjects and objects-perceiving and being perceived-at the same time.
In this world which we enter, appearing from a nowhere, and from which we disappear into a nowhere, Being and Appearing coincide.
Time |
H. L. Mencken, fully Henry Louis Mencken
The common argument that crime is caused by poverty is a kind of slander on the poor.
H. L. Mencken, fully Henry Louis Mencken
The liberation of the human mind has never been furthered by such learned dunderheads; it has been furthered by gay fellows who heaved dead cats into sanctuaries and then went roistering down the highways of the world, proving to all men that doubt, after all, was safe - that the god in the sanctuary was finite in his power, and hence a fraud. One horse-laugh is worth ten thousand syllogisms. It is not only more effective; it is also vastly more intelligent.
Wherever the relevance of speech is at stake, matters become political by definition, for speech is what makes man a political being.
To expect truth to come from thinking signifies that we mistake the need to think with the urge to know.
What really distinguishes this generation in all countries from earlier generations... is its determination to act, its joy in action, the assurance of being able to change things by one's own efforts.
Time |
Seen from the perspective of the world, every creature born into it arrives well equipped to deal with a world in which Being and Appearing coincide; they are fit for world existence.
The product of movement and counter-movement is tension. When tension ? working strength ? is expressed, it endows the work of art with the living effect of coordinated, though opposing, forces.
Time |
Revolutions are the only political events which confront us directly and inevitably with the problem of beginning.
What makes it so plausible to assume that hypocrisy is the vice of vices is that integrity can indeed exist under the cover of all other vices except this one. Only crime and the criminal, it is true, confront us with the perplexity of radical evil; but only the hypocrite is really rotten to the core.
To worship the product and ignore its development leads to dilettantism and reaction. Art cannot result from sophisticated, frivolous, or superficial effects.
The eye of the master fattens the horse.
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