This site is dedicated to the memory of Dr. Alan William Smolowe who gave birth to the creation of this database.
W. H. Auden, fully Wystan Hugh Auden
A craftsman knows in advance what the finished result will be, while the artist knows only what it will be when he has finished it. But it is unbecoming in an artist to talk about inspiration; that is the reader's business.
Adolescence | Aesthetic | Authority | Duty | Learning | Little | Looks | Man | Nature | Need | Peace | Pleasure | Reading | Taste | War | Work | Learn |
W. E. B. Du Bois, fully William Edward Burghardt Du Bois
The dark world is going to submit to its present treatment just as long as it must and not one moment longer.
W. Eugene Smith, fully William Eugene Smith
I would that my photographs might be, not the coverage of a news event, but an indictment of war – the brutal corrupting viciousness of its doing to the minds and bodies of men; and, that my photographs might be a powerful emotional catalyst to the reasoning which would help this vile and criminal stupidity from beginning again.
W. Winwood Reade, fully William Winwood Reade
Industry is the only true source of wealth, and there was no industry in Rome. By day the Ostia road was crowded with carts and muleteers, carrying to the great city the silks and spices of the East, the marble of Asia Minor, the timber of the Atlas, the grain of Africa and Egypt; and the carts brought nothing out but loads of dung. That was their return cargo. London turns dirt into gold. Rome turned gold into dirt.
W. Macneile Dixon, fully William Macneile Dixon
Birth is the sudden opening of a window, through which you look out upon a stupendous prospect. For what has happened? A miracle. You have exchanged nothing for the possibility of everything.
War |
Vladimir Lenin, fully Vladimir Ilyich Lenin
To decide once every few years which members of the ruling class is to repress and crush the people through parliament–this is the real essence of bourgeois parliamentarism, not only in parliamentary- constitutional monarchies, but also in the most democratic republics.
Vladimir Lenin, fully Vladimir Ilyich Lenin
No natural science can hold its own in the struggle against the onslaught of bourgeois ideas and the restoration of the bourgeois world outlook unless it stands on solid philosophical ground. In order to hold his own in this struggle and carry it to a victorious finish, the natural scientist must be a modern materialist, a conscious adherent of the materialism represented by Marx, i.e., he must be a dialectical materialist.
Vladimir Lenin, fully Vladimir Ilyich Lenin
If you want to help the “masses” and win the sympathy and support of the “masses,” you should not fear difficulties, or pinpricks, chicanery, insults and persecution from the “leaders,” but must absolutely work wherever the masses are to be found.
War |
Vladimir Lenin, fully Vladimir Ilyich Lenin
Trade unions and strikes cannot help in times of crisis when there is no demand for this “commodity”, they cannot change the conditions which, convert labor-power into a commodity and which doom the masses of working people to dire need and unemployment. To change these conditions, a revolutionary struggle against the whole existing social and political system is necessary; the industrial crisis will convince very many workers of the justice of this statement.
Vladimir Lenin, fully Vladimir Ilyich Lenin
The revolutionary way is the way of quick amputation, which is the least painful to the proletariat, the way of the direct removal of the decomposing parts, the way of fewest concessions to and least consideration for the monarchy and the disgusting, vile, rotten and contaminating institutions which go with it.
Revolution | War |
Vladimir Lenin, fully Vladimir Ilyich Lenin
Stalin is too rude and this defect, although quite tolerable in our midst and in dealing among us Communists, becomes intolerable in a Secretary-General. That is why I suggest that the comrades think about a way of removing Stalin from that post and appointing another man in his stead.
Vladimir Lenin, fully Vladimir Ilyich Lenin
We would like to hope that developments in world socialism will increasingly remove the grounds for this difference between us.
Vladimir Lenin, fully Vladimir Ilyich Lenin
In the beginning we had to teach the workers the ABC, both in the literal and in the figurative senses. Now the standard of political literacy has risen so gigantically that we can and should concentrate all our efforts on the more direct Social-Democratic objectives aimed at giving an organized direction to the revolutionary stream.
Government | Nature | War | Government |
Vladimir Lenin, fully Vladimir Ilyich Lenin
The government is tottering. We must deal it the death blow at any cost. To delay action is the same as death.
Determination | Government | Humanity | Nations | Peace | War | Government |
Vladimir Lenin, fully Vladimir Ilyich Lenin
All our lives we fought against exalting the individual, against the elevation of the single person, and long ago we were over and done with the business of a hero, and here it comes up again: the glorification of one personality. This is not good at all. I am just like everybody else.
Vladimir Lenin, fully Vladimir Ilyich Lenin
The class-conscious proletariat can give its consent to a revolutionary war, which would really justify revolutionary defensism, only on condition: (a) that the power pass to the proletariat and the poorest sections of the peasants aligned with the proletariat; (b) that all annexations be renounced in deed and not in word; (c) that a complete break be effected in actual fact with all capitalist interests.
Vladimir Lenin, fully Vladimir Ilyich Lenin
The war of 1914-18 was imperialist (that is, an annexationist, predatory, war of plunder) on the part of both sides; it was a war for the division of the world, for the partition and repartition of colonies and spheres of influence of finance capital.
War |
Vladimir Lenin, fully Vladimir Ilyich Lenin
The worker is becoming impoverished absolutely, i.e., he is actually becoming poorer than before; he is compelled to live worse, to eat worse, to suffer hunger more, and to live in basements and attics.