This site is dedicated to the memory of Dr. Alan William Smolowe who gave birth to the creation of this database.
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 |
You are different from the really great man in only one thing: The great man, at one time, also was a very little man, but he developed one important ability: he learned to see where he was small in his thinking, and actions. Under the pressure of some task which was dear to him he learned better and better to sense the threat that comes from his smallness and pettiness. The great man, then, knows when and in what he is a little man.
Wilfred Trotter, fully Wilfred Batten Lewis Trotter
The air of caricature never fails to show itself in the products of reason applied relentlessly and without correction. The observation of clinical facts would seem to be a pursuit of the physician as harmless as it is indispensable. [But] it seemed irresistibly rational to certain minds that diseases should be as fully classifiable as are beetles and butterflies. This doctrine ... bore perhaps its richest fruit in the hands of Boissier de Sauvauges. In his Nosologia Methodica published in 1768 ... this Linnaeus of the bedside grouped diseases into ten classes, 295 genera, and 2400 species.
Belief | Experience | Science | Think |
The disesteem into which moralists have fallen is due at bottom to their failure to see that in an age like this one the function of the moralist is not to exhort men to be good but to elucidate what the good is. The problem of sanctions is secondary.
Belief | Conduct | Doubt | Good | Law | Man | Power | Rebellion | Rights |
Society can only exist on the basis that there is some amount of polished lying and that no-one says exactly what he thinks.
We are living through the closing chapters of the established and traditional way of life. We are in the early beginnings of a struggle to remake our civilization. It is not a good time for politicians. It is a time for prophets and leaders and explorers and investors and pioneers, and for those who are willing to plant trees for their children to sit under.
The Hebrew religion was an unfinished religion. That is one of the best proofs of its divine inspiration. The prophets had the forward look [and] great things were yet to come. As one of the most daring expressed it, the old and hallowed covenant, made by God at the Exodus, would be superseded by a new and higher relation; God would write his law into the hearts of the people; the old drill in outward statutes would disappear, for all men would know God by an inward experience of forgiveness and love.
Belief |
As I understand it, I am being paid only for my work in arranging the words; my property is that arrangement. The thoughts in this book, on the contrary, are not mine. They came freely to me, and I give them freely away. I have no intellectual property, and I think that all claimants to such property are thieves.
If the devil doesn't exist... how do you explain that some people are a lot worse than they're smart enough to be?
W. H. Auden, fully Wystan Hugh Auden
Lay your sleeping head, my love, human on my faithless arm; time and fevers burn away individual beauty from thoughtful children, and the grave proves the child ephemeral; but in my arms till break of day let the living creature lie: mortal, guilty, but to me the entirely beautiful.
Belief | Deeds | God | Love | Man | Order | People | Prosperity | Sacrifice | Deeds | God | Victim |
W. E. H. Lecky, fully William Edward Hartpole Lecky
The stately ship is seen no more, the fragile skiff attains the shore; and while the great and wise decay, and all their trophies pass away, some sudden thought, some careless rhyme, still floats above the wrecks of Time.
Age | Belief | Culture | Existence | Faith | Ideas | Imagination | Legends | Life | Life | Light | Little | Poetry | Religion | System | Time |
Who can think of the sun costuming clouds when all people are shaken or of night endazzled, proud, when people awaken and cry and cry for help?
Vitruvius, fully Marcus Vitruvius Pollio NULL
Consequently, since this study is vast in extent, embellished and enriched as it is with many different kinds of learning, I think that men have no right to profess themselves architects hastily, without having climbed from boyhood the steps of these studies and thus, nursed by the knowledge of many arts and sciences, having reached the heights of the holy ground of architecture.
Belief | Body | Education | Human nature | Nature | Observation | Receive | Will | Instruction |
The reader became the book; and summer night was like the conscious being of the book. The house was quiet and the world was calm. The words were spoken as if there was no book, except that the reader leaned above the page, wanted to lean, wanted much to be the scholar to whom his book is true, to whom the summer night is like a perfection of thought. The house was quiet because it had to be. The quiet was part of the meaning, part of the mind: the access of perfection to the page. And the world was calm. The truth in a calm world, in which there is no other meaning, itself is calm, itself is summer and night, itself is the reader leaning late and reading there.