This site is dedicated to the memory of Dr. Alan William Smolowe who gave birth to the creation of this database.
The United Nations continues to sense as the forum where nations whose interests clash may lay their cases before world opinion. It still provides the essential escape valve without which the slow build-up of pressures would have long since resulted in catastrophic explosion.
Day |
H. L. Mencken, fully Henry Louis Mencken
There are men so philosophical that they can see humor in their own toothaches. But there has never lived a man so philosophical that he could see the toothache in his own humor.
Will |
H. L. Mencken, fully Henry Louis Mencken
What makes philosophy so tedious is not the profundity of philosophers, but their lack of art; they are like physicians who sought to cure a slight hyperacidity by prescribing a carload of burned oyster-shells.
Day |
H. L. Mencken, fully Henry Louis Mencken
We must respect the other fellow's religion but only in the sense and to the extent that we respect his theory that his wife is beautiful and his children smart.
It is characteristic of the Oxford school of criticism to understand these [metaphysical] fallacies as logical non sequiturs?as though philosophers throughout the centuries had been, for reasons unknown, just a bit too stupid to discover the elementary flaws in their arguments. The truth of the matter is that elementary logical mistakes are quite rare in the history of philosophy; what appear to be errors in logic to minds disencumbered of questions that have been uncritically dismissed as ?meaningless? are usually caused by semblances, unavoidable for beings whose whole existence is determined by appearance. Hence, In our context the only relevant question is whether the semblances are inauthentic or authentic ones, whether they are caused by dogmatic beliefs and arbitrary assumptions, mere mirages that disappear upon closer inspection, or whether they are inherent in the paradoxical condition of a living being that, though itself part of the world of appearances, is in possession of a faculty, the ability to think, that permits the mind to withdraw from the world without ever being able to leave it or transcend it.
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.
Praise |
It takes intelligence and training, self-discipline and fine-sensibility, to gain renewed life through leisure occupation. America now suffers spiritual poverty, and art must become more fully American life before her leisure can become culture.
Light |
I am not an optimist. I'm a very serious possibilist. It's a new category where we take emotion apart and we just work analytically with the world.
Bride |
The totalitarian attempt at global conquest and total domination has been the destructive way out of all impasses. Its victory may coincide with the destruction of humanity; wherever it has ruled, it has begun to destroy the essence of man. Yet to turn our backs on the destructive forces of the century is of little avail. The trouble is that our period has so strangely intertwined the good with the bad that without the imperialists' "expansion for expansion's sake," the world might never have become one; without the bourgeoisie's political device of "power for power's sake," the extent of human strength might never have been discovered; without the fictitious world of totalitarian movements, in which with unparalleled clarity the essential uncertainties of our time have been spelled out, we might have been driven to our doom without ever becoming aware of what has been happening. And if it is true that in the final stages of totalitarianism an absolute evil appears (absolute because it can no longer be deduced from humanly comprehensible motives), it is also true that without it we might never have known the truly radical nature of Evil.
Day |
The trouble with Eichmann was precisely that so many were like him, and that the many were neither perverted nor sadistic, that they were, and still are, terribly and terrifyingly normal. From the viewpoint of our legal institutions and of our moral standards of judgment, this normality was much more terrifying than all the atrocities put together.
Day |
Somewhat influenced by Aristotelian physics, he [Augustine] holds that the end of all movement is rest, and now he understands the emotions - the motions of the soul - in analogy to the movements of the physical world. For ?nothing else do bodies desire by their weight than what souls desire by their love.? Hence, in the Confessions: ?My weight is my love; by it I am borne whithersoever I am born.? The soul?s gravity, the essence of who somebody is, and which as such is inscrutable to human eyes, becomes manifest in this love.
Day |
Of the wealth of the world each has as much as they take.
Affliction | Gloom | Light |
Much smoke, and little roast.
Life | Life | Television | World | Understand |
Take heed of enemies reconciled and of meat twice boiled.
Power | Revolution | Will | World |