This site is dedicated to the memory of Dr. Alan William Smolowe who gave birth to the creation of this database.
The widespread willingness to rely on thermonuclear bombs as the ultimate weapon displays a cavalier attitude toward death that has always puzzled me. My impression is that...most of the defenders of these weapons are not suitably horrified at the possibility of a war in which hundreds of millions of people would be killed...I suspect that an important factor may be belief in an afterlife, and that the proportion of those who think that death is not the end is much higher among the partisans of the bomb than among its opponents.
Business | Happy | Knowing | Object | People | Reason | Worry | Business | Politeness | Think |
William Henley, fully William Ernest Henley
Between the dusk of a summer night And the dawn of a summer day, We caught at a mood as it passed in flight, And we bade it stoop and stay. And what with the dawn of night began With the dusk of day was done; For that is the way of woman and man, When a hazard has made them one. Arc upon arc, from shade to shine, The World went thundering free; And what was his errand but hers and mine -- The lords of him, I and she? O, it's die we must, but it's live we can, And the marvel of earth and sun Is all for the joy of woman and man And the longing that makes them one.
Here may we prove the pow'r of pray'r, to strengthen faith, and sweeten care; to teach our faint desires to rise, and bring all heav'n before our eyes.
Will Rogers, fully William Penn Adair "Will" Rogers
Prohibition is better than no liquor at all.
Business | Government | Worry | Government | Business |
To probe for unconscious determinants of behavior and then define a man in their terms exclusively, ignoring his overt behavior altogether, is a greater distortion than ignoring the unconscious completely.
Absolute | Imagination | Worry |
Whittaker Chambers, born Jay Vivian Chambers, aka Jay David Whittaker Chambers
Innocence seldom utters outraged shrieks. Guilt Does.
Treason |
A simultaneous change of our whole economic and social system in favor of drastic decentralization of cities and industries, of the restoration of some more `natural order', more rural, but less urbanized, mechanized, industrialized, proletarized and commercialized. People will not like to face competition unless they have some firm stand. They must not feel lost in this present dehumanized world. Competition is a necessary social arrangement not a social gospel likely to make us enthusiastic. It is a negative concept which derives its strength from the fact that we like the alternatives, i.e., monopoly and collectivism, even less. It must be supplemented by something which is humanly positive.
Business | Debt | Man | Nature | Need | Problems | Worry | Business |
Whittaker Chambers, born Jay Vivian Chambers, aka Jay David Whittaker Chambers
Out of that vision of Almighty Man that we call Communism and that agony of souls and bodies that we call the revolution of the 20th century was left that pinch of irreducible dust: “Who pays is boss, and who takes money must also give something.” It might stand as the motto of every welfare philosophy.
Hope | Individual | Man | Men | Purpose | Purpose | Treason |
Walt Disney, fully Walter Elias "Walt" Disney
We're not trying to entertain the critics ... I'll take my chances with the public.
Contentment | Good | Happy | Public | Worry | Happiness | Think |
Dullness in matters of government is a good sign, and not a bad one - in particular, dullness in parliamentary government is a test of its excellence, an indication of its success.
Worry |
Can we actually suppose that we are wasting, polluting, and making ugly this beautiful land for the sake of patriotism and the love of God? Perhaps some of us would like to think so, but in fact this destruction is taking place because we have allowed ourselves to believe, and to live, a mated pair of economic lies: that nothing has a value that is not assigned to it by the market; and that the economic life of our communities can safely be handed over to the great corporations.
Control | Dependence | Economics | Era | Failure | Freedom | Need | Nothing | People | Politics | Rationality | Society | System | Will | World | Worry | Society | Failure |
Like the water of a deep stream, love is always too much. We did not make it. Though we drink till we burst, we cannot have it all, or want it all. In its abundance it survives our thirst. In the evening we come down to the shore to drink our fill, and sleep, while it flows through the regions of the dark. It does not hold us, except we keep returning to its rich waters thirsty. We enter, willing to die, into the commonwealth of its joy.
All the ancient wisdom tells us that work is necessary to us, as much a part of our condition as mortality; that good work is our salvation and our joy; that shoddy or dishonest or self-serving work is our curse and our doom. We have tried to escape the sweat and sorrow promised in Genesis - only to find that, in order to do so, we must forswear love and excellence, health and joy.
What works poorly in agriculture — monoculture, for instance, or annual accounting — can be pretty fully explained, because what works poorly is invariably some oversimplifying thought that subjugated nature, people, and culture. What works well ultimately defies explanation because it involves an order that in both magnitude and complexity is ultimately incomprehensible.
W. C. Fields, stage name for William Claude Dukenfield
I now touch nothing stronger than buttermilk: 90-proof buttermilk.
Worry |