This site is dedicated to the memory of Dr. Alan William Smolowe who gave birth to the creation of this database.
Salman Rushdie, fully Sir Ahmed Salman Rushdie
It may be argued that the past is a country from which we have all emigrated, that its loss is part of our common humanity. Which seems to be self-evidently true; but I suggest that the writer who is out-of-country and even out-of-language may experience this loss in an intensified form. It is made more concrete for him by the physical fact of discontinuity, of his present being in a different place from his past, of his being elsewhere… human beings do not perceive things whole; we are not gods but wounded creatures, cracked lenses, capably only of fractured perceptions. Partial beings, in all the senses of that phrase. Meaning is a shaky edifice we build out of scraps, dogmas, childhood injuries, newspaper articles, chance remarks, old films, small victories, people hated, people loved; perhaps it is because of our sense of what is the case is constructed from such inadequate materials that we defend it so fiercely, even to the death.
And wisely tell what hour o' the day The clock does strike, by algebra.
I agree with you, too, that it is hardly fair to have our people crowded out of employment by those who simply come here for the purpose of working at low wages -- higher than those they may be accustomed to in their own countries-- and then after a while return there. I am also free to say to you, however, that I do not see how a remedy is to be obtained without closing the ports entirely, and as to that there is considerable division of opinion. It may not be amiss to call attention to the fact that the introduction of one machine in a trade may throw more men out of employment than the Greeks who come here even in the manner which you describe.
Evidence | Hope | Labor | Life | Life | Men | Past | Prejudice | Race | Receive | Think |
Science, after all, is only an expression for our ignorance of our own ignorance.
As already stated, the negro workers must be organized in order that they may be in a position to protect themselves, and in such way feel an interest with our organized white workmen, or we shall unquestionably have their undying enmity. This is not a question of love or sentiment but is the hardest kind of practicability and common interest. If we do not in some way make friends with the colored workmen, the employer will not be slow to take advantage of our hostility to use the colored workmen to defeat the efforts of the white workmen in every endeavor to either obtain improvement in our condition or to resist deterioration.
Samuel Johnson, aka Doctor Johnson
Sorrow is the mere rust of the soul. Activity will cleanse and brighten it.
Samuel Johnson, aka Doctor Johnson
Let us never negotiate out of fear, but let us never fear to negotiate.
Past |
Samuel Johnson, aka Doctor Johnson
When a king asked Euclid, whether he could not explain his art to him in a more compendious manner, he was answered, that there was no royal way to geometry. Other things may be seized by might, or purchased with money; but knowledge is to be gained only by study, and study to be prosecuted only in retirement.
Sigmund Freud, born Sigismund Schlomo Freud
In human beings pure masculinity or femininity is not to be found either in a psychological or biological sense.
Experience | Past | People | Present |
He who constantly rules the world is verily the cause of bondage and Liberation. Established in His own glory, He is the Immortal, the Embodiment of Consciousness, the omnipresent Protector of the universe. There is no one else able to rule it.
As a believer that all of us are accountable before our creator, I have always believed that when my life is over, I shall meet up with those who perished, and they will ask me, What have you done? At that moment, I will have the honor of telling them; I have never forgotten you.
Past |
Archibald Geikie, fully Sir Archibald Geikie
If all history is only an amplification of biography, the history of science may be most instructively read in the life and work of the men by whom the realms of Nature have been successively won.
Antiquity | Argument | Error | Eternity | Evidence | Evolution | Lord | Past | Time |
Simone de Beauvoir, fully Simone-Ernestine-Lucie-Marie Bertrand de Beauvoir
No one is more arrogant toward women, more aggressive or scornful, than the man who is anxious about his virility.
Arthur Conan Doyle, fully Sir Arthur Ignatius Conan Doyle
What the deuce is it to me?’ he interrupted impatiently: ‘you say that we go round the sun. If we went round the moon it would not make a pennyworth of difference to me or to my work.’
Character | Existence | Hope | Nothing | Past | Providence | Rest | Science |
Simone de Beauvoir, fully Simone-Ernestine-Lucie-Marie Bertrand de Beauvoir
The people of former times... they're dead that's the only thing they have over the living but in their own day they were just as sickening. Picturesqueness: I don't fall for that not for one minute. Stinking filthy dirty washing cabbage-stalks what a pretentious fool you have to be to go into such ecstasies over that! And it's the same thing everywhere all the time whether they're stuffing themselves with chips paella or pizza it's the same crew a filthy crew the rich who trample over you the poor who hate you for your money the old who dodder the young who sneer the men who show off the women who open their legs. I'd rather stay at home reading a thriller although they've become so dreary nowadays. The telly too what a clapped-out set of fools! I was made for another planet altogether I mistook the way.