This site is dedicated to the memory of Dr. Alan William Smolowe who gave birth to the creation of this database.
To suppress minority thinking and minority expression would tend to freeze society and prevent progress. Now more than ever we must keep in the forefront of our minds the fact that whenever we take away the liberties of those we hate, we are opening the way to loss of liberty for those we love.
Chance | Doubt | Freedom | Liberty | Nations | War | World |
No matter whose lips that would speak, they must be free and ungagged. The community which dares not protect its humblest and most hated member in the free utterance of his opinions, no matter how false or hateful, is only a gang of slaves. If there is anything in the universe that can’t stand discussion, let it crack.
The old Hindoo saw, in his dream, the human race led out to its various fortunes. - First, men were in chains that went back to an iron hand - then he saw them led by threads from the brain, which went upward to an unseen hand. The first was despotism, iron, and ruling by force. - The last was civilization, ruling by ideas.
Whittaker Chambers, born Jay Vivian Chambers, aka Jay David Whittaker Chambers
For the world, as seen in materialist view from the Right, scarcely differs from the same world seen in materialist view from the Left. The question become chiefly: who is to run that world in whose interests, or perhaps, at best, who can run it more efficiently? Something of this implication is fixed in the book’s dictatorial tone, which is much its most striking feature. Out of a lifetime of reading, I can recall no other book in which a tone of overriding arrogance was so implacably sustained. Its shrillness is without reprieve. Its dogmatism is without appeal.… From almost any page of Atlas Shrugged, a voice can be heard, from painful necessity, commanding, “To a gas chamber—go!”
Civilization | Mankind | Will | World |
Whittaker Chambers, born Jay Vivian Chambers, aka Jay David Whittaker Chambers
Toscanini was hailing a great artist, but that voice was more than a magnificent personal talent. It was the religious voice of a whole religious people — probably the most God-obsessed (and man-despised) people since the ancient Hebrews.
Ability | Corruption | Evil | Fate | Little | Man | Mankind | Men | Soul | Weakness | Will | Witness | Fate | Intellect |
Whittaker Chambers, born Jay Vivian Chambers, aka Jay David Whittaker Chambers
The mass of Americans, who vehemently made known their views in (and during) a recent general election, know perfectly well that they are not living in a reign of terror and that they seldom look behind a door for anything more frightening than an umbrella.
Balance | Mankind | Politics | Power | War | Will | World | Crisis |
Whittaker Chambers, born Jay Vivian Chambers, aka Jay David Whittaker Chambers
My children, as long as you live, the shadow of the Hiss Case will brush you. In every pair of eyes that rests on you, you will see pass, like a cloud passing behind a woods in winter, the memory of your father - dissembled in friendly eyes, lurking in unfriendly eyes.
Walt Whitman, fully Walter "Walt" Whitman
The ship is anchor'd safe and sound, its voyage is closed and done. From fearful trip the victor ship comes in with object won. Exult, O shores, and ring, O bells; but I with mournful tread walk the deck my captain lies, fallen cold and dead.
Dignity | Individual | Law | Liberty | Man | Purpose | Purpose | Wise |
The caucus is a sort of representative meeting which sits voting and voting till they have cut out all the known men against whom much is to be said, and agreed on some unknown man against whom there is nothing known, and therefore nothing to be alleged.
Government | Mankind | Reason | World | Government | Understand |
The mystic reverence, the religious allegiance, which are essential to a true monarchy, are imaginative sentiments that no legislature can manufacture in any people.
Benevolence | Good | Mankind | Melancholy | Question |
There is a deep disorder in our society which comes not from the machinations of our enemies and from the adversities of the human condition but from within ourselves.