This site is dedicated to the memory of Dr. Alan William Smolowe who gave birth to the creation of this database.
On eroding, ecologically degraded, increasingly toxic landscapes, worked by failing or subsidy-dependent farmers and by the cheap labor of migrants, we have erected the tottering tower of "agribusiness," which prospers and "feeds the world" (incompletely and temporarily) by undermining its own foundations.
The world had become pretty generally Ceceliafied.
Care | Cultivation | Culture | Ideas | Meaning | Means | Sense | Understanding | Words | Worship |
W. H. Auden, fully Wystan Hugh Auden
The belief that politics can be scientific must inevitably produce tyrannies. Politics cannot be a science, because in politics theory and practice cannot be separated, and the sciences depend upon their separation. Empirical politics must be kept in bounds by democratic institutions, which leave it up to the subjects of the experiment to say whether it shall be tried, and to stop it if they dislike it, because, in politics, there is a distinction, unknown to science, between Truth and Justice.
Experience | Intelligence | Meaning |
We do not need to plan or devise a world of the future; if we take care of the world of the present, the future will have received full justice from us. A good future is implicit in the soils, forests, grasslands, marshes, deserts, mountains, rivers, lakes, and oceans that we have now, and in the good things of human culture that we have now; the only valid futurology available to us is to take care of those things. We have no need to contrive and dabble at the future of the human race; we have the same pressing need that we have always had - to love, care for, and teach our children.
God | Human race | Influence | Meaning | Nature | Race | God |
W. H. Auden, fully Wystan Hugh Auden
Part came from Lane, and part from D.H. Lawrence; Gide, though I didn't know it then, gave part. They taught me to express my deep abhorrence if I caught anyone preferring Art To Life and Love and being Pure-in-heart. I lived with crooks but seldom was molested; The Pure-in-heart can never be arrested.
W. C. Fields, stage name for William Claude Dukenfield
Wife: Why don't you go to bed? WC: I thought I'd take a nap first.
Meaning |
W. C. Fields, stage name for William Claude Dukenfield
I had this Melanesian belle, a comely looking lass, and I was headed for the shrubbery, which grows very lush in those parts. Well, her husband was following behind holding a forefinger up in the air and crying, 'One dollah, one dollah!'
W. E. B. Du Bois, fully William Edward Burghardt Du Bois
Herein lies the tragedy of the age: not that men are poor - all men know something of poverty; not that men are wicked - who is good? Not that men are ignorant - what is truth? Nay, but that men know so little of men.
W. H. Auden, fully Wystan Hugh Auden
When one looks into the window of a store which sells devotional art objects, one can't help wishing the iconoclasts had won.
W. Edwards Deming, fully William Edwards Deming
The principle that where there is fear, there will be wrong figures.
Individual | Judgment | Meaning | Principles | Relationship | Style | System | Understanding | Will | Work | Understand |
The chrysanthemums' astringent fragrance comes each year to disguise the clanking mechanism of machine within machine within machine.
Taste |
To regard the imagination as metaphysics is to think of it as part of life, and to think of it as part of life is to realize the extent of artifice. We live in the mind.
Soldier, there is a war between the mind and sky, between thought and day and night. It is for that the poet is always in the sun, patches the moon together in his room to his virgilian cadences, up down, up down. It is a war that never ends.
That's the down-town frieze, principally the church steeple, a black line beside a white line; and the stack of the electric plant, a black line drawn on flat air.
Meaning |
Vladimir Lenin, fully Vladimir Ilyich Lenin
All efforts and all attention should now be concentrated on the next step — the search after forms of the transition or the approach to the proletarian revolution.
Experience | History | Majority | Meaning | Power | Price | Purpose | Purpose | Right | Time |
Vladimir Lenin, fully Vladimir Ilyich Lenin
The Poor Peasants’ Committees are necessary to fight the kulaks, the rich, the exploiters, who shackle the working peasants. But between the kulaks, who are a small minority, and the poor or semi-proletarians there is the section of the middle peasants. The Soviet government has never declared or conducted any struggle against them. Any steps or measures to the contrary must be condemned most vigorously and stopped. The socialist government must pursue a policy of agreement with the middle peasants.
Meaning | Power | Revolution |