This site is dedicated to the memory of Dr. Alan William Smolowe who gave birth to the creation of this database.
We haven't accepted — we can't really believe — that the most characteristic product of our age of scientific miracles is junk, but that is so. And we still think and behave as though we face an unspoiled continent, with thousands of acres of living space for every man. We still sing "America the Beautiful" as though we had not created in it, by strenuous effort, at great expense, and with dauntless self-praise, an unprecedented ugliness.
W. H. Auden, fully Wystan Hugh Auden
In the course of many centuries a few laborsaving devices have been introduced into the mental kitchen — alcohol, coffee, tobacco, Benzedrine, etc. — but these are very crude, constantly breaking down, and liable to injure the cook. Literary composition in the twentieth century A.D. is pretty much what it was in the twentieth century B.C.: nearly everything has still to be done by hand.
W. Clement Stone, fully William Clement Stone
Analyze your life in terms of its environment. Are the things around you helping you toward success or are they holding you back?
Achievement | Adversity | Desire | Mind | Words | Trouble | Learn |
W. C. Fields, stage name for William Claude Dukenfield
I've been barbecued, stewed, screwed, tattooed, and fried by people claiming to be my friends. The human race has gone backward, not forward, since the days we were apes swinging through the trees.
W. Clement Stone, fully William Clement Stone
When you do the wrong thing, knowing it is wrong, you do so because you haven't developed the habit of effectively controlling or neutralizing strong inner urges that tempt you, or because you have established the wrong habit and don't know how to eliminate them effectively.
Desire | Enthusiasm | Will | Work |
W. H. Auden, fully Wystan Hugh Auden
There is a great deal of difference in believing something still, and believing it again.
Desire |
W. Clement Stone, fully William Clement Stone
You affect your subconscious mind by verbal repetition.
Desire | Enthusiasm | Time | Think |
W. E. B. Du Bois, fully William Edward Burghardt Du Bois
But, back of this, still broods silently the deep religious feeling of the real Negro heart, the stirring, unguided might of powerful human souls who have lost the guiding star of the past and are seeking in the great night a new religious ideal. Someday the Awakening will come, when the pent-up vigor of 10,000,000 souls shall sweep irresistibly toward the Goal, out of the Valley of the Shadow of Death, where all that makes life worth living - Liberty, Justice and Right - is marked For White People Only.
Desire | Earth | Understand |
The hand between the candle and the wall grows large on the wall. The mind between this light or that and space, (this man in a room with an image of the world, that woman waiting for the man she loves,) grows large against space.
No self in the mass: the braver being, the body that could never be wounded, the life that never would end, no matter who died, the being that was an abstraction.
That scrawny cry—it was a chorister whose C preceded the choir. It was part of the colossal sun, surrounded by its choral rings, still far away. It was like a new knowledge of reality.
Vitruvius, fully Marcus Vitruvius Pollio NULL
For the human body is so designed by nature that the face, from the chin to the top of the forehead and the lowest roots of the hair, is a tenth part of the whole height; the open hand from the wrist to the tip of the middle finger is just the same; the head from the chin to the crown is an eighth, and with the neck and shoulder from the top of the breast to the lowest roots of the hair is a sixth; from the middle of the breast to the summit of the crown is a fourth. If we take the height of the face itself, the distance from the bottom of the chin to the under-side of the nostrils is one third of it; the nose from the under-side of the nostrils to a line between the eyebrows is the same; from there to the lowest roots of the hair is also a third, comprising the forehead. The length of the foot is one sixth of the height of the body; of the forearm, one fourth; and the breadth of the breast is also one fourth... Then again, in the human body the central point is naturally the navel. For if a man be placed flat on his back, with his hands and feet extended, and a pair of compasses centered at his navel, the fingers and toes of his two hands and feet will touch the circumference of a circle described therefrom. And just as the human body yields a circular outline, so too a square figure may be found from it. For if we measure the distance from the soles of the feet to the top of the head, and then apply that measure to the outstretched arms, the breadth will be found to be the same as the height, as in the case of plane surfaces which are perfectly square.
Appearance | Compensation | Desire | Pleasure | Search | Will |
The president has apples on the table and barefoot servants round him, who adjust the curtains to a metaphysical and the banners of the nation flutter, burst on the flag-poles in a red-blue dazzle, whack at the halyards.
Vladimir Lenin, fully Vladimir Ilyich Lenin
The Capitalists will sell us the rope with which we will hang them.
Bourgeoisie | Desire | Freedom | Will |
Vladimir Lenin, fully Vladimir Ilyich Lenin
From the correct Marxist premise concerning the deep economic roots of the class struggle in general and of the political struggle in particular, the Economists have drawn the singular conclusion that we must turn our backs on the political struggle and retard its development, narrow its scope, and reduce its aims. The political wing, on the contrary, has drawn a different conclusion from these same premises, namely, that the deeper the roots of our present struggle, the more widely, the more boldly, the more resolutely, and with greater initiative must we wage this struggle.
Association | Freedom | Speech | Association |
Vladimir Nabokov, fully Vladimir Vladimirovich Nabokov
No writer in a free country should be expected to bother about the exact demarcation between the sensuous and the sensual; this is preposterous; I can only admire but cannot emulate the accuracy of judgment of those who pose the fair young mammals photographed in magazines where the general neckline is just low enough to provoke a past master's chuckle and just high enough not to make a postmaster frown.