This site is dedicated to the memory of Dr. Alan William Smolowe who gave birth to the creation of this database.
Theodore Dreiser, fully Theodore Herman Albert Dreiser
Assure a man that he has a soul and then frighten him with old wives' tales as to what is to become of him afterward, and you have hooked a fish, a mental slave.
I knew a woman, lovely in her bones, when small birds sighed, she would sigh back at them; ah, when she moved, she moved more ways than one;
Desolation | Public | Sadness |
Theodore H. White, fully Theodore Harold White
To go against the dominant thinking of your friends, of most of the people you see every day, is perhaps the most difficult act of heroism you can perform.
Théophile Gautier, fully Pierre Jules Théophile Gautier, aka Le Bon Theo
It is a difficult matter to gain the affection of a cat. He is a philosophical, methodical animal, tenacious of his own habits, fond of order and neatness, and disinclined to extravagant sentiment. He will be your friend, if he finds you worthy of friendship, but not your slave.
Custom | Enjoyment | God | Good | Life | Life | Love | Reading | Rest | Reward | Sense | Soul | Thought | God | Privilege | Thought |
If they could forget for a moment the correggiosity of Correggio and the learned babble of the sale-room and varnishing Auctioneer.
Waste |
Your life is short, your duties many, your assistance great, and your reward sure; therefore faint not, hold on and hold up, in ways of well-doing, and heaven shall make amends for all.
The final cause, end, or design of men (who naturally love liberty, and dominion over others) in the introduction of that restraint upon themselves, in which we see them live in Commonwealths, is the foresight of their own preservation, and of a more contented life thereby; that is to say, of getting themselves out from that miserable condition of war which is necessarily consequent, as hath been shown, to the natural passions of men when there is no visible power to keep them in awe, and tie them by fear of punishment to the performance of their covenants, and observation of those laws of nature set down in the fourteenth and fifteenth chapters.
If all be true that I do think, there are five reasons we should drink. Good friends, good times, or being dry, or lest we should be by and by, or any other reason why
Government | Liberty | Man | People | Property | Safe | Will | Government |
I have lived temperately, eating little animal food, and that not as an aliment, so much as a condiment for the vegetables, which constitute my principal diet.
Administration | Friend | Integrity | Science | Strength | Understanding |
No ground of support for the Executive will ever be so sure as a complete knowledge of their proceedings by the people; and it is only in cases where the public good would be injured, and BECAUSE it would be injured, that proceedings should be secret. In such cases it is the duty of the Executive to sacrifice their personal interest (which would be promoted by publicity) to the public interest.
Government | Government |
The pretense that the workings of the mind, like the actions of the body, are subject to the control of laws, does not seem sufficiently demolished... The legitimate powers of government extend to such acts only as are injurious to others.
The Habeas Corpus secures every man here, alien or citizen, against everything which is not law, whatever shape it may assume.
The bank mania is one of the most threatening of these imitations. It is raising up a moneyed aristocracy in our country which has already set the government at defiance, and although forced at length to yield a little on this first essay of their strength, their principles are unyielded and unyielding. These have taken deep root in the hearts of that class from which our legislators are drawn, and the sop to Cerberus from fable has become history. Their principles lay hold of the good, their pelf of the bad, and thus those whom the Constitution had placed as guards to its portals, are sophisticated or suborned from their duties.
Tobacco is a culture productive of infinite wretchedness.
Better | Fear | Looks | Man | Melancholy | Mind | Nothing | Opinion | Principles | Sound | Suppression | Truth | Will | Learn |
Where the principle of difference [between political parties] is as substantial and as strongly pronounced as between the republicans and the monocrats of our country, I hold it as honorable to take a firm and decided part and as immoral to pursue a middle line, as between the parties of honest men and rogues, into which every country is divided.
Man |
Everything in modern city life is calculated to keep man from entering into himself and thinking about spiritual things. Even with the best of intentions a spiritual man finds himself exhausted and deadened and debased by the constant noise of machines and loudspeakers, the dead air and the glaring lights of offices and shops, the everlasting suggestion of advertising and propaganda. The whole mechanism of modern life is geared for a flight from God and from the spirit into the wilderness of neurosis.
Comfort | Danger | Earth | Faith | Humanity | Man | Need | Noise | Reason | Speech | Truth | Danger |