This site is dedicated to the memory of Dr. Alan William Smolowe who gave birth to the creation of this database.
Woodrow Wilson, fully Thomas Woodrow Wilson
When I give a man an office, I watch him carefully to see whether he is swelling or growing.
Thornton Wilder, fully Thornton Niven Wilder
The mind of Caesar. It is the reverse of most men's. It rejoices in committing itself. To us arrive each day a score of challenges; we must say yes or no to decisions that will set off chains of consequences. Some of us deliberate; some of us refuse the decision, which is itself a decision; some of us leap giddily into the decision, setting our jaws and closing our eyes, which is the sort of decision of despair. Caesar embraces decision. It is as though he felt his mind to be operating only when it is interlocking itself with significant consequences. Caesar shrinks from no responsibility. He heaps more and more upon his shoulders.
Belief | Custom | Daughter | Dread | Enough | Heaven | Ideas | Knowledge | Little | Love | Passion | People | Shame | Sincerity | World |
Words had to change their ordinary meaning and to take that which was now given them. Reckless audacity came to be considered the courage of a loyal ally; prudent hesitation, specious cowardice; moderation was held to be a cloak for unmanliness; ability to see all sides of a question, inaptness to act on any. Frantic violence became the attribute of manliness; cautious plotting, a justifiable means of self-defense. The advocate of extreme measures was always trustworthy; his opponent a man to be suspected. To succeed in a plot was to have a shrewd head, to divine a plot a still shrewder; but to try to provide against having to do either was to break up your party and to be afraid of your adversaries.
Absence | Accuracy | Aid | Coincidence | Cost | Desire | History | Knowledge | Labor | Partiality | Past | Romance | Trust |
The least degree of ambiguity, which leaves the mind in suspense as to the meaning, ought to be avoided with the greatest care.
Admiration | Contempt | History | Love | Public |
Surely the fact that a uniformed police officer is wearing his hair below his collar will make him no less identifiable as a policeman.
History |
Tom Hayden, fully Thomas Emmet "Tom" Hayden
The now legendary Fonda photo shows her with diminutive Vietnamese women examining an antiaircraft weapon, implying in the rightist imagination that she relished the thought of killing those American pilots innocently flying overhead.
Tom Robbins, fully Thomas Eugene "Tom" Robbins
And who ever said the world was fair, little lady? Maybe death is fair, but certainly not life. We must accept the unfairness as proof of the sublime flux of existence, the capricious music of the universe- and go on about our tasks
A stony adversary, an inhuman wretch, uncapable of pity, void and empty from any dram of mercy. The Merchant of Venice, act iv, Scene 1
History |
Angels and ministers of grace defend us. Be thou a spirit of health, or goblin damned, bring with thee airs from heaven, or blasts from hell, be thy intents wicked, or charitable, thou com'st in such a questionable shape, that I will speak to thee.
Human beings are born into this little span of life of which the best thing is its friendship and intimacies, and soon their places will know them no more, and yet they leave their friendships and intimacies with no cultivation, to grow as they will… and yet they leave their friendships and intimacies with no cultivation, to grow as they will by the roadside, expecting them to "keep" by force of mere inertia.