This site is dedicated to the memory of Dr. Alan William Smolowe who gave birth to the creation of this database.
"I can understand companionship. I can understand bought sex in the afternoon, but I cannot understand the love affair." - Gore Vidal, fully Eugene Luther Gore Vidal
"I shared, naturally, in that hatred of organized labor which has been the one political constant in my lifetime, culminating in Ronald Reagan's most popular gesture, the smashing of the air-controllers' union. No alternative view of organized labor has ever come to us through the popular media. If labor leaders were not crooks like Jimmy Hoffa, they were in the pay of Moscow." - Gore Vidal, fully Eugene Luther Gore Vidal
"If Henry Miller often sounded like a village idiot, it is because, like Whitman, he was the rest of the village as well." - Gore Vidal, fully Eugene Luther Gore Vidal
"If you let people break your spirit and detour you from your path, then you have not been true to yourself or those you're here to touch, those who believe in you." - Gore Vidal, fully Eugene Luther Gore Vidal
"If you want to rise in politics in the United States, there is one subject you must stay away from, and that is politics." - Gore Vidal, fully Eugene Luther Gore Vidal
"It is curious how little interested we are in the sexual desires of those who do not attract us." - Gore Vidal, fully Eugene Luther Gore Vidal
"Laughing at someone else is an excellent way of learning how to laugh at oneself; and questioning what seem to be the absurd beliefs of another group is a good way of recognizing the potential absurdity of many of one's own cherished beliefs." - Gore Vidal, fully Eugene Luther Gore Vidal
"Of course his dust would be absorbed in other living things and to that degree at least he would exist again, though it was plain enough that the specific combination which was he would never exist again." - Gore Vidal, fully Eugene Luther Gore Vidal
"Television is now so desperately hungry for material that they''re scraping the top of the barrel" - Gore Vidal, fully Eugene Luther Gore Vidal
"The American reader cannot bear a surprise. He knows that this is the greatest country on earthÂ…and evidence to the contrary is not admissible. That means no inconvenient facts, no new information. If you really want the readerÂ’s attention, you must flatter him. Make his prejudices your own. Tell him things he already knows. He will love your soundness." - Gore Vidal, fully Eugene Luther Gore Vidal
"The great unmentionable evil at the center of our culture is monotheism. From a barbaric Bronze Age text known as the Old Testament, three anti-human religions have evolved — Judaism, Christianity, Islam. These are sky-god religions. They are, literally, patriarchal — God is the Omnipotent Father — hence the loathing of women for 2,000 years in those countries afflicted by the sky-god and his earthly male delegates. The sky-god is a jealous god, of course. He requires total obedience from everyone on earth, as he is in place not for just one tribe but for all creation. Those who would reject him must be converted or killed for their own good. Ultimately, totalitarianism is the only sort of politics that can truly serve the sky-god's purpose." - Gore Vidal, fully Eugene Luther Gore Vidal
"The worst thing to happen to Lincoln - aside from the unfortunate incident at Ford's theatre - was to fall into the hands of Carl Sandburg." - Gore Vidal, fully Eugene Luther Gore Vidal
"There is no such thing as a homosexual or a heterosexual person. There are only homo- or heterosexual acts. Most people are a mixture of impulses if not practices." - Gore Vidal, fully Eugene Luther Gore Vidal
"There is no such thing as a true account of anything." - Gore Vidal, fully Eugene Luther Gore Vidal
"There is only one party in the United States, the Property Party...and it has two right wings: Republican and Democrat. Republicans are a bit stupider, more rigid, more doctrinaire in their laissez-faire capitalism than the Democrats, who are cuter, prettier, a bit more corrupt—until recently... and more willing than the Republicans to make small adjustments when the poor, the black, the anti-imperialists get out of hand. But, essentially, there is no difference between the two parties." - Gore Vidal, fully Eugene Luther Gore Vidal
"We're the most captive nation of slaves that ever came along. The moral timidity of the average American is quite noticeable. Everybody's afraid to be thought in any way different from everyone else." - Gore Vidal, fully Eugene Luther Gore Vidal
"You think of the Republican Party as a party, like the British Conservative Party - well it isn't! I don't say that the British Conservative Party is much better, I'm only saying the Republican Party is a mindset. They love war! They love money! They're out to hang on through all the connections that they have, through their various operatives." - Gore Vidal, fully Eugene Luther Gore Vidal
"A man should take to himself no discomfort from an opinion expressed or implied by his adversary, but it is difficult, and oftentimes humiliating to attempt to justify the kindness of one's friends." - Eugene V. Debs, fully Eugene Victor Debs
"I would no more teach children military training than teach them arson, robbery, or assassination." - Eugene V. Debs, fully Eugene Victor Debs
