This site is dedicated to the memory of Dr. Alan William Smolowe who gave birth to the creation of this database.
If there is no friendship with them [the poor] and no sharing of the life of the poor, then there is no authentic commitment to liberation, because love exists only among equals.
Think |
Gustavo Dudamel and the Teresa Carreño Youth Orchestra
I want to work with the big orchestras. I want to have a big family.
Change |
H. L. Mencken, fully Henry Louis Mencken
A Puritan is a person who lives in the fear that someone, somewhere, may be having a good time.
We were Red Romantics, perfectly ridiculous to be sure, but in full bloom. The little good which remains to me comes from that epoch.
You ask me whether the Orient is up to what I imagined it to be. Yes, it is; and more than that, it extends far beyond the narrow idea I had of it. I have found, clearly delineated, everything that was hazy in my mind. Facts have taken the place of suppositions - so excellently so that it is often as though I were suddenly coming upon old forgotten dreams.
H. L. Mencken, fully Henry Louis Mencken
Democracy is the pathetic belief in the wisdom of collective ignorance.
Work |
H. L. Mencken, fully Henry Louis Mencken
The fact that I have no remedy for all the sorrows of the world is no reason for my accepting yours. It simply supports the strong probability that yours is a fake.
H. L. Mencken, fully Henry Louis Mencken
To believe that Russia has got rid of the evils of capitalism takes a special kind of mind. It is the same kind that believes that a Holy Roller has got rid of sin.
Work |
Could the activity of thinking as such, the habit of examining whatever happens to come to pass or to attract attention, regardless of results and specific content, could this activity he among the conditions that make men abstain from evil-doing?
Nature |
H. L. Mencken, fully Henry Louis Mencken
The plain fact is that education is itself a form of propaganda - a deliberate scheme to outfit the pupil, not with the capacity to weigh ideas, but with a simple appetite for gulping ideas ready-made. The aim is to make 'good' citizens, which is to say, docile and uninquisitive citizens.
He who would be a leader must pay the price in self-discipline and moral restraints. This details the correction and improvement of his personal character, the checking of passions and desires and an exemplary control of one's bodily needs and desires.
Work |
H. L. Mencken, fully Henry Louis Mencken
The true function of art is to criticize, embellish and edit nature? the artist is a sort of impassioned proof-reader, blue penciling the bad spelling of God.
Man by working and fabricating and building a world inhabited only by himself would still be a fabricator, though not homo faber: he would have lost his specifically human quality and, rather, be a god - not, to be sure, the Creator, but a divine demiurge as Plato described him in one of his myths.
Change |
Men in plural? can experience meaningfulness only because they can talk with and make sense to each other and themselves.
If you have democracy, people will vote for washing machines. They love them!
Work |
One who wants to keep their yard tidy does not reserve a plot for the weeds.
Change | Civilization | Future | Global | Health | Inconvenient | Land | Security | Will |
One who speaks fair words feeds you with an empty spoon.