This site is dedicated to the memory of Dr. Alan William Smolowe who gave birth to the creation of this database.
When roused to rage the maddening populace storms, their fury, like a rolling flame, bursts forth unquenchable; but give its violence ways, it spends itself, and as its force abates, learns to obey and yields it to your will.
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:
And so we take a holiday, a vacation, to gain release from this bondage for a space, to stand back from the rush of things and breathe again. But a holiday is a respite, not a cure. The more we need holidays, the more certain it is that the disease has conquered us and not we it. More and more holidays just to get away from it all is a sure sign of a decaying civilization; it was one of the most obvious marks of the breakdown of the Roman empire. It is a symptom that we haven't learned how to live so as to re-create ourselves in our work instead of being sapped by it. A car should always be charging its battery as it runs. If it simply uses up without putting back, it has to go into dock to be recharged. It is not a sign that we are running particularly well if we are constantly needing to go into dock.
Evil | Extreme | Love | Object | Time | Truth | Vision | World |
Evelyn Waugh, fully Evelyn Arthur St. John Waugh
I can never understand how two men can write a book together; to me, that's like three people getting together to have a baby.
Evelyn Waugh, fully Evelyn Arthur St. John Waugh
Perhaps host and guest is really the happiest relation for father and son.
Sadness |
Everett Dirksen, fully Everett McKinley Dirksen
I have said, with respect to authorization bills, that I do not want the Congress or the country to commit fiscal suicide on the installment plan.
Man |
Love... makes the whole difference between an execution and a martyrdom.
Evelyn Waugh, fully Evelyn Arthur St. John Waugh
Saints are simply men and women who have fulfilled their natural obligation which is to approach God.
Evelyn Waugh, fully Evelyn Arthur St. John Waugh
It was dead contrary to the common experience of such encounters, when time is found to have built its own defensive lines, camouflaged vulnerable points, and laid a field of mines across all but a few well-trodden paths, so that, more often than not, we can only signal to one another from either side of the tangle of wire.
Evelyn Waugh, fully Evelyn Arthur St. John Waugh
Words should be an intense pleasure just as leather should be to a shoemaker
In short, nothing is more wanting to our public schools than that the masters of them should use the same care in fashioning the manners of their scholars as in forming their tongues to the learned languages. Wherever the former is omitted, I cannot help agreeing with Mr. Locke, that a man must have a very strange value for words, when, preferring the languages of the Greeks and Romans to that which made them such brave men, he can think it worthwhile to hazard the innocence and virtue of his son for a little Greek and Latin.
Evelyn Waugh, fully Evelyn Arthur St. John Waugh
A copy of Dante's Purgatorio excited his especial disgust. "French, eh?" he said. "I guessed as much, and pretty dirty too, I shouldn't wonder. Now just you wait while I look up these here books"—how he said it!—"in my list. Particularly against books the Home Secretary is. If we can't stamp out literature in the country, we can at least stop its being brought in from outside."
Civilization | Force | Man | Wishes | Work |
Evelyn Waugh, fully Evelyn Arthur St. John Waugh
Almost all crime is due to the repressed desire for aesthetic expression.
Pleasure |
Evelyn Waugh, fully Evelyn Arthur St. John Waugh
Lord Copper quite often gave banquets; it would be an understatement to say that no one enjoyed them more than the host, for no one else enjoyed them at all, while Lord Copper positively exulted in every minute.