This site is dedicated to the memory of Dr. Alan William Smolowe who gave birth to the creation of this database.
Warren Bennis, fully Warren Gamaliel Bennis
Leadership is the wise use of power. Power is the capacity to translate intention into reality and sustain it.
Warren Bennis, fully Warren Gamaliel Bennis
Effective leaders allow great people to do the work they were born to do.
My wish simply is to live my life as fully as I can. In both our work and our leisure, I think, we should be so employed. And in our time this means that we must save ourselves from the products that we are asked to buy in order, ultimately, to replace ourselves.
The expert knowledge of agriculture developed in the universities, like other such knowledges, is typical of the alien order imposed on a conquered land. We can never produce a native economy, much less a native culture, with this knowledge. It can only make us the imperialist invaders of our own country.
What could be more superstitious than the idea that money brings forth food?
To the corporate and political and academic servants of global industrialism, the small family farm and the small farming community are not known, not imaginable, and therefore unthinkable, except as damaging stereotypes. The people of the cutting edge in science, business, education, and politics have no patience with the local love, local loyalty, and local knowledge that make people truly native to their places and therefore good caretakers of their places. This is why one of the primary principles in industrialism has always been to get the worker away from home. From the beginning it has been destructive of home employment and home economies. The economic function of the household has been increasingly the consumption of purchased goods. Under industrialism, the farm too has become increasingly consumptive, and farms fail as the costs of consumption overpower the income from production.
Faith | Loneliness | Vision |
W. H. Auden, fully Wystan Hugh Auden
Before people complain of the obscurity of modern poetry, they should first examine their consciences and ask themselves with how many people and on how many occasions they have genuinely and profoundly shared some experience with another; they might also ask themselves how much poetry of any period they can honestly say that they understand.
Dawn | Day | Heart | Insult | Mortal | Vision | World | Insult |
W. E. B. Du Bois, fully William Edward Burghardt Du Bois
John, she said, does it make every one unhappy when they study and learn lots of things. He paused and smiled. I am afraid it does, he said. And, John, are you glad you studied? Yes, came the answer, slowly but positively. She watched the flickering lights upon the sea, and said thoughtfully, I wish I was unhappy,—and—and, putting both arms about his neck, I think I am, a little, John.
Beauty | Heart | Life | Life | Longing | Mistake | Music | Sorrow | Talking | Time | Vision | World | Beauty |
W. E. B. Du Bois, fully William Edward Burghardt Du Bois
But art is not simply works of art; it is the spirit that knows Beauty, that has music in its soul and the color of sunsets in its headkerchiefs; that can dance on a flaming world and make the world dance, too.
Vitruvius, fully Marcus Vitruvius Pollio NULL
In a word, the opinions of learned authors, though their bodily forms are absent, gain strength as time goes on, and, when taking part in councils and discussions, have greater weight than those of any living men.
The president has apples on the table and barefoot servants round him, who adjust the curtains to a metaphysical and the banners of the nation flutter, burst on the flag-poles in a red-blue dazzle, whack at the halyards.
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
The real education of the masses can never be separated from their independent political, and especially revolutionary, struggle. Only struggle educates the exploited class. Only struggle discloses to it the magnitude of its own power, widens its horizon, enhances its abilities, clarifies its mind, forges its will.
Proletariat | Revolution | Struggle |
Vladimir Lenin, fully Vladimir Ilyich Lenin
Once we accept the point of view that human knowledge develops from ignorance, we shall find millions of examples of it just as simple as the discovery of alizarin in coal tar, millions of observations not only in the history of science and technology but in the everyday life of each and every one of us that illustrate the transformation of “things-in-themselves” into “things-for-us.”
Aims | Method | Proletariat | Revolution | Struggle |