This site is dedicated to the memory of Dr. Alan William Smolowe who gave birth to the creation of this database.
Individualism is the growth-stunting, maturity-inhibiting habit of understanding growth as an isolated self-project. Individualism is self-ism with swagger. The individualist is the person who is convinced that he or she can serve God without dealing with God. This is the person who is sure that he or she can love neighbors without knowing their names. This is the person who assumes that ‘getting ahead’ involves leaving other people behind. This is the person who having gained competence in knowing God or people or world, uses that knowledge to take charge of God or people or world.
We learn to live not by our feelings about God but by the facts about God. If I break my leg I do not become less a person. My wife and children do not reject me. Neither when my faith fractures or my feelings bruise does God cast me off and reject me.
Words |
Let us consider man the first moment of his existence; his mind immediately feels different sensations; such as light, colors, pain, pleasure, motion, rest: these arc his first thoughts.
All men cannot connect their ideas with equal force, nor in equal number: and this is the reason why all are not equally happy in their imagination and memory.
Language |
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.
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.
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 |
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 |
Gore Vidal, fully Eugene Luther Gore Vidal
If itÂ’s a battle between the Gores and the Bushes, the Gores will win. We are much meaner and cleverer. And we have more popular support.
Rest |
Eugene V. Debs, fully Eugene Victor Debs
I told my friends of the cloth that I did not believe Christ was meek and lowly but a real living, vital agitator who went into the temple with a lash and a krout and whipped the oppressors of the poor, routed them out of the doors and spilled their blood and got silver on the floor. He told the robbed and misruled and exploited and driven people to disobey their plunderers, he denounced the profiteers, and it was for this that they nailed his quivering body to the cross and spiked it to the gates of Jerusalem, not because he told them to love one another. That was harmless doctrine. But when he touched their profits and denounced them before their people he was marked for crucifixion.
Right |
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.
Gore Vidal, fully Eugene Luther Gore Vidal
To turn life into words is to make life yours to do with as you please, instead of the other way round
Famous |