This site is dedicated to the memory of Dr. Alan William Smolowe who gave birth to the creation of this database.
"Thank goodness modern convenience is a thing of the remote future." - Walt Kelley, fully Walter Crawford "Walt" Kelly, Jr.
"Football strategy does not originate in a scrimmage it is useless to expect solutions in a political campaign." - Walter Lippmann
"Franklin D. Roosevelt is no crusader. He is no tribune of the people. He is no enemy of entrenched privilege. He is a pleasant man who, without any important qualifications for the office, would very much like to be President." - Walter Lippmann
"Genius sees the dynamic purpose first, finds reasons afterword." - Walter Lippmann
"The principles of the good society call for a concern with an order of being -- which cannot be proved existentially to the sense organs -- where it matters supremely that the human person is inviolable, that reason shall regulate the will, that truth shall prevail over error." - Walter Lippmann
"Thought is not made in a vacuum, nor created out of likeness. It requires travel and shipping and the coming and going of strangers to impregnate a civilization. That is why thought has flourished in cities which lie along the paths of communication. Nineveh, Athens, Alexandria, Rome, Venice, the Hansa towns, London, Paris -- they have made ideas out of the movement and contact of many people. Men are jostled into thought. Left alone they spin the same thread from the same dream. A community which is self-contained and homogeneous and secluded is intellectually deaf, dumb, and blind. It can cultivate robust virtue and simple dogmatism, but it will not invent or throw out a profusion of ideas." - Walter Lippmann
"When all men think alike, no one thinks very much." - Walter Lippmann
"In a time of disorder [Laertes] has returned to the care of the earth, the foundation of life and hope. And Odysseus finds him in an act emblematic of the best and most responsible kind of agriculture: an old man caring for a young tree." - Wendell Berry
"It is, for example, axiomatic that we should all think of ourselves as being more sensitive than other people because, when we are insensitive in our dealings with others, we cannot be aware of it at the time: conscious insensitivity is a self-contradiction." - W. H. Auden, fully Wystan Hugh Auden
"This great society is going smash; they cannot fool us with how fast they go, how much they cost each other and the gods! A culture is no better than its woods." - W. H. Auden, fully Wystan Hugh Auden
"Experience the mystery of pain, open to it, allow it. When you do, the experience shifts. What basically generates pain is the defense against it." - W. Brugh Joy, fully William Brugh Joy
"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." - Vladimir Lenin, fully Vladimir Ilyich Lenin
"Our program necessarily includes the propaganda of atheism" - Vladimir Lenin, fully Vladimir Ilyich Lenin
"Pacifism, the preaching of peace in the abstract, is one of the means of duping the working class." - Vladimir Lenin, fully Vladimir Ilyich Lenin
"The proletarian state must effect the transition to collective farming with extreme caution and only very gradually, by the force of example, without any coercion of the middle peasant." - Vladimir Lenin, fully Vladimir Ilyich Lenin
"This struggle must be organized, according to “all the rules of the art”, by people who are professionally engaged in revolutionary activity. The fact that the masses are spontaneously being drawn into the movement does not make the organization of this struggle less necessary. On the contrary, it makes it more necessary." - Vladimir Lenin, fully Vladimir Ilyich Lenin
"To belittle the socialist ideology in any way, to turn aside from it in the slightest degree means to strengthen bourgeois ideology. There is much talk of spontaneity. But the spontaneousdevelopment of the working-class movement leads to its subordination to bourgeois ideology; for the spontaneous working-class movement is trade-unionism, and trade unionism means the ideological enslavement of the workers by the bourgeoisie. Hence, our task, the task of Social-Democracy, is to combat spontaneity, to divert the working-class movement from this spontaneous, trade-unionist striving to come under the wing of the bourgeoisie, and to bring it under the wing of revolutionary Social Democracy." - Vladimir Lenin, fully Vladimir Ilyich Lenin
"We know that an unskilled laborer or a cook cannot immediately get on with the job of state administration." - Vladimir Lenin, fully Vladimir Ilyich Lenin
"We shall not achieve socialism without a struggle. But we are ready to fight, we have started it and we shall finish it with the aid of the apparatus called the Soviets." - Vladimir Lenin, fully Vladimir Ilyich Lenin
