This site is dedicated to the memory of Dr. Alan William Smolowe who gave birth to the creation of this database.
If there is no friendship with them [the poor] and no sharing of the life of the poor, then there is no authentic commitment to liberation, because love exists only among equals.
Think |
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.
Body |
H. L. Mencken, fully Henry Louis Mencken
A Puritan is a person who lives in the fear that someone, somewhere, may be having a good time.
Then, noticing on one of the shelves a volume of Hugo and another of Lamartine, he broke out into sarcastic criticisms of the romantic school. These poets had neither good sense nor correctness, and, above all, were not French! He plumed himself on his knowledge of the language, and analysed the most beautiful phrases with that snarling severity, that academic taste which persons of playful disposition exhibit when they are discussing serious art.
Space |
You ask me whether the Orient is up to what I imagined it to be. Yes, it is; and more than that, it extends far beyond the narrow idea I had of it. I have found, clearly delineated, everything that was hazy in my mind. Facts have taken the place of suppositions - so excellently so that it is often as though I were suddenly coming upon old forgotten dreams.
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
The plain fact is that education is itself a form of propaganda - a deliberate scheme to outfit the pupil, not with the capacity to weigh ideas, but with a simple appetite for gulping ideas ready-made. The aim is to make 'good' citizens, which is to say, docile and uninquisitive citizens.
Men in plural? can experience meaningfulness only because they can talk with and make sense to each other and themselves.
Sometimes it is better to give your apple away, than to eat it yourself.
The chamber-bell is the worst sound one have in his ears.