This site is dedicated to the memory of Dr. Alan William Smolowe who gave birth to the creation of this database.
A mind always employed is always happy. This is the true secret, the grand recipe, for felicity.
The acquisition of Canada this year, as far as the neighborhood of Quebec, will be a mere matter of marching, and will give us experience for the attack of Halifax the next, and the final expulsion of England from the American continent.
The society adopts neither rites nor priesthood, and it will never lose sight of the resolution not to advance anything as a society inconvenient to any sect or sects, in any time or country, and under any government. It will be seen that it is so much the more easy for the society to keep within this circle, because, that the dogmas of the Theophilanthropists are those upon which all the sects have agreed, that their moral is that upon which there has never been the least dissent; and that the name they have taken expresses the double end of all the sects, that of leading to the adoration of God and love of man.
From a very early age I had imbibed the opinion that it was every man's duty to do all that lay in his power to leave his country as good as he had found it.
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Full sexual consciousness and a natural regulation of sexual life mean the end of mystical feelings of any kind, that, in other words, natural sexuality is the deadly enemy of mystical religion. The church, by making the fight over sexuality the center of its dogmas and of its influence over the masses, confirms this concept.
Blame | Defense | Fighting | Freedom | Right | Rule | Slavery | Time | Writing | Happiness | Understand | Winning |
We need to ask not whether it is realistic or practical or viable but whether it is imaginable. We need to ask if our consciousness and imagination have been so assaulted and co-opted by the royal consciousness that we have been robbed of the courage or power to think an alternative thought.
Most of us are still too sane to piss in our own cistern, but we allow others to do so and we reward them for it. We reward them so well, in fact, that those who piss in our cistern are wealthier than the rest of us.
W. E. B. Du Bois, fully William Edward Burghardt Du Bois
The history of the American Negro is the history of this strife, -- this longing to attain self-conscious manhood, to merge his double self into a better and truer self. In this merging he wishes neither of the older selves to be lost... He simply wishes to make it possible for a man to be both a Negro and an American...
Consideration | Death | Disagreement | Inevitable | Loyalty | Loyalty | Opposition | Patriotism | Position | Reconciliation | Right | Slavery | Spirit |
Vladimir Lenin, fully Vladimir Ilyich Lenin
The reflection of nature in man’s thought must be understood not lifelessly but in the eternal process of movement, the arising of contradictions and their solution.
Enthusiasm | People | Slavery |
Virginia Woolf, nee Stephen, fully Adeline Virginia Woolf
To enjoy freedom we have to control ourselves.
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There was Boulatruelle's mistake. He believed in the straight line; a respectable optical illusion, but one that ruins many men.
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We see past time in a telescope and present time in a microscope. Hence the apparent enormities of the present.
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Upton Sinclair, fully Upton Beall Sinclair, Jr.
I intend to do what little one man can do to awaken the public conscience, and in the meantime I am not frightened by your menaces. I am not a giant physically; I shrink from pain and filth and vermin and foul air, like any other man of refinement; also, I freely admit, when I see a line of a hundred policeman with drawn revolvers flung across a street to keep anyone from coming onto private property to hear my feeble voice, I am somewhat disturbed in my nerves. But I have a conscience and a religious faith, and I know that our liberties were not won without suffering, and may be lost again through our cowardice. I intend to do my duty to my country.
Defects | Defense | Force | Ideals | Language | Question | Slavery | Spirit | Study | War | Friends |
We need to become national, not by any conscious effort, such as implies attitudinizing and constraint, but by simply accepting our own life. It is not desirable to go out of one’s way to be original, but it is to be hoped that it may lie in one’s way. Originality is simply a fresh pair of eyes. If you want to astonish the whole world, said Rahel, tell the simple truth. It is easier to excuse a thousand defects in the literary man who proceeds on this faith, than to forgive the one great defect of imitation in the purist who seeks only to be English. As Wasson has said, “The Englishman is undoubtedly a wholesome figure to the mental eye; but will not twenty million copies of him do, for the present?” We must pardon something to the spirit of liberty. We must run some risks, as all immature creatures do, in the effort to use our own limbs. Professor Edward Channing used to say that it was a bad sing for a college boy to write too well; there should be exuberances and inequalities. A nation which has but just begun to create a literature must sow some wild oats. The most tiresome vaingloriousness may be more hopeful than hypercriticism and spleen. The follies of the absurdest spread-eagle orator may be far more promising, because they smack more of the soil, than the neat Londonism of the city editor who dissects him.
Culture | Faith | Little | Need | People | Pride | Slavery | War | Will |
Beshrow me but I love her heartily! For she is wise, if I can judge of her, And fair she is, if that mine eyes be true, And true she is, as she hath proved herself; And therefore, like herself, wise, fair, true, Shall she be placed in my constant soul. The Merchant of Venice, Act ii, Scene 6
William Howells, fully William Dean Howells, aka The Dean of American Letters
There will presently be no room in the world for things it will be filled up with the advertisements of things.
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