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
The last war simplified the balance of political forces in the world by reducing them to two. For the first time, it made the power of the Communist sector of mankind (embodied in the Soviet Union) roughly equal to the power of the free sector of mankind (embodied in the United States). It made the collision of these powers all but inevitable. For the world wars did not end the crisis. They raised its tensions to a new pitch. They raised the crisis to a new stage. All the politics of our time, including the politics of war, will be the politics of this crisis.
Whittaker Chambers, born Jay Vivian Chambers, aka Jay David Whittaker Chambers
In 1937, I began, like Lazarus, the impossible return. I began to break away from Communism and to climb from deep within its underground, where for six years I had been buried, back into the world of free men.
When I started studying Reich’s works, I went through a period of enthusiasm, followed by a period of skepticism, followed by a period of just continued interest, but I think a lot of his ideas probably were sound. A lot probably were unsound. And, I’m not a Reichian in the sense of somebody who thinks he was the greatest scientist who ever lived and discovered the basic secrets of psychology, physics and everything else, all in one lifetime. But I think he has enough sound ideas that his unpopular ideas deserve further investigation. - View Quote Details on He had a great capacity to arouse irrational hatred obviously… Every physician, shoemaker, mechanic or educator must know his shortcomings if he is to do his work and make his living. For some decades, you have begun to play a governing role on this earth. It is on your thinking and your actions that the future of humanity depends. But your teachers and masters do not tell you how you really think and are; nobody dares to voice the one criticism of you which could make you capable of governing your own fate. You are “free” only in one sense: free from education in governing your life yourself, free from self-criticism.
Art | Better | Body | Little | Procrastination | Security | Wife | Will | Art | Think |
Walt Whitman, fully Walter "Walt" Whitman
I sit by the restless all the dark night, some are so young, Some suffer so much, I recall the experience sweet and sad, (Many a soldier's loving arms about this neck have cross'd and rested, Many a soldier's kiss dwells on these bearded lips.)
Agony | Deeds | Jealousy | Martyrs | Meanness | Mother | Oppression | Wife | Deeds |
Walt Whitman, fully Walter "Walt" Whitman
I hear and behold God in every object, yet understand God not in the least, nor do I understand who there can be more wonderful than myself… I see something of God each hour of the twenty-four, and each moment then, in the faces of men and women I see God, and in my own face in the glass; I find letters from God dropt in the street, and everyone is signed by God's name, and I leave them where they are, for I know that whereso'er I go others will punctually come forever and ever.
A Parliament is nothing less than a big meeting of more or less idle people.
When great questions end, little parties begin.
Cost | Family | Philanthropy | Wife |
Wang Yang-Ming or Yangming, aka Wang Shouren or Wang Shou-jen, courtesy name Bo'an
How does man become mind? Clear intelligence and clear intelligence alone. We know, then, in all that fills heaven and earth there is but this clear intelligence. It is only because of their physical forms and bodies that men are separated. My clear intelligence is the master of heaven and earth and spiritual beings. If heaven is deprived of my clear intelligence, who is going to look into its height? If earth is deprived of my clear intelligence, who is going to look into its height? If earth is deprived of my clear intelligence, who is going to look into its depth? If spiritual beings are deprived of my clear intelligence, who is going to distinguish their good and evil fortune or the calamities and blessings that they will bring? Separated from my clear intelligence, there will be no heaven, earth, spiritual beings, or myriad things, and separated from these, there will not be my clear intelligence. Thus they are all permeated with one material force. How can they be separated?
Affliction | Father | Humanity | Husband | Relationship | Wife | Afraid |
No sooner does he hear any of this brothers mention reform or retrenchment, than up he jumps.
History fades into fable; fact becomes clouded with doubt and controversy; the inscription molders from the tablet: the statue falls from the pedestal. Columns, arches, pyramids, what are they but heaps of sand; and their epitaphs, but characters written in the dust?
Wife |
Mahomet now proceeded to execute the great object of his religious aspirations, the purifying of the sacred edifice from the symbols of idolatry, with which it was crowded. All the idols in and about it, to the number of three hundred and sixty, were thrown down and destroyed. Among these, the most renowned was Hobal, an idol brought from Balka, in Syria, and fabled to have the power of granting rain. It was, of course, a great object of worship among the inhabitants of the thirsty desert. There were statues of Abraham and Ishmael also, represented with divining arrows in their hands ; an outrage on their memories, said Mahomet, being symbols of a diabolical art which they had never practiced. In reverence of their memories, therefore, these statues were demolished. There were paintings, also, depicting angels in the guise of beautiful women. The angels, said Mahomet, indignantly, are no such beings. There are celestial hour is provided in paradise for the solace of true believers ; but angels are ministering spirits of the Most High, and of too pure a nature to admit of sex. The paintings were accordingly obliterated. Even a dove, curiously carved of wood, he broke with his own hands, and cast upon the ground, as savoring of idolatry.
Better | Chastity | Day | Devotion | Giving | God | Gratitude | Life | Life | Tenderness | Wife | God |
Monsanto doesn't care about feeding the world. We have to think about the wage slavery of migrant workers and salary slavery of those who are desperately unhappy.
Ability | Diversion | Energy | Heart | Marriage | Nothing | Rights | System | Television | Wife | Will | Work | Negotiation | Understand |
W. C. Fields, stage name for William Claude Dukenfield
Business is an establishment that gives you the legal, even though unethical, right to screw the naive--right, left, and in the middle.
Wife |
Your discovery, as best as I can determine, is that there is an alternative which no one has hit upon. It is that one finding oneself in one of life's critical situations need not after all respond in one of the traditional ways. No. One may simply default. Pass. Do as one pleases, shrug, turn on one's heel and leave. Exit. Why after all need one act humanly?
Vladimir Nabokov, fully Vladimir Vladimirovich Nabokov
Once we deny a Higher Intelligence that plans and administrates our individual hereafters we are bound to accept the unspeakably dreadful notion of Chance reaching into Eternity.
Day | Life | Life | Man | Pleasure | Plenty | Space | Story | Time | Wife |
Voltaire, pen name of François-Marie Arouet NULL
The ideal form of government is democracy tempered with assassination.
Virginia Woolf, nee Stephen, fully Adeline Virginia Woolf
And there rose in her an unmastering desire to overcome her; to unmask her. If she could have felled her it would have eased her. But it was not the body; it was the soul and its mockery that she wished to subdue; make feel her mastery.
Virginia Woolf, nee Stephen, fully Adeline Virginia Woolf
How could one express in words these emotions of the body? Express that emptiness there? It was one's body feeling, not one's mind. To want and not to have sent all up her body a hardness, a hollowness, a strain. And then to want and not to have - to want and want - how that wrung the heart, and wrung it again and again.
I wish those people who write so glibly about this being a holy war and the orators who talk so much about going on, no matter how long the war lasts and what it may mean, could see a case of mustard gas - the poor things burnt and blistered all over with great mustard colored suppurating blisters, with blind eyes, all sticky and stuck together, and always fighting for breath, with voices a mere whisper, saying their throats are closing and they know they will choke.