This site is dedicated to the memory of Dr. Alan William Smolowe who gave birth to the creation of this database.
The human psyche has two great sicknesses: the urge to carry vendetta across generations, and the tendency to fasten group labels on people rather than see them as individuals. Abrahamic religion mixes explosively with (and gives strong sanction to) both. Only the willfully blind could fail to implicate the divisive force of religion in most, if not all, of the violent enmities in the world today. Without a doubt it is the prime aggravator of the Middle East. Those of us who have for years politely concealed our contempt for the dangerous collective delusion of religion need to stand up and speak out. Things are different now.
Contempt | Delusion | Doubt | Force | Need | People | Religion | World |
When one person suffers from a delusion, it is called insanity. When many people suffer from a delusion it is called Religion.
Rose Macauley, fully Dame Emilie Rose Macaulay
It was a book to kill time for those who like it better dead.
To waste, to destroy our natural resources, to skin and exhaust the land instead of using it so as to increase its usefulness, will result in undermining in the days of our children the very prosperity which we ought by right to hand down to them amplified and developed.
Better | Cause | Delusion | Democracy | Destroy | Effort | Evil | Experience | Failure | Good | Greed | Liberty | Men | Mind | Power | Present | Property | Reason | Service | Slavery | Wrong | Failure |
Resort is had to ridicule only when reason is against us.
Choice | Confidence | Delusion | Government | Men | Silence | Trust | Government | Parent |
Its soul, its climate, its equality, liberty, laws, people, and manners. My god! how little do my countrymen know what precious blessings they are in possession of, and which no other people on earth enjoy!
Choice | Confidence | Delusion | Government | Men | Silence | Government | Parent |
Will Rogers, fully William Penn Adair "Will" Rogers
If we really wanted to honor our boys, why didn’t we let them sit on the reviewing stands and make the people march those fifteen miles? They didn’t want to parade, they wanted to go home and rest.
Delusion |
Whittaker Chambers, born Jay Vivian Chambers, aka Jay David Whittaker Chambers
To me many of my colleagues at Time, basically kind and intensely well-meaning people, seemed to me as charming and as removed from reality as fish in a fish bowl. To me they seemed to know little about the forces that were shaping the history of our time. To me they seemed like little children, knowing and clever little children, but knowing and clever chiefly about trifling things while they were extremely resistant to finding out about anything else.
Belief | Delusion | Habit | Mind | Openness | Peace | People | Price | War | World |
W. H. Auden, fully Wystan Hugh Auden
Slowly we are learning, we at least know this much, that we have to unlearn much that we were taught, and are growing chary of emphatic dogmas; Love like Matter is much odder than we thought.
W. H. Auden, fully Wystan Hugh Auden
''God is Love,'' we are taught as children to believe. But when we first begin to get some inkling of how He loves us, we are repelled; it seems so cold, indeed, not love at all as we understand the word.
Delusion |
Vladimir Nabokov, fully Vladimir Vladimirovich Nabokov
Everything in the world is beautiful, but Man only recognizes beauty if he sees it either seldom or from afar. Listen, today we are gods Our blue shadows are enormous We move in a gigantic, joyful world
Vernon Howard, fully Vernon Linwood Howard
The feeling of self-worth of every person is like an elevator, right? Your feeling of self-value goes up, stays up for a short time, plunges down again. Something favorable comes across your path and the elevator goes up. Up and down. Up and down. Always restless. Never stable, never still. Always making a racket and making movements. This a form of self-betrayal, which you have not as yet detected.
It takes time for a fruit to mature and acquire sweetness and become eatable; time is a prime factor for most good fortunes.
Cultivation | Delusion | Hypothesis | Means | People | Present | Wealth | Happiness |
Would you know who is the greatest saint in the world: It is not he who prays most or fasts most, it is not he who gives most alms or is most eminent for temperance, chastity or justice; but it is he who is always thankful to God, who wills everything that God wills, who receives everything as an instance of God’s goodness and has a heart always ready to praise God for it.
Death | Delusion | Desire | Eternal | Faith | Life | Life | Love | Nothing | Waste | Will | Zeal |