This site is dedicated to the memory of Dr. Alan William Smolowe who gave birth to the creation of this database.
Ideals are an imaginative understanding of that which is desirable in that which is possible.
The principle of majority rule is the mildest form in which the force of numbers can be exercised. It is a pacific substitute for civil war in which the opposing armies are counted and the victory is awarded to the larger before any blood is shed. Except in the sacred tests of democracy and in the incantations of the orators, we hardly take the trouble to pretend that the rule of the majority is not at bottom a rule of force.
Darkness | Enough | Light | Men | Society | Work | World | Society | Govern |
Truth sometimes corner unawares upon Caution, and sometimes speaks in public as unconsciously as in a dream.
Warren Buffett, fully Warren Edward Buffett, aka Oracle of Omaha
The speed at which a business success is recognized, furthermore, is not that important as long as the company's intrinsic value is increasing at a satisfactory rate. In fact, delayed recognition can be an advantage: It may give us the chance to buy more of a good thing at a bargain price.
Warren Buffett, fully Warren Edward Buffett, aka Oracle of Omaha
In that, we agreed with Andrew Carnegie, who said that huge fortunes that flow in large part from society should in large part be returned to society. In my case, the ability to allocate capital would have had little utility unless I lived in a rich, populous country in which enormous quantities of marketable securities were traded and were sometimes ridiculously mispriced. And fortunately for me, that describes the U.S. in the second half of the last century.
There is certain relief in change, even though it be from bad to worse! As I have often found in traveling in a stagecoach, that it is often a comfort to shift one's position, and be bruised in a new place.
Adversity | Comfort | Disgrace | Glory | Love | Mother | Pleasure | Sacrifice | Surrender | Tenderness | Will | World |
There is certainly something in angling that tends to produce a serenity of the mind.
Comfort |
There is a healthful hardiness about real dignity that never dreads contact and communion with others however humble.
Comfort |
W. H. Auden, fully Wystan Hugh Auden
How happy the lot of the mathematician. He is judged solely by his peers, and the standard is so high that no colleague or rival can ever win a reputation he does not deserve.
Good | Happy | Mathematics | Reputation | Waste | Old |
W. H. Auden, fully Wystan Hugh Auden
In the course of many centuries a few laborsaving devices have been introduced into the mental kitchen — alcohol, coffee, tobacco, Benzedrine, etc. — but these are very crude, constantly breaking down, and liable to injure the cook. Literary composition in the twentieth century A.D. is pretty much what it was in the twentieth century B.C.: nearly everything has still to be done by hand.
W. C. Fields, stage name for William Claude Dukenfield
I've been barbecued, stewed, screwed, tattooed, and fried by people claiming to be my friends. The human race has gone backward, not forward, since the days we were apes swinging through the trees.
Vladimir Lenin, fully Vladimir Ilyich Lenin
The Capitalists will sell us the rope with which we will hang them.
Bourgeoisie | Desire | Freedom | Will |
Vladimir Lenin, fully Vladimir Ilyich Lenin
From the correct Marxist premise concerning the deep economic roots of the class struggle in general and of the political struggle in particular, the Economists have drawn the singular conclusion that we must turn our backs on the political struggle and retard its development, narrow its scope, and reduce its aims. The political wing, on the contrary, has drawn a different conclusion from these same premises, namely, that the deeper the roots of our present struggle, the more widely, the more boldly, the more resolutely, and with greater initiative must we wage this struggle.
Association | Freedom | Speech | Association |
Vladimir Nabokov, fully Vladimir Vladimirovich Nabokov
There exist few things more tedious than a discussion of general ideas inflicted by author or reader upon a work of fiction. The purpose of this foreword is not to show that Bend Sinister belongs or does not belong to serious literature (which is a euphemism for the hollow profundity and the ever-welcome commonplace). I have never been interested in what is called the literature of social comment (in journalistic and commercial parlance: great books). I am not sincere, I am not provocative, I am not satirical. I am neither a didacticist nor an allegorizer. Politics and economics, atomic bombs, primitive and abstract art forms, the entire Orient, symptoms of thaw in Soviet Russia, the Future of Mankind, and so on, leave me supremely indifferent. As in the case of my Invitation to a Beheading - with which this book has obvious affinities - automatic comparisons between Bend Sinister and Kafka's creations or Orwell's cliches would go merely to prove that the automaton could not have read either the great German writer or the mediocre English one.
Voltaire, pen name of François-Marie Arouet NULL
It is new fancy rather than taste which produces so many new fashions.
Voltaire, pen name of François-Marie Arouet NULL
If there were only one religion in England there would be danger of despotism, if there were two, they would cut each other's throats, but there are thirty, and they live in peace and happiness.