This site is dedicated to the memory of Dr. Alan William Smolowe who gave birth to the creation of this database.
Emmanuel Lévinas , originally Emanuelis Lévinas
We could formulate the result of our analyses in the following way: the existence of material things contains in itself a nothingness, a possibility of not-being. This does not mean that things do not exist but that their mode of existing contains precisely the possible negation of itself.
What a strange development of patriotism that turns a thinking being into a loyal machine!
Democracy | Free press | Free speech | Opinion | Safe | Speech | War | World |
Emmanuel Lévinas , originally Emanuelis Lévinas
Reason is alone. And in this sense knowledge never encounters anything truly other in the world. This is the profound truth of idealism. It betokens a radical difference between spatial exteriority and the exteriority of instants in relation to one another.
I cannot believe that God would make to a sinner in his wants and his woes the tender of a relief which did not exist, or which he did not wish him to embrace; I cannot believe that God would command his creatures to embrace a provision which had never been made for them, or sanction by the peril of one’s everlasting interests a commandment which he never meant should be obeyed, and which itself precluded the possibility of obedience.
Eternal | Force | God | Inconsistency | Judgment | Life | Life | Lord | Men | Nothing | Purpose | Purpose | Question | Will | God | Understand |
Erma Bombeck, fully Erma Louise Bombeck, born Erma Fiste
It is upsetting to many parents that their teen-agers introduce them to their friends as encyclopedia salesmen who are just passing through ... if they introduce them at all. I have some acquaintances who hover in dark parking lots, enter church separately and crouch in furnace rooms so their teen-agers will not be accused of having parents.
Compassion | Judgment | Mother |
But we can also see at once that there is no line between normal and neurotic, as we all lie and are all bound in some ways by the lies. Neurosis is, then, something we all share; it is universal.4 Or, putting it another way, normality is neurosis, and vice versa. We call a man "neurotic" when his lie begins to show damaging effects on him or on people around him and he seeks clinical help for it—or others seek it for him. Otherwise, we call the refusal of reality “normal" because it doesn't occasion any visible problems. It is really as simple as that. After all, if someone who lives alone wants to get out of bed a half-dozen times to see if the door is really locked, or another washes and dries his hands exactly three times every time or uses a half-roll of toilet tissue each time he relieves himself—there is really no human problem involved. These people are earning their safety in the face of the reality of creatureliness in relatively innocuous and untroublesome ways.
The happiness of most people is not ruined by great catastrophes or fatal errors, but by the repetition of slowly destructive little things.
Eugene McCarthy, fully Eugene Joseph "Gene" McCarthy
In 1968, the party became a kind of unrelated bloc of factions ... each refusing accommodation with another, each wanting control at the expense of all the others.
Gore Vidal, fully Eugene Luther Gore Vidal
At least when the Emperor Justinian, a sky-god man, decided to outlaw sodomy, he had to come up with a good practical reason, which he did. It is well known, Justinian declared, that buggery is a principal cause of earthquakes, and so must be prohibited. But our sky-godders, always eager to hate, still quote Leviticus, as if that looney text had anything useful to say about anything except, perhaps, the inadvisability of eating shellfish in the Jerusalem area.
Eugene V. Debs, fully Eugene Victor Debs
First of all, Theodore Roosevelt and Charles W. Fairbanks, candidates for President and Vice-President, respectively, deny the class struggle and this almost infallibly fixes their status as friends of capital and enemies of labor. They insist that they can serve both; but the fact is obvious that only one can be served and that one at the expense of the other. Mr. RooseveltÂ’s whole political career proves it.
Gore Vidal, fully Eugene Luther Gore Vidal
The first TV babies are now writing with a TV mind that has no attention span at all.
Objectivity | Opinion | World |
Eugene V. Debs, fully Eugene Victor Debs
They are continually talking about your patriotic duty. It is not their but your patriotic duty that they are concerned about. There is a decided difference. Their patriotic duty never takes them to the firing line or chucks them into the trenches. And now among other things they are urging you to "cultivate" war gardens, while at the same time a government war report just issued shows that practically 52 percent of the arable, tillable soil is held out of use by the landlords, speculators and profiteers. They themselves do not cultivate the soil. Nor do they allow others to cultivate it. They keep it idle to enrich themselves, to pocket the millions of dollars of unearned increment.
Age | Evidence | Men | Opposition | Rule | Treason | Wonder |
I would prefer as friend a good man ignorant than one more clever who is evil too.
Judgment | Understand |
I understand too well the dreadful act I'm going to commit, but my judgment can't check my anger, and that incites the greatest evils human beings do.
Do not mistake the rule of force for true power. Men are not shaped by force.