This site is dedicated to the memory of Dr. Alan William Smolowe who gave birth to the creation of this database.
What stops me from taking myself seriously, even though I am essentially a serious person, is that I find myself extremely ridiculous, not in the sense of the small-scale ridiculousness of slap-stick comedy, but rather in the sense of ridiculousness that seems intrinsic to human life and that manifests itself in the simplest actions and the most extraordinary gestures.
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H. L. Mencken, fully Henry Louis Mencken
Eugenics is the theory that charm in a woman is the same as charmed in a prize-fighter.
Need |
H. L. Mencken, fully Henry Louis Mencken
Every failure teaches a man something, to wit, that he will probably fail again next time.
The truth is that fullness of soul can sometimes overflow in utter vapidity of language, for none of us can ever express the exact measure of his needs or his thoughts or his sorrows; and human speech is like a cracked kettle on which we tap crude rhythms for bears to dance to, while we long to make music that will melt the stars.
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Why was it? Who drove you to it?' She replied, 'It had to be, my dear!' 'Weren't you happy? Is it my fault? I did all I could!' 'Yes, that is true ? you are good ? you.
Gustavo Dudamel and the Teresa Carreño Youth Orchestra
Recently, I went to a disco with friends, and all the young people were saying, 'Dudamel, we want to go to your concert, but it's impossible because it's sold out.' It's really amazing.
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H. L. Mencken, fully Henry Louis Mencken
If women believed in their husbands they would be a good deal happier and also a good deal more foolish.
H. L. Mencken, fully Henry Louis Mencken
I believe that all government is evil, and that trying to improve it is largely a waste of time.
H. L. Mencken, fully Henry Louis Mencken
No one ever went broke underestimating the taste of the American public.
It is collective security: it is the very existence of the League of Nations. It is the confidence that each State is to place in international treaties. It is the value of promises made to small States that their integrity and their independence shall be respected and ensured.
Religion |
H. L. Mencken, fully Henry Louis Mencken
Popularity: The capacity for listening sympathetically when men boast of their wives and women complain of their husbands.
The main objection to the theory of pure visualization is our thesis that the non-Euclidean axioms can be visualized just as rigorously if we adjust the concept of congruence. This thesis is based on the discovery that the normative function of visualization is not of visual but of logical origin and that the intuitive acceptance of certain axioms is based on conditions from which they follow logically, and which have previously been smuggled into the images. The axiom that the straight line is the shortest distance is highly intuitive only because we have adapted the concept of straightness to the system of Eucidean concepts. It is therefore necessary merely to change these conditions to gain a correspondingly intuitive and clear insight into different sets of axioms; this recognition strikes at the root of the intuitive priority of Euclidean geometry. Our solution of the problem is a denial of pure visualization, inasmuch as it denies to visualization a special extralogical compulsion and points out the purely logical and non-intuitive origin of the normative function. Since it asserts, however, the possibility of a visual representation of all geometries, it could be understood as an extension of pure visualization to all geometries. In that case the predicate "pure" is but an empty addition, since it denotes only the difference between experienced and imagined pictures, and we shall therefore discard the term "pure visualization." Instead we shall speak of the normative function of the thinking process, which can guide the pictorial elements of thinking into any logically permissible structure.
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We may remember what the Romans... thought a cultivated person ought to be: one who knows how to choose his company among men, among things, among thoughts, in the present as well as in the past.
The possibilities of being different from what one is are infinite. Once one has negated oneself, however, there are no longer any particular choices.
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The relative meaning of two physical facts in a emotionally controlled relation always creates the phenomenon of a third fact of a higher order, just as two musical sounds, heard simultaneously create the phenomenon of a third, fourth or fifth. The nature of this higher third is non-physical. In a sense it is magic. Each such phenomenon always overshadows the material qualities and the limited meaning of the basic factors from which it has sprung. For this reason Art expresses the highest quality of the spirit when it is surreal in nature; or, in terms of the visual arts, when it is of a surreal plastic nature.
One who speaks fair words feeds you with an empty spoon.