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
A Sunday school is a prison in which children do penance for the evil conscience of their parents.
There is no truth except in its relation, that is to say, the fashion in which we perceive the objects.
We were Red Romantics, perfectly ridiculous to be sure, but in full bloom. The little good which remains to me comes from that epoch.
H. L. Mencken, fully Henry Louis Mencken
In any combat between a rogue and a fool the sympathy of mankind is always with the rogue.
Life | Life | Television |
H. L. Mencken, fully Henry Louis Mencken
The chief contribution of Protestantism to human thought is its massive proof that God is a bore.
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The United Nations continues to sense as the forum where nations whose interests clash may lay their cases before world opinion. It still provides the essential escape valve without which the slow build-up of pressures would have long since resulted in catastrophic explosion.
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I assert that the problem submitted to the Assembly today is a much wider one. It is not merely a question of the settlement of Italian aggression.
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H. L. Mencken, fully Henry Louis Mencken
What makes philosophy so tedious is not the profundity of philosophers, but their lack of art; they are like physicians who sought to cure a slight hyperacidity by prescribing a carload of burned oyster-shells.
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You have to fit in sometimes to make people comfortable to listen to you.
The totalitarian attempt at global conquest and total domination has been the destructive way out of all impasses. Its victory may coincide with the destruction of humanity; wherever it has ruled, it has begun to destroy the essence of man. Yet to turn our backs on the destructive forces of the century is of little avail. The trouble is that our period has so strangely intertwined the good with the bad that without the imperialists' "expansion for expansion's sake," the world might never have become one; without the bourgeoisie's political device of "power for power's sake," the extent of human strength might never have been discovered; without the fictitious world of totalitarian movements, in which with unparalleled clarity the essential uncertainties of our time have been spelled out, we might have been driven to our doom without ever becoming aware of what has been happening. And if it is true that in the final stages of totalitarianism an absolute evil appears (absolute because it can no longer be deduced from humanly comprehensible motives), it is also true that without it we might never have known the truly radical nature of Evil.
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The trouble with Eichmann was precisely that so many were like him, and that the many were neither perverted nor sadistic, that they were, and still are, terribly and terrifyingly normal. From the viewpoint of our legal institutions and of our moral standards of judgment, this normality was much more terrifying than all the atrocities put together.
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Somewhat influenced by Aristotelian physics, he [Augustine] holds that the end of all movement is rest, and now he understands the emotions - the motions of the soul - in analogy to the movements of the physical world. For ?nothing else do bodies desire by their weight than what souls desire by their love.? Hence, in the Confessions: ?My weight is my love; by it I am borne whithersoever I am born.? The soul?s gravity, the essence of who somebody is, and which as such is inscrutable to human eyes, becomes manifest in this love.
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The eye of the master fattens the horse.
Experience | Life | Life | Principles | Psychology | Time | Youth | Youth |
Much smoke, and little roast.
Life | Life | Television | World | Understand |
Thank you, pretty pussy, was the death of my cat.
Death | Good | Hypothesis | Individual | Phenomena | Sense | Loss |