This site is dedicated to the memory of Dr. Alan William Smolowe who gave birth to the creation of this database.
"A "fraternity" is the antithesis of fraternity. The first... is predicated on the idea of exclusion; the second (that is, the abstract thing) is based on a feeling of total equality." - E. B. White, fully Elwyn Brooks White
"Men's manners have improved markedly since Genghis Khan's day. Harems went out of style centuries ago and even despots now disavow pillage and oppression as ideals. At heart, though, we're the same animals we were 800 years ago. Which is to say we are status seekers. We may talk of equality and fraternity. We may strive for classless societies. But we go right on building hierarchies and jockeying for status within them. Can we abandon the tendency? Probably not. For as scientists are now discovering, status seeking is not just a habit or cultural tradition. It's a design of the male psyche - a biological drive that is rooted in the nervous system and regulated by hormones and brain chemicals." -
"In the kingdom of consumption the citizen is king. A democratic monarchy: equality before consumption, fraternity in consumption, and freedom through consumption." - Raoul Vaneigem
"Let me tell you who we conservatives are: we love people. When we look out over the United States of America, when we are anywhere, when we see a group of people, such as this or anywhere, we see Americans. We see human beings. We don't see groups. We don't see victims." - Rush Limbaugh
"I wonder if it isn't just cowardice instead of generosity that makes us give tips." - Will Rogers, fully William Penn Adair "Will" Rogers
"I have discovered that most people have no one to talk to, no one, that is, who really wants to listen. When it does at last dawn on a man that you really want to hear about his business, the look that comes over his face is something to see." - Walker Percy
"All my stories are webs of style and none seems at first blush to contain much kinetic matter. For me style is matter." - Vladimir Nabokov, fully Vladimir Vladimirovich Nabokov
"Solitude is the play field of Satan" - Vladimir Nabokov, fully Vladimir Vladimirovich Nabokov
"The growth of his power and fame was matched, in my imagination, by the degree of the punishment I would have liked to inflict on him. Thus, at first, I would have been content with an electoral defeat, a cooling of public enthusiasm. Later I already required his imprisonment; still later, his exile to some distant, flat island with a single palm tree, which, like a black asterisk, refers one to the bottom of an eternal hell made of solitude, disgrace, and helplessness. Now, at last, nothing but his death could satisfy me." - Vladimir Nabokov, fully Vladimir Vladimirovich Nabokov
"A dogma is a dark chamber." - Victor Hugo
"Greater than the tread of mighty armies is an idea whose time has come." - Victor Hugo
"A fox passing through the wood on business of his own stopped several minutes and sniffed. 'Hobbits!' he thought. 'Well, what next? I have heard of strange doings in this land, but I have seldom heard of a hobbit sleeping out of doors under a tree. Three of them! There's something mighty queer behind this.' He was quite right, but he never found out any more about it." - J. R. R. Tolkien, fully John Ronald Reuel Tolkien