This site is dedicated to the memory of Dr. Alan William Smolowe who gave birth to the creation of this database.
Eugene V. Debs, fully Eugene Victor Debs
The most barbarous fact in all christendom is the labor market. The mere term sufficiently expresses the animalism of commercial civilization.They who buy and they who sell in the labor market are alike dehumanized by the inhuman traffic in the brains and blood and bones of human beings.
Gore Vidal, fully Eugene Luther Gore Vidal
Every time a friend succeeds, I die a little.
Despair | Individual | Land | Man | People | Sense | Will | Woman |
Eugene V. Debs, fully Eugene Victor Debs
I do not oppose the insane asylum — but I abhor and condemn the cutthroat system that robs man of his reason, drives him to insanity and makes the lunatic asylum an indispensable adjunct to every civilized community.
Gore Vidal, fully Eugene Luther Gore Vidal
The idea of a good society is something you do not need a religion and eternal punishment to buttress; you need a religion if you are terrified of death.
Giving | Government | Religion | Government |
Gore Vidal, fully Eugene Luther Gore Vidal
I shared, naturally, in that hatred of organized labor which has been the one political constant in my lifetime, culminating in Ronald Reagan's most popular gesture, the smashing of the air-controllers' union. No alternative view of organized labor has ever come to us through the popular media. If labor leaders were not crooks like Jimmy Hoffa, they were in the pay of Moscow.
Good | Human race | People | Race | Regard | Religion | System | World |
Gore Vidal, fully Eugene Luther Gore Vidal
Life will be wonderful when men no longer fear dying. When the last superstitions are thrown out and we meet death with the same equanimity as life. No longer will children's minds be twisted by evil gods whose fantastic origin is in those barbaric tribes who feared death and lightning, who feared life. That's it: life is the villain to to those who preach reward in death, through grace and eternal bliss, or through dark revenge.
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 |
What mortal claims, by searching to the utmost limit, to have found out the nature of God, or of his opposite, or of that which comes between, seeing as he doth this world of man tossed to and fro by waves of contradiction and strange vicissitudes?
The most dangerous aspect of present-day life is the dissolution of the feeling of individual responsibility. Mass solitude has done away with any difference between the internal and the external, between the intellectual and the physical.
Human misery must somewhere have a stop; there is no wind that always blows a storm; great good fortune comes to failure in the end. All is change; all yields its place and goes; to persevere, trusting in what hopes he has, is courage in a man. The coward despairs.
What other creatures are bred so exquisitely and purposefully for mistreatment as women are?
Contradiction | Man | Mortal | Nature | World |
Ælian, in his account of Zoilus, the pretended critic, who wrote against Homer and Plato, and thought himself wiser than all who had gone before him, tells us that this Zoilus had a very long beard that hung down upon his breast, but no hair upon his head, which he always kept close shaved, regarding, it seems, the hairs of his head as so many suckers, which, if they had been suffered to grow, might have drawn away the nourishment from his chin, and by that means have starved his beard.