"When feudalism was overthrown and “free” capitalist society appeared in the world, it at once became apparent that this freedom meant a new system of oppression and exploitation of the working people." - Vladimir Lenin, fully Vladimir Ilyich Lenin
"There is much unexplored potential in each human being. We are not just flesh and bone or an amalgamation of conditionings. If this were so, our future on this planet would not be very bright. But there is infinitely more to life, and each passionate being who dares to explore beyond the fragmentary and superficial into the mystery of totality helps all humanity perceive what it is to be fully human. Revolution, total revolution, implies experimenting with the impossible. And when an individual takes a step in the direction of the new, the impossible, the whole human race travels through that individual." - Vimala Thakar
"Well I think in all the thirty years I've been doing this now and being gone from home and all that stuff it's really, it's not about what I've achieved and if I've become a better player, or played better ten years ago than I do today." - Vince Gill
"The Mediterranean has the color of mackerel, changeable I mean. You don't always know if it is green or violet, you can't even say it's blue, because the next moment the changing reflection has taken on a tint of rose or gray." - Vincent van Gogh, fully Vincent Willem van Gogh
"The white man has not lost his soul. But he is so small-minded that he has confused his soul with God." - Vine Deloria, fully Vine Victor Deloria, Jr.
"Human beings have neither kindness, nor faith, nor charity beyond what serves to increase the pleasure of the moment." - Virginia Woolf, nee Stephen, fully Adeline Virginia Woolf
"My mind still clung to the image of my wife. A thought crossed my mind: I didn't even know if she were still alive, and I had no means of finding out (during all my prison life there was no outgoing or incoming mail); but at that moment it ceased to matter. There was no need to know; nothing could touch the strength of my love, and the thoughts of my beloved. Had I known then that my wife was dead, I think that I still would have given myself, undisturbed by that knowledge, to the contemplation of that image, and that my mental conversation with her would have been just as vivid and just as satisfying. "Set me like a seal upon thy heart, love is as strong as death."" - Viktor Frankl, fully Viktor Emil Frankl
"No man and no destiny can be compared with any other man or any other destiny. No situation repeats itself, and each situation calls for a different response." - Viktor Frankl, fully Viktor Emil Frankl
"The existential vacuum manifests itself mainly in a state of boredom." - Viktor Frankl, fully Viktor Emil Frankl
"I think [the invasion of Iraq] was unquestionably worth doing, Charlie. I think that, looking back, I now certainly feel I understand more what the war was about... We needed to go over there basically, and take out a very big stick, right in the heart of that world, and burst that bubble… And what they needed to see was American boys and girls going from house to house, from Basra to Baghdad, and basically saying: which part of this sentence do you understand?" - Thomas L. Friedman, fully Thomas Lauren Friedman
"We have come to be one of the worst ruled, one of the most completely controlled and dominated Governments in the world." - Woodrow Wilson, fully Thomas Woodrow Wilson
"The things we do when we expect our lives to continue are naturally and properly different than the things we might do if we expected them to end abruptly. We go easy on the lard and tobacco, smile dutifully at yet another of our supervisor's witless jokes, read books like this one when we could be wearing paper hats and eating pistachio macaroons in the bathtub, and we do each of these things in the charitable service of the people we will soon become." - Daniel Gilbert, fully Daniel Todd Gilbert, aka Professor Happiness
"However inadequate our ideas of causal efficacy may be, we are less wide of the mark when we say that our ideas and feelings have it, than the Automatists are when they say they haven’t it. As in the night all cats are gray, so in the darkness of metaphysical criticism all causes are obscure. But one has no right to pull the pall over the psychic half of the subject only . . . whilst in the same breath one dogmatizes about material causation as if Hume, Kant, and Lotze had never been born." - William James
"The main problem with Headline Contradicted by Actual Article is that most people don’t read articles, they read only headlines and move on. Judging from the click-out patterns on Fark, the average person on a given visit to Fark will click on maybe three links out of around two hundred. As for the rest of the links, they read the outrageous tagline, figure they know what the rest of the article says, and move on." - Drew Curtis
