This site is dedicated to the memory of Dr. Alan William Smolowe who gave birth to the creation of this database.
Gore Vidal, fully Eugene Luther Gore Vidal
WeÂ’re the most captive nation of slaves that ever came along. The moral timidity of the average American is quite noticeable. EverybodyÂ’s afraid to be thought in any way different from everyone else.
Eugene V. Debs, fully Eugene Victor Debs
Foolish and vain indeed is the workingman who makes the color of his skin the stepping-stone to his imaginary superiority. The trouble is with his head, and if he can get that right he will find that what ails him is not superiority but inferiority, and that he, as well as the Negro he despises, is the victim of wage-slavery, which robs him of what he produces and keeps both him and the Negro tied down to the dead level of ignorance and degradation.
Gore Vidal, fully Eugene Luther Gore Vidal
In general. . . novel-theorists have nothing very urgent or interesting to say about literature. Why then do they write when they have nothing to say? Because the ambitious teacher can only rise in the academic bureaucracy by writing at complicated length about writing that has already been much written about. The result of all this book-chat cannot interest anyone who knows literature while those who would like to learn something about books can only be mystified and discouraged by these commentaries.
Experiment | Revolution | Writing |
Eugene McCarthy, fully Eugene Joseph "Gene" McCarthy
Now it is certain. There is no magic stone. No secret to be found. One must go with the mind's winnowed learning.
Man |
Gore Vidal, fully Eugene Luther Gore Vidal
Andy Warhol is the only genius I've ever known with an I.Q. of 60.
Gore Vidal, fully Eugene Luther Gore Vidal
I have begun writing what I have said I'd never write, a memoir ("I am not my own subject," I used to say with icy superiority).
Darkness | Death | Defeat | Earth | Failure | Hope | Life | Life | Light | Love | Mystery | Nothing | Power | Reading | Sadness | Will | Failure |
Gore Vidal, fully Eugene Luther Gore Vidal
It is marvelous indeed to watch on television the rings of Saturn close; and to speculate on what we may yet find at galaxy's edge. But in the process, we have lost the human element; not to mention the high hope of those quaint days when flight would create one world. Instead of one world, we have star wars, and a future in which dumb dented human toys will drift mindlessly about the cosmos long after our small planet's dead.
Gore Vidal, fully Eugene Luther Gore Vidal
It is not enough merely to win; others must lose.
Future | Hope | Television | Will |
Gore Vidal, fully Eugene Luther Gore Vidal
After four centuries, Montaigne's curious genius still has that effect on his readers and, time and again, one finds in his self-portrait one's own most brilliant aperçus (the ones that somehow we forgot to write down and so forgot) restored to us in his essays—attempts—to assay—value—himself in his own time as well as, if he was on the subject, all time, if there is such a thing.
Words |
Gore Vidal, fully Eugene Luther Gore Vidal
Early on, he knew Ronald Reagan largely as a bore to avoid at Hollywood cocktail parties. On Nancy Reagan: ArenÂ’t you glad the rage she has for fashion has not been addressed to politics? Better Marie Antoinette than Catherine de Medici.
Gore Vidal, fully Eugene Luther Gore Vidal
It is reasonable to assume that, by and large, what is not read now will not be read, ever. It is also reasonable to assume that practically nothing that is read now will be read later. Finally, it is not too farfetched to imagine a future in which novels are not read at all.
Character | Control | Effort | Empathy | Little | Race | Think |
Eugene McCarthy, fully Eugene Joseph "Gene" McCarthy
It is dangerous for a national candidate to say things that people might remember.
Politics |
Eugene McCarthy, fully Eugene Joseph "Gene" McCarthy
The maple tree that night without a wind or rain let go its leaves because its time had come.
Gore Vidal, fully Eugene Luther Gore Vidal
Happily for the busy lunatics who rule over us, we are permanently the United States of Amnesia. We learn nothing because we remember nothing.
People |
Eugene V. Debs, fully Eugene Victor Debs
Cooperative industry in which all shall work together in harmony as the basis of a new social order, a higher civilization, a real republic. That is the demand.
Eugene V. Debs, fully Eugene Victor Debs
Ten thousand times has the labor movement stumbled and fallen and bruised itself, and risen again; been seized by the throat and choked and clubbed into insensibility; enjoined by courts, assaulted by thugs, charged by the militia, shot down by regulars, traduced by the press, frowned upon by public opinion, deceived by politicians, threatened by priests, repudiated by renegades, preyed upon by grafters, infested by spies, deserted by cowards, betrayed by traitors, bled by leeches, and sold out by leaders, but notwithstanding all this, and all these, it is today the most vital and potential power this planet has ever known, and its historic mission of emancipating the workers of the world from the thraldom of the ages is as certain of ultimate realization as is the setting of the sun.