This site is dedicated to the memory of Dr. Alan William Smolowe who gave birth to the creation of this database.
While wading through the whimsies, the puerilities, and unintelligible jargon of this work Plato's Republic, I laid it down often to ask myself how it could have been that the world should have so long consented to give reputation to such nonsense as this?
Thomas Mann, fully Paul Thomas Mann
Richard Wagner once declared that civilization disappears before music like mist before the sun. He never dreamed that one day, for its part, music would disappear before civilization, before democracy, like mist before the sun.
His [Jesus'] historians, having brought him into the world in a supernatural manner, were obliged to take him out again in the same manner, or the first part of the story must have fallen to the ground.
Birth | Family | Men | Preference | Right |
For as in absolute governments the king is law, so in free countries the law ought to be king and there ought to be no other.
Birth | Family | Men | Preference | Right |
Songs of Innocence (Introduction) - Piping down the valleys wild, Piping songs of pleasant glee, On a cloud I saw a child, And he laughing said to me: ‘Pipe a song about a Lamb!’ So I piped with merry cheer. ‘Piper, pipe that song again;’ So I piped; he wept to hear. ‘Drop thy pipe, thy happy pipe; Sing thy songs of happy cheer:’ So I sang the same again, While he wept with joy to hear. ‘Piper, sit thee down and write In a book, that all may read.’ So he vanish’d from my sight, And I pluck’d a hollow reed, And I made a rural pen, And I stain’d the water clear, And I wrote my happy songs Every child may joy to hear.
Angels | Comfort | Darkness | Day | Death | Eternal | Family | Grave | Heaven | Joy | Light | Little | Mother | Nature | Silence | Sin | Sorrow | Soul | Sound | Space | Spirit | Tears | Thinking | Woman | World | Youth | Youth |
The Holiness of Minute Particulars - And many conversèd on these things as they labour’d at the furrow, Saying: ‘It is better to prevent misery than to release from misery; It is better to prevent error than to forgive the criminal. Labour well the Minute Particulars: attend to the Little Ones; And those who are in misery cannot remain so long, If we do but our duty: labour well the teeming Earth.… He who would do good to another must do it in Minute Particulars. General Good is the plea of the scoundrel, hypocrite, and flatterer; For Art and Science cannot exist but in minutely organized Particulars, And not in generalizing Demonstrations of the Rational Power: The Infinite alone resides in Definite and Determinate Identity. Establishment of Truth depends on destruction of Falsehood continually, On Circumcision, not on Virginity, O Reasoners of Albion!
Family | Good | Harmony | Land | Lord | Love | Man | Vengeance | Forgive |
It seems only yesterday I used to believe there was nothing under my skin but light. If you cut me, I would shine. But now when I fall upon the sidewalks of life, I skin my knees. I bleed.
Will Rogers, fully William Penn Adair "Will" Rogers
So much money is being spent on the campaigns that I doubt if either man, as good as they are, are worth what it will cost to elect them.
Family |
Will Rogers, fully William Penn Adair "Will" Rogers
Legalize racing in every State. Sure people will bet, but they get to see the horses run and you certain can't see General Motors and General Electric and General Utility run when you bet on them.
The fear of capitalism compelled socialism to widen freedom, and the fear of socialism has compelled capitalism to increase equality.
Family |
Willa Cather, fully Willa Sibert Cather
Her eye, her ear, were tuning forks, burning glasses, which caught the minutest refraction or echo of a thought or feeling... She heard a deeper vibration, a kind of composite echo, of all that the writer said, and did not say.
Family |
Willa Cather, fully Willa Sibert Cather
Nearly all the Escapists in the long past have managed their own budget and their social relations so unsuccessfully that I wouldn't want them for my landlords, or my bankers, or my neighbors. They were valuable, like powerful stimulants, only when they were left out of the social and industrial routine.
Willa Cather, fully Willa Sibert Cather
Personal life becomes paler as the imaginative life becomes richer.
Family |