"Ministers and officials should attend the Court early in the morning and retire late, for the whole day is hardly enough for the accomplishment of state business. If one is late in attending Court, emergencies cannot be met; if officials retire early, the work cannot be completed." - Prince Shōtoku, born Shotoku Taishi, aka Prince Umayado or Prince Kamitsumiya
"But you will imagine that it is best that He should at once enable you to see clearly. If it is, you may be sure He will do it. He never makes mistakes. But He often deals far differently with His disciples. He lets them grope their way in the dark until they fully learn how blind they are, how helpless, how absolutely in need of Him. What His methods will be with you I cannot foretell. But you may be sure that He never works in an arbitrary way. He has a reason for everything He does. You may not understand why He leads you now in this way and now in that, but you may, nay, you must believe that perfection is stamped on His every act." - Elizabeth Payson Prentiss
"Much madness is divinest sense to a discerning eye; much sense the starkest madness. ’T is the majority in this, as all, prevails....Much madness is divinest sense to a discerning eye; much sense the starkest madness. ’T is the majority in this, as all, prevails. Assent, and you are sane; demur,—you ’re straightway dangerous, and handled with a chain." - Emily Dickinson, fully Emily Elizabeth Dickinson
"The soul should always stand ajar, that if the heaven inquire, he will not be obliged to wait, or shy of troubling her. Depart, before the host has slid the bolt upon the door, to seek for the accomplished guest, -- her visitor no more." - Emily Dickinson, fully Emily Elizabeth Dickinson
"Conceit, arrogance and egotism are the essentials of patriotism. Let me illustrate. Patriotism assumes that our globe is divided into little spots, each one surrounded by an iron gate. Those who have had the fortune of being born on some particular spot consider themselves nobler, better, grander, more intelligent than those living beings inhabiting any other spot. It is, therefore, the duty of everyone living on that chosen spot to fight, kill and die in the attempt to impose his superiority upon all the others. The inhabitants of the other spots reason in like manner, of course, with the result that from early infancy the mind of the child is provided with blood-curdling stories about the Germans, the French, the Italians, Russians, etc. When the child has reached manhood he is thoroughly saturated with the belief that he is chosen by the Lord himself to defend his country against the attack or invasion of any foreigner. It is for that purpose that we are clamoring for a greater army and navy, more battleships and ammunition. An army and navy represent the people's toys." - Emma Goldman
"The majority cares little for ideals and integrity. What it craves is display." - Emma Goldman
"The most absurd apology for authority and law is that they serve to diminish crime. Aside from the fact that the State is itself the greatest criminal, breaking every written and natural law, stealing in the form of taxes, killing in the form of war and capital punishment, it has come to an absolute standstill in coping with crime. It has failed utterly to destroy or even minimize the horrible scourge of its own creation." - Emma Goldman
"If technology is felt to be becoming more and more inhuman, we might do well to consider whether it is possible to have something better - a technology with a human face." - E. F. Schumacher, fully Ernst Friedrich "Fritz" Schumacher
"The great unmentionable evil at the center of our culture is monotheism. From a barbaric Bronze Age text known as the Old Testament, three anti-human religions have evolved — Judaism, Christianity, Islam. These are sky-god religions. They are, literally, patriarchal — God is the Omnipotent Father — hence the loathing of women for 2,000 years in those countries afflicted by the sky-god and his earthly male delegates. The sky-god is a jealous god, of course. He requires total obedience from everyone on earth, as he is in place not for just one tribe but for all creation. Those who would reject him must be converted or killed for their own good. Ultimately, totalitarianism is the only sort of politics that can truly serve the sky-god's purpose." - Gore Vidal, fully Eugene Luther Gore Vidal
"The future and strength of the race is for women to be able to have kids when they want them and to love and provide them with the tools they'll need to get through a hostile world. The image of the black woman bearing child upon child against her will is the real threat to the race." - Faye Wattleton