This site is dedicated to the memory of Dr. Alan William Smolowe who gave birth to the creation of this database.
We settle things by a majority vote, and the psychological effect of doing that is to create the impression that the majority is probably right. Of course, on any fine issue the majority is sure to be wrong. Think of taking a majority vote on the best music. Jazz would win over Chopin. Or on the best novel. Many cheap scribblers would win over Tolstoy. And any day a prizefight will get a bigger crowd, larger gate receipts and wider newspaper publicity than any new revelation of goodness, truth or beauty could hope to achieve in a century.
Beauty | Character | Day | Hope | Impression | Majority | Music | Revelation | Right | Truth | Will | Wrong | Beauty | Think |
I am unable to understand how a man of honor could take a newspaper in his hands without a shudder of disgust.
Honor | Man | Wisdom | Understand |
Sad spectacle that man should live and be fed that he may fill a paragraph in the newspaper for his wonderful age, as we record the weight and girth of the Big Ox and Mammoth Girl. We don't count a man's years until he has nothing else to count.
Erich Fromm, fully Erich Seligmann Fromm
We have a literacy rate above 90 percent of the population. We have radio, television, movies, a newspaper a day for everybody. But instead of giving us the best of past and present literature and music, these media of communication, supplemented by advertising, fill the minds of men with the cheapest trash, lacking in any sense of reality, with sadistic phantasies which a halfway cultured person would be embarrassed to entertain even once in a while. But while the mind of everybody, young and old, is thus poisoned, we go on blissfully to see to it that no "immorality" occurs on the screen.
Day | Giving | Literature | Men | Mind | Past | Present | Sense |
Fulton Sheen, fully Archbishop Fulton John Sheen
The proud man counts his newspaper clippings, the humble man his blessings.
Man |
Mark Twain, pen name of Samuel Langhorne Clemens
If you don't read the newspaper you are uninformed, if you do read the newspaper you are misinformed.
Michelangelo Antonioni, Cavaliere di Gran Croce
The principle behind the cinema, like that behind all the arts, rests on a choice. It is, in Camus' words, "the revolt of the artist against the real." If one holds to this principle, what difference can it make by what means reality is revealed? Whether the author of a film seizes on the real in a novel, in a newspaper story or in his own imagination, what counts is the way he isolates it, stylizes it, makes it his own.
Genius sits in a glass house -- but in an unbreakable one --conceiving ideas. After giving birth, it falls into madness. Stretches out its hand through the window toward the first person happening by. The demon's claw rips, the iron fist grips. Before, you were a model, mocks the ironic voice between serrated teeth, for me, you are raw material to work on. I throw you against the glass wall, so that you remain stuck there, projected and stuck. (Then come the lovers of art and contemplate the bleeding work from outside. Then come the photographers. New art, it says in the newspaper the following day. The learned journals give it a name that ends in ism.)
Amusingly, it [astrology] falls foul of our modern taboo against lazy stereotyping. How would we react if a newspaper published a daily column that read something like this: Germans: It is in your nature to be hard-working and methodical, which should serve you well at work today. In your personal relationships, especially this evening, you will need to curb your natural tendency to obey orders. Chinese: Inscrutability has many advantages, but it may be your undoing today. British: Your stiff upper lip may serve you well in business dealings, but try to relax and let yourself go in your social life.
Richard Nixon, fully Richard Milhous Nixon
I've never canceled a subscription to a newspaper because of bad cartoons or editorials. If that were the case, I wouldn't have any newspapers or magazines to read.
Bette Davis, Ruth Elizabeth "Bette" Davis
People often become actresses because of something they dislike about themselves: They pretend they are someone else.
Death |
Bette Davis, Ruth Elizabeth "Bette" Davis
Without wonder and insight, acting is just a trade. With it, it becomes creation.