This site is dedicated to the memory of Dr. Alan William Smolowe who gave birth to the creation of this database.
Vernon Howard, fully Vernon Linwood Howard
Foolishness is simply the nervous preference for wrong ideas, like a sailor anxiously hugging a broken compass.
François-René de Chateaubriand, fully François-René, vicomte de Chateaubriand
Religion assures us that our afflictions shall have an end; she comforts us, she dries our tears, she promises us another life. On the contrary, in the abominable worship of atheism, human woes are the incense, death is the priest, a coffin the altar, and annihilation the Deity.
Genius | Happy | Revolution | Taste |
Vernon Howard, fully Vernon Linwood Howard
The single most important thing is for you to persist in spite of everything.
Truth |
François-René de Chateaubriand, fully François-René, vicomte de Chateaubriand
One can never be the judge of another's grief. That which is a sorrow to one, to another is joy. Let us not dispute with any one concerning the reality of his sufferings; it is with sorrows as with countries - each man has his own.
Change | Dawn | Doubt | Light | Looks | Men | Nations | Revolution | Thinking | Tomorrow | Will | World | Old |
King of the peak and glacier, King of the cold, white scalps, He lifts his head at that close tread, The eagle of the Alps.
Justice | Lord | Revolution | World |
Viktor Frankl, fully Viktor Emil Frankl
Nothing could touch the strength of my love, and the thoughts of my beloved. Had I known then that my wife was dead, I think that I still would have given myself, undisturbed by that knowledge, to the contemplation of that image, and that my mental conversation with her would have been just as vivid and just as satisfying. "Set me like a seal upon thy heart, love is as strong as death."
Viktor Frankl, fully Viktor Emil Frankl
But there was no need to be ashamed of tears, for tears bore witness that a man had the greatest of courage, the courage to suffer.
Ability | Accident | Day | Growth | Life | Life | Meaning | Power | Psychology | Television | Time | Will |
I surrender my mind to Him; I place my wealth before Him. I totally renounce my selfish ways.
Agony and anxiety have not softened his heart; adventure and achievement have not made him humble. He is proud of his advance in the path of hatred and haughtiness. He revels in cruelty and sin. He displays an unholy satisfaction in immorality and untruth. He has reduced himself to a level lower than that of beasts.
The wind blows not over the earth. No one looks on. Do thou then, befriended of Indra, put all women and dogs to sleep.
Upton Sinclair, fully Upton Beall Sinclair, Jr.
In the most deeply significant of the legends concerning Jesus, we are told how the devil took him up into a high mountain and showed him all the kingdoms of the world in a moment of time; and the devil said unto him: All this power will I give unto thee, and the glory of them, for that is delivered unto me, and to whomsoever I will, I give it. If thou, therefore, wilt worship me, all shall be thine. Jesus, as we know, answered and said Get thee behind me, Satan! And he really meant it; he would have nothing to do with worldly glory, with temporal power; he chose the career of a revolutionary agitator, and died the death of a disturber of the peace. And for two or three centuries his church followed in his footsteps, cherishing his proletarian gospel. The early Christians had all things in common, except women; they lived as social outcasts, hiding in deserted catacombs, and being thrown to lions and boiled in oil. But the devil is a subtle worm; he does not give up at one defeat, for he knows human nature, and the strength of the forces which battle for him. He failed to get Jesus, but he came again, to get Jesus' church. He came when, through the power of the new revolutionary idea, the Church had won a position of tremendous power in the decaying Roman Empire; and the subtle worm assumed the guise or no less a person than the Emperor himself, suggesting that he should become a convert to the new faith, so that the Church and he might work together for the greater glory of God. The bishops and fathers of the Church, ambitious for their organization, fell for this scheme, and Satan went off laughing to himself. He had got everything he had asked from Jesus three hundred years before; he had got the world's greatest religion.
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 |
Upton Sinclair, fully Upton Beall Sinclair, Jr.
The remedy for the Great Depression is to give the workers access to the means of production, and let them produce for themselves, not for others… the American way.
Despise | Good | Meaning | Pious | Question | Sense | Society | Wealth | Will | Society | Old | Understand |
Upton Sinclair, fully Upton Beall Sinclair, Jr.
The first thing brought forth by the study of any religion, ancient or modern, is that it is based upon Fear, born of it, fed by it — and that it cultivates the source from which its nourishment is derived.
Ursula Le Guin, fully Ursula Kroeber Le Guin
The creative adult is the child who has survived.
Children | Revolution |
Without a global revolution in the sphere of human consciousness, nothing will change for the better in the sphere of our Being as humans, and the catastrophe toward which this world is headed, whether it be ecological, social, demographic or a general breakdown of civilization, will be unavoidable. If we are no longer threatened by world war or by the danger that the absurd mountains of accumulated nuclear weapons might blow up the world, this does not mean that we have definitively won. We are in fact far from definite victory.
Consciousness | Global | Revolution | Society | Will | Society |