This site is dedicated to the memory of Dr. Alan William Smolowe who gave birth to the creation of this database.
"The story - from Rumplestiltskin to War and Peace - is one of the basic tools invented by the human mind, for the purpose of gaining understanding. There have been great societies that did not use the wheel, but there have been no societies that did not tell stories." - Ursula Le Guin, fully Ursula Kroeber Le Guin
"Some men are born old, and some men never seem so. If we keep well and cheerful, we are always young and at last die in youth even when in years would count as old." - Tryon Edwards
"Double, double toil and trouble; fire burn, and caldron bubble. Fillet of a fenny snake, in the caldron boil and bake; eye of newt, and toe of frog, wool of bat, and tongue of dog, adder's fork, and blind-worm's sting, lizard's leg, and owlet's wing,— for a charm of powerful trouble, like a hell-broth boil and bubble. Double, double toil and trouble; scale of dragon; tooth of wolf; witches' mummy; maw and gulf of the ravin'd salt-sea shark; root of hemlock digg'd in the dark; liver of blaspheming jew; gall of goat, and slips of yew sliver'd in the moon's eclipse; nose of turk, and tartar's lips; finger of birth-strangled babe ditch-deliver'd by a drab,— make the gruel thick and slab: add thereto a tiger's chaudron, for the ingrediants of our caldron. Fire burn, and caldron bubble. Double, double toil and trouble; fire burn, and caldron bubble. Cool it with a baboon's blood, then the charm is firm and good. Macbeth, Act iv, Witches, Scene I" -
"In my individual heart I fully believe my faith is as robust as yours. The trouble with your robust and full bodied faiths, however, is, that they begin to cut eachothers’ throats too soon, and for getting on in the world and establishing amodus vivendi these pestilential refinements and reasonablenesses and moderations have to creep in." - William James
"Our errors are surely not such awfully solemn things. In a world where we are so certain to incur them in spite of all our caution, a certain lightness of heart seems healthier than this excessive nervousness on their behalf." - William James
"The beauty of flames lies in their strange play, beyond all proportion and harmony. Their diaphanous flare symbolizes at once grace and tragedy, innocence and despair, sadness and voluptuousness. The burning transcendence has something of the lightness of great purifications. I wish the fiery transcendence would carry me up and throw me into a sea of flames, where, consumed by their delicate and insidious tongues, I would die an ecstatic death. The beauty of flames creates the illusion of a pure, sublime death similar to the light of dawn. Immaterial, death in flames is like a burning of light, graceful wings. Do only butterflies die in flames? What about those devoured by the flames within them?" - Emil M. Cioran
"The more we try to rest ourselves from our Egos, the deeper we sink into it." - Emil M. Cioran
"The people are urged to be patriotic ... by sacrificing their own children. Patriotism requires allegience to the flag, which means obedience and readiness to kill father, mother, brother, sister." - Emma Goldman
"One horse-laugh is worth ten-thousand syllogisms." - 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." - H. L. Mencken, fully Henry Louis Mencken