This site is dedicated to the memory of Dr. Alan William Smolowe who gave birth to the creation of this database.
There are three things in the world I love most: the sea, Hamlet, and Don Giovanni.
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H. L. Mencken, fully Henry Louis Mencken
If I had my way, any man guilty of golf would be ineligible for any office of trust in the United States.
Though she had no one to write to, she had bought herself a blotter, a writing case, a pen and envelopes; she would dust off her whatnot, look at herself in the mirror, take up a book, and then begin to daydream and let it fall to her lap? She wanted to die. And she wanted to live in Paris.
H. L. Mencken, fully Henry Louis Mencken
A man's women folk, whatever their outward show of respect for his merit and authority, always regard him secretly as an ass, and with something akin to pity.
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H. L. Mencken, fully Henry Louis Mencken
A good politician is quite as unthinkable as an honest burglar.
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H. L. Mencken, fully Henry Louis Mencken
The objection to Puritans is not that they try to make us think as they do, but that they try to make us do as they think.
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H. L. Mencken, fully Henry Louis Mencken
The public, with its mob yearning to be instructed, edified and pulled by the nose, demands certainties?. but there are no certainties.
Action and speech go on between men, as they are directed toward them, and they retain their agent-revealing capacity even if their content is exclusively ?objective,? concerned with the matters of the world of things in which men move, which physically lies between them and out of which arise their specific, objective worldly interests.
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In this world which we enter, appearing from a nowhere, and from which we disappear into a nowhere, Being and Appearing coincide.
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What really distinguishes this generation in all countries from earlier generations... is its determination to act, its joy in action, the assurance of being able to change things by one's own efforts.
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The product of movement and counter-movement is tension. When tension ? working strength ? is expressed, it endows the work of art with the living effect of coordinated, though opposing, forces.
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The greatest evil perpetrated is the evil committed by nobodies, that is, by human beings who refuse to be persons
What makes it so plausible to assume that hypocrisy is the vice of vices is that integrity can indeed exist under the cover of all other vices except this one. Only crime and the criminal, it is true, confront us with the perplexity of radical evil; but only the hypocrite is really rotten to the core.
What stuck in the minds of these men who had become murderers was simply the notion of being involved in something historic, grandiose, unique ("a great task that occurs once in two thousand years"), which must therefore be difficult to bear. This was important, because the murderers were not sadists or killers by nature; on the contrary, a systematic effort was made to weed out all those who derived physical pleasure from what they did. The troops of the Einsatzgruppenhad been drafted from the Armed S.S., a military unit with hardly more crimes in its record than any ordinary unit of the German Army, and their commanders had been chosen by Heydrich from the S.S. ‚lite with academic degrees. Hence the problem was how to overcome not so much their conscience as the animal pity by which all normal men are affected in the presence of physical suffering. The trick used by Himmler ? who apparently was rather strongly afflicted by these instinctive reactions himself ? was very simple and probably very effective; it consisted in turning these instincts around, as it were, in directing them toward the self. So that instead of saying: What horrible things I did to people!, the murderers would be able to say: What horrible things I had to watch in the pursuance of my duties, how heavily the task weighed upon my shoulders!
The eye of the master fattens the horse.
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