This site is dedicated to the memory of Dr. Alan William Smolowe who gave birth to the creation of this database.
When money represents so many things, not to love it would be to love nearly nothing. To forget true needs can be only a weak moderation; but to know the value of money and to sacrifice it always, maybe to duty, maybe even to delicacy,—that is real virtue.
You seem disappointed that I am not more responsive to your interest in spiritual direction. Actually, I am more than a little ambivalent about the term, particularly in the ways it is being used so loosely without any sense of knowledge of the church's traditions in these matters.
Gore Vidal, fully Eugene Luther Gore Vidal
Anais Nin gave me my most original, or so I thought, creation. As I read Incest, I realized that something which I had always taken to be unique, the voice of Myra Breckinridge, was actually that of Anaïs in all the flowing megalomania of the diaries. Of course, I had not read the diaries then, but even so, if only for that one thundering voice, I am forever in her debt.
Man |
Gore Vidal, fully Eugene Luther Gore Vidal
For a writer, memory is everything. But then you have to test it; how good is it, really? Whether it's wrong or not, I'm beyond caring. It is what it is. As Norman Mailer would say, "It's existential." He went to his grave without knowing what that word meant.
Gore Vidal, fully Eugene Luther Gore Vidal
The genius of our ruling class is that it has kept a majority of the people from ever questioning the inequity of a system where most people drudge along, paying heavy taxes for which they get nothing in return.
Words |
Eugene McCarthy, fully Eugene Joseph "Gene" McCarthy
Now it is certain. There is no magic stone. No secret to be found. One must go with the mind's winnowed learning.
Man |
Gore Vidal, fully Eugene Luther Gore Vidal
After four centuries, Montaigne's curious genius still has that effect on his readers and, time and again, one finds in his self-portrait one's own most brilliant aperçus (the ones that somehow we forgot to write down and so forgot) restored to us in his essays—attempts—to assay—value—himself in his own time as well as, if he was on the subject, all time, if there is such a thing.
Words |
Eugene V. Debs, fully Eugene Victor Debs
I have no country to fight for; my country is the earth, and I am a citizen of the world.
Indispensable | Insanity | Man | System |
Eugene V. Debs, fully Eugene Victor Debs
Ten thousand times has the labor movement stumbled and fallen and bruised itself, and risen again; been seized by the throat and choked and clubbed into insensibility; enjoined by courts, assaulted by thugs, charged by the militia, shot down by regulars, traduced by the press, frowned upon by public opinion, deceived by politicians, threatened by priests, repudiated by renegades, preyed upon by grafters, infested by spies, deserted by cowards, betrayed by traitors, bled by leeches, and sold out by leaders, but notwithstanding all this, and all these, it is today the most vital and potential power this planet has ever known, and its historic mission of emancipating the workers of the world from the thraldom of the ages is as certain of ultimate realization as is the setting of the sun.
Gore Vidal, fully Eugene Luther Gore Vidal
TodayÂ’s public figures can no longer write their own speeches or books, and there is some evidence that they canÂ’t read them either.
Eugene V. Debs, fully Eugene Victor Debs
The most barbarous fact in all christendom is the labor market. The mere term sufficiently expresses the animalism of commercial civilization.They who buy and they who sell in the labor market are alike dehumanized by the inhuman traffic in the brains and blood and bones of human beings.
Gore Vidal, fully Eugene Luther Gore Vidal
Every time a friend succeeds, I die a little.
Despair | Individual | Land | Man | People | Sense | Will | Woman |
Eugene V. Debs, fully Eugene Victor Debs
I do not oppose the insane asylum — but I abhor and condemn the cutthroat system that robs man of his reason, drives him to insanity and makes the lunatic asylum an indispensable adjunct to every civilized community.