This site is dedicated to the memory of Dr. Alan William Smolowe who gave birth to the creation of this database.
How long would authority . . . exist, if not for the willingness of the mass to become soldiers, policemen, jailers, and hangmen.
Spirit |
I know how your visit and my strange behavior must have affected you, he wrote. The sight of your face after all these years completely unnerved me. I could not think, I could not speak. It was as if all my dreams of freedom, the whole world of the living, were concentrated in the shiny little trinket that was dangling from your watch-chain. I couldn't take my eyes off it, I couldn't keep my hand from playing with it. It absorbed my whole being. And all the time I felt how nervous you were at my silence, and I couldn't utter a word.
No sacrifice is lost for a great ideal!
Ignorance | Inhumanity | Man | Means | Protest | Revolution | Spirit | System | Wrong |
Emily Brontë, fully Emily Jane Brontë, aka pseudonym Ellis Bell
Instead of a wild, hatless little savage jumping into the house, and rushing to squeeze us all breathless, there lighted from a handsome black pony a very dignified person with brown ringlets falling from the cover of a feathered beaver, and a long cloth habit which she was obliged to hold up with both hands that she might sail in.
Emily Brontë, fully Emily Jane Brontë, aka pseudonym Ellis Bell
I'm now quite cured of seeking pleasure in society, be it country or town. A sensible man ought to find sufficient company in himself.
The STATE IDEA, the authoritarian principle, has been proven bankrupt by the experience of the Russian Revolution. If I were to sum up my whole argument in one sentence I should say: The inherent tendency of the State is to concentrate, to narrow, and monopolize all social activities; the nature of revolution is, on the contrary, to grow, to broaden, and disseminate itself in ever-wider circles. In other words, the State is institutional and static; revolution is fluent, dynamic. These two tendencies are incompatible and mutually destructive. The State idea killed the Russian Revolution and it must have the same result in all other revolutions, unless the libertarian idea prevail.
Capitalism | Danger | Spirit | Wishes | Danger |
The sense of justice and equality, the love of liberty and of human brotherhood — these fundamentals of the real regeneration of society — the Communist State suppressed to the point of extermination. Man's instinctive sense of equity was branded as weak sentimentality; human dignity and liberty became a bourgeois superstition; the sanctity of life, which is the very essence of social reconstruction, was condemned as unrevolutionary, almost counter-revolutionary. This fearful perversion of fundamental values bore within itself the seed of destruction.
Fear | Heaven | Humanity | Man | Mankind | Reward | Spirit | Truth | Will |
The philosophy of Atheism represents a concept of life without any metaphysical Beyond or Divine Regulator. It is the concept of an actual, real world with its liberating, expanding and beautifying possibilities, as against an unreal world, which, with its spirits, oracles, and mean contentment has kept humanity in helpless degradation.
New minicities, like the sleepy village of Alviso: Around the factory, where we would have a huge parking lot, Alviso has a cluttered collection of buildings, with trees everywhere. There are restaurants, a library, bakeries, a ‘core store’ selling groceries and clothes, small shops, even factories and workshops – all jumbled amid apartment buildings. These are generally of three or four stories, arranged around a central courtyard … They are built almost entirely of wood, which has become the predominant building material in Ecotopia, due to the reforestation program. … The apartments themselves are very large by our standards – with 10 or 15 rooms, to accommodate their communal living groups.
I have reached far beyond my competence and have probably secured for good a reputation for flamboyant gestures. But the times still crowd me and give me no rest, and I see no way to avoid ambitious synthetic attempts; either we get some kind of grip on the accumulation of thought or we continue to wallow helplessly, to starve amidst plenty. So I gamble with science and write.
Character | Choice | Justification | Order | People | Prison | Reason | Self-esteem | Spirit | Terror | Truth | World | Child |
Ernest Hemingway, fully Ernest Miller Hemingway
Always do sober what you said you'd do drunk. That will teach you to keep your mouth shut.
Che Guevara, fully Ernesto “Che” Guevara
The revolution is not an apple that falls when it is ripe. You have to make it fall.
Day | Revolution | Spirit |
As a boy I used to go to the Chamber of Horrors at the annual fair, to look at the wax figures of Emperors and Kings, of heroes and murderers of the day. The dead now had that same unreality, which shocks without arousing pity.
Revolution | Spirit | Will |
Che Guevara, fully Ernesto “Che” Guevara
If your heart vibrate looking Resist oppression then silence is a form of treason because
Beauty | Life | Life | People | Spirit | Understanding | Will | Beauty |
Che Guevara, fully Ernesto “Che” Guevara
The stars drew light across the night sky in that little mountain village, and the silence and the cold made the darkness vanish away. It was - I don't know how to explain it - as if everything solid melted away into the ether, eliminating all individuality and absorbing us, rigid, into the immense darkness. Not a single cloud to lend perspective to the space blocked any portion of the starry sky.