This site is dedicated to the memory of Dr. Alan William Smolowe who gave birth to the creation of this database.
Gore Vidal, fully Eugene Luther Gore Vidal
An eagle, looking for a hard surface on which to break up the turtle that he held in his claws, mistook the bald head of Aeschylus, the author of The Persians, for a rock and let slip the turtle, with fatal accuracy.
Gore Vidal, fully Eugene Luther Gore Vidal
Our form of democracy is bribery, on the highest scale.
Nature |
Gore Vidal, fully Eugene Luther Gore Vidal
Patriotism is as sickening today as it has ever been. I was watching the news before you came and there was a lot of coverage of Kosovo and the problems there. They showed footage of people burning an American flag. And the newscaster got all broken up and teary-eyed. He says, "I guess [sob] I just feel something here, folks, when I see the American flag being burned." And I said, You fucking asshole. Whatever happened to the news?
Price | Proletariat | Question | Right | System |
Eugene V. Debs, fully Eugene Victor Debs
Yes, I am my brotherÂ’s keeper. I am under a moral obligation to him that is inspired, not by any maudlin sentimentality but by the higher duty I owe myself. What would you think me if I were capable of seating myself at a table and gorging myself with food and saw about me the children of my fellow beings starving to death.
It is in the thirties that we want friends. In the forties we know they won't save us any more than love did.
What other creatures are bred so exquisitely and purposefully for mistreatment as women are?
Contradiction | Man | Mortal | Nature | World |
The first requisite to happiness is that a man be born in a famous city.
Anger |
Those who have searched into human nature observe that nothing so much shows the nobleness of the soul, as that its felicity consists in action. Every man has such an active principle in him that he will find out something to employ himself upon, in whatever place or state of life he is posted.
Conversation | Discretion | Giving | Good | Love | Man | Nothing | Sense |
We are generally so much pleased with any little accomplishments, either of body or mind, which have once made us remarkable in the world, that we endeavor to persuade ourselves it is not in the power of time to rob us of them. We are eternally pursuing the same methods which first procured us the applauses of mankind. It is from this notion that an author writes on, though he is come to dotage; without ever considering that his memory is impaired, and that he hath lost that life, and those spirits, which formerly raised his fancy and fired his imagination. The same folly hinders a man from submitting his behavior to his age, and makes Clodius, who was a celebrated dancer at five-and-twenty, still love to hobble in a minuet, though he is past threescore. It is this, in a word, which fills the town with elderly fops and superannuated coquettes.
Human nature | Life | Life | Man | Nature | Nothing | Will |
Happy the man who from the sea escapes the storm and finds harbor.