This site is dedicated to the memory of Dr. Alan William Smolowe who gave birth to the creation of this database.
To those who are longing for a higher life, who deeply feel the need of religious satisfactions, we suggest that there is a way in which the demands of the head and the heart may be reconciled. Religion is not necessarily allied with dogma, a new kind of faith is possible, based not upon legend and tradition, not upon the authority of any book, but upon the moral nature of man.
Belief | Misfortune | Need | Past | Progress | Truth | Misfortune | Truths |
Often, when they spoke of Paris, she would murmur: "Ah! How happy we'd be, living there!" "Aren't we happy here?" the young would softly ask, passing his hand over her hair.
Common Sense | Sense |
She cast her eyes about her, longing for the earth to open up. Why not end it all? What was holding her back? She was free to act. And she moved forward. "Do it! Do it!" she ordered herself, peering down at the pavement.
On certain occasions art can shake very ordinary spirits, and whole worlds can be revealed by its clumsiest interpreters.
Sense |
What an awful thing life is, isn?t it? It?s like soup with lots of hairs floating on the surface. You have to eat it nevertheless.
Words |
H. L. Mencken, fully Henry Louis Mencken
Bachelors know more about women than married men. If they didn't they be married, too.
H. L. Mencken, fully Henry Louis Mencken
Happiness is peace after strife, the overcoming of difficulties, the feeling of security and well-being. The only really happy folk are married women and single men.
Sense |
The principal thing in this world is to keep one's soul aloft.
H. L. Mencken, fully Henry Louis Mencken
I believe in only one thing and that thing is human liberty. If ever a man is to achieve anything like dignity, it can happen only if superior men are given absolute freedom to think what they want to think and say what they want to say. I am against any man and any organization which seeks to limit or deny that freedom? and the superior man can be sure of freedom only if it is given to all men.
Excitement | Sense |
The finest works of art are those in which there is the least matter. The closer expression comes to thought, the more the word clings to the idea and disappears, the more beautiful the work of art.
Words |
Gustavo Dudamel and the Teresa Carreño Youth Orchestra
I love to travel, but sometimes it's nice to stay in one place.
I assert that the problem submitted to the Assembly today is a much wider one. It is not merely a question of the settlement of Italian aggression.
Language |
H. L. Mencken, fully Henry Louis Mencken
Morality and honor are not to be confused. The difference between a moral man and a man of honor is that the latter regrets a discreditable act, even when it has worked and he has not been caught.
Words |
H. L. Mencken, fully Henry Louis Mencken
The woman who is not pursued sets up the doctrine that pursuit is offensive to her sex, and wants to make it a felony. No genuinely attractive woman has any such desire. She likes masculine admiration, however violently expressed, and is quite able to take care of herself. More, she is well aware that very few men are bold enough to offer it without a plain invitation, and this awareness makes her extremely cynical of all women who complain of being harassed, beset, storied, and seduced. All the more intelligent women that I know, indeed, are unanimously of the opinion that no girl in her right senses has ever been actually seduced since the world began;
Words |
For politics is not like the nursery; in politics obedience and Support are the same.
Words |
H. L. Mencken, fully Henry Louis Mencken
The average newspaper, especially of the better sort, has the intelligence of a hillbilly evangelist, the courage of a rat, the fairness of a prohibitionist boob-jumper, the information of a high school janitor, the taste of a designer of celluloid valentines, and the honor of a police-station lawyer.
Creation is dominated by three absolutely different factors: First, nature, which works upon us by its laws; second, the artist, who creates a spiritual contact with nature and his materials; third, the medium of expression through which the artist translates his inner world. Of those three components only one, the medium, is material.
Words |
It is the greatest injustice done to Mondrian that people who are plastically blind see only decorative design instead of the plastic perfection which characterizes his work. The whole De Stijl group from which Mondrian's art was derived must be considered a protest against such blindness.
Words |
I meet so many that think population growth is a major problem in regard to climate change. But the number of children born per year in the world has stopped growing since 1990. The total number of children below 15 years of age in the world are now relatively stable around 2 billion.
Words |
Basically I hate categorical labels. As a young artist I already was very clear about this ? that "objectification" is not the final aim of art. For there are greater things than the object. The greatest thing is the human mind.
Words |