This site is dedicated to the memory of Dr. Alan William Smolowe who gave birth to the creation of this database.
Richard Wright, fully Richard Nathaniel Wright
My mother's suffering grew into a symbol in my mind, gathering to itself all the poverty, the ignorance, the helplessness; the painful, baffling, hunger-ridden days and hours; the restless moving, the futile seeking, the uncertainty, the fear, the dread; the meaningless pain and the endless suffering. Her life set the emotional tone of my life, colored the men and women I was to meet in the future, conditioned my relation to events that had not yet happened, determined my attitude to situations and circumstances I had yet to face. A somberness of spirit that I was never to lose settled over me during the slow years of my mother's unrelieved suffering, a somberness that was to make me stand apart and look upon excessive joy with suspicion, that was to make me keep forever on the move, as though to escape a nameless fate seeking to overtake me. At the age of twelve, before I had one year of formal schooling, I had a conception of life that no experience would ever erase, a predilection for what was real that no argument could ever gainsay, a sense of the world that was mine and mine alone, a notion as to what life meant that no education could ever alter, a conviction that the meaning of living came only when one was struggling to wring a meaning out of meaningless suffering. At the age of twelve I had an attitude toward life that was to endure, that was to make me seek those areas of living that would keep it alive, that was to make me skeptical of everything while seeking everything, tolerant of all and yet critical. The spirit I had caught gave me insight into the sufferings of others, made me gravitate toward those whose feelings were like my own, made me sit for hours while others told me of their lives, made me strangely tender and cruel, violent and peaceful. It made me want to drive coldly to the heart of every question and it open to the core of suffering I knew I would find there. It made me love burrowing into psychology, into realistic and naturalistic fiction and art, into those whirlpools of politics that had the power to claim the whole of men's souls. It directed my loyalties to the side of men in rebellion; it made me love talk that sought answers to questions that could help nobody, that could only keep alive in me that enthralling sense of wonder and awe in the face of the drama of human feeling which is hidden by the external drama of life.
Age | Argument | Awe | Circumstances | Education | Events | Experience | Fate | Feelings | Heart | Insight | Joy | Life | Life | Love | Meaning | Men | Pain | Politics | Power | Question | Sense | Spirit | Suffering | Wonder | World | Fate |
Richard Wagner, fully Wilhelm Richard Wagner
The July Revolution took place; with one bound I became a revolutionist, and acquired the conviction that every decently active being ought to occupy himself with politics exclusively. I was only happy in the company of political writers, and I commenced an Overture upon a political theme. Thus was I minded, when I left school and went to the university: not, indeed, to devote myself to studying for any profession
Happy | Politics | Revolution |
Richard Nixon, fully Richard Milhous Nixon
Finishing second in the Olympics gets you silver. Finishing second in politics gets you oblivion.
Politics |
Richard Nixon, fully Richard Milhous Nixon
The one thing sure about politics is that what goes up comes down and what goes down often comes up.
Politics |
Richard Nixon, fully Richard Milhous Nixon
The word politics causes some people lots of trouble. Let us be very clear - politics is not a dirty word.
Richard Nixon, fully Richard Milhous Nixon
In the television age, the key distinction is between the candidate who can speak poetry and the one who can only speak prose.
Distinction | Poetry | Television |
One day while studying a [William Butler] Yeats poem I decided to write poetry the rest of my life. I recognized that a single short poem has room for history, music, psychology, religious thought, mood, occult speculation, character, and events of one's own life.
Robert Byrne, fully Robert Leo Byrne
A promising young man should go into politics so that he can go on promising for the rest of his life.
The greatest mathematics has the simplicity and inevitableness of supreme poetry and music, standing on the borderland of all that is wonderful in Science, and all that is beautiful in Art.
Mathematics | Poetry | Simplicity |
Ronald Reagan, fully Ronald Wilson Reagan
It is not my intention to do away with government. It is rather to make it work -- work with us, not over us; stand by our side, not ride on our back. Government can and must provide opportunity, not smother it; foster productivity, not stifle it.
Politics |
Ronald Reagan, fully Ronald Wilson Reagan
We do not deny any nation's legitimate interest in security. But protecting the security of one nation by robbing another of its national independence and national traditions is not legitimate. In the long run, it is not even secure.
Ronald Reagan, fully Ronald Wilson Reagan
Most tax revisions didn't improve the system, they made it more like Washington itself complicated, unfair, cluttered with gobbledygook and loopholes designed for those with the power and influence to hire high-priced legal and tax advisers.
Books | Children | Day | Decision | Life | Life | Rest | Right | Rights | Tragedy | Will | Child | Happiness |
Ronald Reagan, fully Ronald Wilson Reagan
I want to talk about political and economic fairy tales
Politics |
Rosa Luxemburg, aka Rosalia Luxemburg, "Bloody Rosa"
The times when the centre of gravity of political development and the crystallising agent of capitalist contradictions lay on the European continent, are long gone by. To-day Europe is only a link in the tangled chain of international connections and contradictions.
Appearance | Awareness | Destiny | Ideas | Meaning | Omnipotence | Peace | Politics | Proletariat | Revolution | Time | War | World | Awareness |
The only true forms of equality are equality at the Last Judgment and equality before a just court of law; all other attempts at leveling must lead, at best, to social stagnation.