This site is dedicated to the memory of Dr. Alan William Smolowe who gave birth to the creation of this database.
Reinhold Niebuhr, fully Karl Paul Reinhold Niebuhr
The brotherhood of the community is indeed the ground in which the individual is ethically realized. But the community is the frustration as well as the realization of individual life. Its collective egotism is an offense to his conscience; its institutional injustices negate the ideal of justice; and such brotherhood as it achieves is limited by ethnic and geographic boundaries. Historical communities are, in short, more deeply involved in nature and time than the individual.
Brotherhood | Individual | Nature | Offense | Time |
If the hero is not a person, the emblem of him, even if xenophon, seems to stand taller than a person stands, has a wider brow, large and less human eyes and bruted ears: the man-like body of a primitive.
Virginia Woolf, nee Stephen, fully Adeline Virginia Woolf
But I pine in Solitude. Solitude is my undoing.
Father | Good | Nothing | Sense | Simplicity |
There is a very large and very knowing class of misanthropes who rejoice in the name of grumblers, persons who are so sure that the world is going to ruin that they resent every attempt to comfort them as an insult to their sagacity, and accordingly seek their chief consolation in being inconsolable, and their chief pleasure in being displeased.
Consciously or unconsciously, most theists see in gods and devils, heaven and hell, reward and punishment, a whip to lash the people into obedience, meekness and contentment.
Arrogance | Belief | Duty | Fortune | Infancy | Kill | Little | Lord | Mind | Patriotism | Purpose | Purpose | Reason | Superiority | Child |
Gore Vidal, fully Eugene Luther Gore Vidal
Basler finds my Lincoln the 'phoniest historical novel I have ever had the pleasure of reading.'... Also, 'more than half the book could never have happened as told.' Unfortunately, he doesn't say which half. If I knew, we could then cut it free from the phony half and publish the result as Basler's Vidal's Lincoln.