"If war is right let it be declared by the people. You who have your lives to lose, you certainly above all others have the right to decide the momentous issue of war or peace." - Eugene V. Debs, fully Eugene Victor Debs
"Intellectual darkness is essential to industrial slavery." - Eugene V. Debs, fully Eugene Victor Debs
"The capitalist class is represented by the Republican, Democratic, Populist and Prohibition parties, all of which stand for private ownership of the means of production, and the triumph of any one of which will mean continued wage-slavery to the working class." - Eugene V. Debs, fully Eugene Victor Debs
"The people can have anything they want, the only problem is they do not want anything." - Eugene V. Debs, fully Eugene Victor Debs
"The political solidarity of the working class means the death of despotism, the birth of freedom, the sunrise of civilization." - Eugene V. Debs, fully Eugene Victor Debs
"Wherever capitalism appears, in pursuit of its mission of exploitation, there will Socialism, fertilized by misery, watered by tears, and vitalized by agitation be also found, unfurling its class-struggle banner and proclaiming its mission of emancipation." - Eugene V. Debs, fully Eugene Victor Debs
"I love athletics because it is poetry If the night dream, dream to be a marathon runner." - Eugenio Montale
"Along with success comes a reputation for wisdom." - Euripedes NULL
"No one who goes against her can win." - Euripedes NULL
"There is no harbor of peace from the changing waves of joy and despair." - Euripedes NULL
"The audience plays a huge part in how a piece will actually form. They really allow the performers to walk a tightrope in a way that never seems to happen in the privacy of your own four walls. I'm listening to the audience, and they're listening to me." - Evelyn Glennie, fully Evelyn Elizabeth Ann Glennie
"He goes because he must, as Galahad went towards the Grail: knowing that for those who can live it, this alone is life." - Evelyn Underhill
"If we do not at least try to manifest something of Creative Charity in our dealings with life, whether by action, thought, or prayer, and do it at our own cost -- if we roll up the talent of love in the nice white napkin of piety and put it safely out of the way, sorry that the world is so hungry and thirsty, so sick and so fettered, and leave it at that: then, even that little talent may be taken from us. We may discover at the crucial moment that we are spiritually bankrupt." - Evelyn Underhill
"Most of our conflicts and difficulties come from trying to deal with the spiritual and practical aspects of our life separately instead of realizing them as parts of one whole. If our practical life is centered on our own interests, cluttered up by possessions, distracted by ambitions, passions, wants and worries, beset by a sense of our own rights and importance, or anxieties for our own future, or longings for our own success, we need not expect that our spiritual life will be a contrast to all this. The soul's house is not built on such a convenient plan; there are few soundproof partitions in it. Only when the conviction - not merely the idea - that the demand of the Spirit, however inconvenient, rules the whole of it, will those objectionable noises die down which have a way of penetrating into the nicely furnished little oratory and drowning all the quieter voices by their din." - Evelyn Underhill
"Art is the symbol of the two noblest human efforts: to construct and to refrain from destruction." - Evelyn Waugh, fully Evelyn Arthur St. John Waugh
"'But what am I to teach them?' said Paul in sudden panic. 'Oh, I shouldn't try to teach them anything, not just yet, anyway. Just keep them quiet.'" - Evelyn Waugh, fully Evelyn Arthur St. John Waugh
"Downstairs Peter Beste-Chetwynde mixed himself another brandy and soda and turned a page in Havelock Ellis, which, next to The Wind in the Willows, was his favourite book." - Evelyn Waugh, fully Evelyn Arthur St. John Waugh
"I can quite understand that many people may be depressed by the spectacle of naked humanity. Personally I cannot see that an ugly body is any more offensive than an ugly dress." - Evelyn Waugh, fully Evelyn Arthur St. John Waugh
"I expect you'll be becoming a schoolmaster, sir. That's what most of the gentlemen does, sir, that gets sent down for indecent behavior." - Evelyn Waugh, fully Evelyn Arthur St. John Waugh
"I will not stand for being called a woman in my own house." - Evelyn Waugh, fully Evelyn Arthur St. John Waugh
"It doesn't matter what people call you unless they call you pigeon pie and eat you up." - Evelyn Waugh, fully Evelyn Arthur St. John Waugh
"It is a curious thing ... that every creed promises a paradise which will be absolutely uninhabitable for anyone of civilized taste." - Evelyn Waugh, fully Evelyn Arthur St. John Waugh
"It's a great thing in life to have a place you can't be moved from - too few of them." - Evelyn Waugh, fully Evelyn Arthur St. John Waugh
"It's the seed of life we carry about with us like our skeletons, each one of us unconsciously pregnant with desirable villa residences. There's no escape. As individuals we simply do not exist. We are just potential home builders, beavers, and ants. How do we come into being? What is birth? (Part One, Chapter XII)" - Evelyn Waugh, fully Evelyn Arthur St. John Waugh