This site is dedicated to the memory of Dr. Alan William Smolowe who gave birth to the creation of this database.
Arthur Helps, fully Sir Arthur Helps
If you understand your own age, read the works of fiction produced in it. People in disguise speak freely.
Age | Disguise | People | Understand |
Doris Lessing, fully Doris May Lessing, born Doris May Tayler
There is no doubt fiction makes a better job of the truth.
Edward Albee, fully Edward Franklin Albee
A play is fiction - and fiction is fact distilled into truth.
Play |
Ernest Renan, aka Joseph Ernest Renan
No idea can succeed except at the expense of sacrifice; no one ever escapes without enduring strain from the struggle of life.
Struggle |
Science is my territory, but science fiction is the landscape of my dreams.
Science |
Frances Wright, known as Fanny Wright
Do we exert our own liberties without injury to others - we exert them justly; do we exert them at the expense of others - unjustly. And, in thus doing, we step from the sure platform of liberty upon the uncertain threshold of tyranny.
Liberty |
The human understanding is of its own nature prone to suppose the existence of more order and regularity in the world than it finds. And though there be many things in nature which are singular and unmatched, yet it devises for them parallels and conjugates and relatives which do not exist. Hence the fiction that all celestial bodies move in perfect circles, spirals and dragons being (except in name) utterly rejected.
Existence | Nature | Order | Understanding | World |
There's an aspect of things which I find amusing: the flow back and forth between science and science fiction, which has been an important part of my life. I started out reading science fiction and then became a scientist, and that set the slant on my scientific work. I like to make connections between life and cosmology and astronomy. Science fiction raises all these interesting possibilities and has had some influence on science in the last 25 years – not only in the area of SETI, but also in other ways.
G. K. Chesterton, fully Gilbert Keith Chesterton
Literature is a luxury; fiction is a necessity.
Success in life could be defined as the continued expansion of happiness and the progressive realization of worthy goals. Success is the ability to fulfill your desires with effortless ease. And yet success, including the creation of wealth, has always been considered to be a process that requires hard work and it is often considered to be at the expense of others. We need a more spiritual approach to success and to affluence which is the abundant flow of all good things to you.
Ability | Good | Life | Life | Need | Success | Work | Happiness |
It's cheaper to pardon than to resent. Forgiveness saves the expense of anger, the cost of hatred, and the waste of spirit.
Cost | Forgiveness | Pardon | Waste | Forgiveness |
Forgiveness is the economy of the heart. Forgiveness saves expense of anger, the cost of hatred, the waste of spirits.
Cost | Forgiveness | Waste | Forgiveness |
Isaac Asimov, born Isaak Yudovich Ozimov
Science fiction writers foresee the inevitable, and although problems and catastrophes may be inevitable, solutions are not.
Problems |
Each generation should be made to bear the burden of its own wars, instead of carrying them on, at the expense of other generations.
The word ‘slavery’ and ‘right’ are contradictory, they cancel each other out. Whether as between one man and another, or between one man and a whole people, it would always be absurd to say: "I hereby make a covenant with you which is wholly at your expense and wholly to my advantage; I will respect it so long as I please and you shall respect it as long as I wish.
Be advised that all flatterers live at the expense of those who listen to them.