This site is dedicated to the memory of Dr. Alan William Smolowe who gave birth to the creation of this database.
H. L. Mencken, fully Henry Louis Mencken
Religion, like poetry, is simply a concerted effort to deny the most obvious realities.
Will |
H. L. Mencken, fully Henry Louis Mencken
The extortions and oppressions of government will go on so long as such bare fraudulence deceives and disarms the victims - so long as they are ready to swallow the immemorial official theory that protesting against the stealings of the archbishop's secretary's nephew's mistress' illegitimate son is a sin against the Holy Ghost.
Will |
How different in 1963 are the attitudes of men. We then existed in an atmosphere of suffocating pessimism. Today, cautious yet buoyant optimism is the prevailing spirit. But each one of us here knows that what has been accomplished is not enough. The United Nations judgments have been and continue to be subject to frustration, as individual member-states have ignored its pronouncements and disregarded its recommendations. The Organization's sinews have been weakened, as member states have shirked their obligations to it. The authority of the Organization has been mocked, as individual member-states have proceeded, in violation of its commands, to pursue their own aims and ends.
Will |
H. L. Mencken, fully Henry Louis Mencken
Poverty is a soft pedal upon the branches of human activity, not excepting the spiritual.
Unlike thoughts an ideas, feelings, passions and emotions can no more become part and parcel of the world of appearances than can our inner organs. What appears in the outside world in addition to physical signs is only what we make of them through the operation of thought.
Will |
The language of the soul in its mere expressive stage, prior to its transformation and transfiguration through thought, is not metaphorical; it does not depart from the senses and uses no analogies when it talks in terms of physical sensations.
Will |
The famous assertion by Einstein that the length of a rod depends on its velocity and on the chosen definition of simultaneity. ...is based on the fact that we do not measure the length of the rod, but its projection on a system at rest. How the length of the projection depends on the choice of simultaneity can be illustrated by reference to a photograph taken through a focal-plane shutter. Such a shutter... consists of a wide band with a horizontal slit, which slides down vertically. Different bands are photographed successively on the film. Moving objects are therefore strangely distorted; the wheels of a rapidly moving car for instance, appear to be slanted. The shape of the objects in the picture will evidently depend on the speed of the shutter. Similarly, the length of the moving segment depends on the definition of simultaneity. One definition of simultaneity differs from another because events that are simultaneous for one definition occur successively for another. What may be a simultaneity projection of a moving segment for one definition is a "focal-plane shutter photograph" for another.
Men |
Beyond 2050 the world population may start to decrease if women across the world will have, on average, less than 2 children. But that decrease will be slow.
Will |
When I have an argument with someone, even with someone I am not very close with, I can't sleep at night thinking about it. It's terrible. But I still manage speak out frankly because I have also been gifted with the ability to read people. I can sense when they start to get irritated with me, and then, I shift.
To show one?s anger is one form of self-presentation: I decide what is fit for appearance. In other words, the emotions I feel are no more meant to be shown in their unadulterated state than the inner organs by which we live.
Will |
To worship the product and ignore its development leads to dilettantism and reaction. Art cannot result from sophisticated, frivolous, or superficial effects.
To sense the invisible and to be able to create it ? that is art.
The concept of congruence in Euclidean geometry is not exactly the same as that in non-Euclidean geometry... "Congruent" means in Euclidean geometry the same as "determining parallelism," a meaning which it does not have in non-Euclidean geometry.
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 |