This site is dedicated to the memory of Dr. Alan William Smolowe who gave birth to the creation of this database.
My grandfather returned to what he called ‘studying.’ He sat looking down at his lap, his left hand idle on the chair arm, his right scratching his head, his white hair gleaming in the lamplight. I knew that when he was studying he was thinking, but I did not know what about. Now I have aged into knowledge of what he thought about. He thought of his strength and endurance when he was young, his merriment and joy, and how his life’s burdens had then grown upon him. He thought of that arc of country that centered upon Port William as he first had known it in the years just after the Civil War, and as it had changed, and as it had become; and how all that time, which would have seemed almost forever when he was a boy, now seemed hardly anytime at all. He thought of the people he remembered, now dead, and of those who had come and gone before his knowledge, and of those who would come after, and of his own place in that long procession.
Evidence | Heart | History | Hope | Improvement | Individual | Little | Protest | Public | Qualities | Spirit | Success |
W. H. Auden, fully Wystan Hugh Auden
Politics cannot be a science, because in politics theory and practice cannot be separated, and the sciences depend upon their separation.
W. H. Auden, fully Wystan Hugh Auden
Any marriage, happy or unhappy, is infinitely more interesting and significant than any romance, however passionate.
W. H. Auden, fully Wystan Hugh Auden
In a rapture of distress; in the deserts of the heart let the healing fountains start, In the prison of his days teach the free man how to praise. [in memory of W.B. Yeats]
W. H. Auden, fully Wystan Hugh Auden
Men will pay large sums to whores for telling them they are not bores
We are now pretty obviously facing the possibility of a world that the supranational corporations, and the governments and educational systems that serve them, will control entirely for their own enrichment–and, incidentally and inescapably, for the impoverishment of all the rest of us.
History |
W. H. Auden, fully Wystan Hugh Auden
The stars are not wanted now: put out every one; pack up the moon and dismantle the sun; pour away the ocean and sweep up the wood. For nothing now can ever come to any good.
Under the discipline of unity, knowledge and morality come together. No longer can we have that paltry 'objective' knowledge so prized by the academic specialists. To know anything at all becomes a moral predicament. Aware that there is no such thing as a specialized effect, one becomes responsible for judgments as well as facts. Aware that as an agricultural scientist he had 'one great subject,' Sir Albert Howard could no longer ask, “What can I do with what I know?” without at the same time asking, “How can I be responsible for what I know?”
W. E. B. Du Bois, fully William Edward Burghardt Du Bois
Perhaps the most extraordinary characteristic of current America is the attempt to reduce life to buying and selling. Life is not love unless love is sex and bought and sold. Life is not knowledge save knowledge of technique, of science for destruction. Life is not beauty except beauty for sale. Life is not art unless its price is high and it is sold for profit. All life is production for profit, and for what is profit but for buying and selling again?
Evil | History | Man | Philosophy | Regard | Study | Value |
Pascal told only half the story. He said man was a thinking reed. What man is, is a thinking reed and a walking genital.
Character | Civilization | History | Mediocrity | People | Sentiment | Time |
W. E. H. Lecky, fully William Edward Hartpole Lecky
Under these circumstances, there has arisen in society a figure which is certainly the most mournful, and in some respects the most awful, upon which the eye of the moralist can dwell. That unhappy being whose very name is a shame to speak; who counterfeits with a cold heart the transports of affection, and submits herself as the passive instrument of lust; who is scorned and insulted as the vilest of her sex, and doomed, for the most part, to disease and abject wretchedness and an early death, appears in every age as the perpetual symbol of the degradation and sinfulness of man. Herself the supreme type of vice, she is ultimately the most efficient guardian of virtue. But for her, the unchallenged purity of countless happy homes would be polluted, and not a few who, in the pride of their untempted chastity, think of her with an indignant shudder, would have known the agony of remorse and of despair. On that one degraded and ignoble form are concentrated the passions that might have filled the world with shame. She remains, while creeds and civilizations rise and fall, the eternal priestess of humanity, blasted for the sins of the people.
W. E. H. Lecky, fully William Edward Hartpole Lecky
All over Europe the organs that represent dogmatic interests are in permanent opposition to the progressive tendencies around them, and are rapidly sinking into contempt. In every country in which a strong political life is manifested, the secularization of politics is the consequence. Each stage of that movement has been initiated and effected by those who are most indifferent to dogmatic theology, and each has been opposed by those who are most occupied with theology.
W. Winwood Reade, fully William Winwood Reade
The essence of religion is inertia; the essence of science is change. It is the function of the one to preserve, it is the function of the other to improve. If, as in Egypt, they are firmly chained together, either science will advance, in which case the religion will be altered, or the religion will preserve its purity, and science will congeal.
W. E. H. Lecky, fully William Edward Hartpole Lecky
The religion of one age is often the poetry of the next. Around every living and operative faith there lies a region of allegory and of imagination into which opinions frequently pass, and in which they long retain a transfigured and idealised existence after their natural life has died away. They are, as it were, deflected. They no longer tell directly and forcibly upon human actions. They no longer produce terror, inspire hopes, awake passions, or mould the characters of men; yet they still exercise a kind of reflex influence, and form part of the ornamental culture of the age. They are turned into allegories. They are interpreted in a non-natural sense. They are invested with a fanciful, poetic, but most attractive garb. They follow instead of controlling the current of thought, and being transformed by far-fetched and ingenious explanations, they become the embellishments of systems of belief that are wholly irreconcilable with their original tendencies. The gods of heathenism were thus translated from the sphere of religion to the sphere of poetry. The grotesque legends and the harsh doctrines of a superstitious faith are so explained away, that they appear graceful myths foreshadowing and illustrating the conceptions of a brighter day. For a time they flicker upon the horizon with a softly beautiful light that enchants the poet, and lends a charm to the new system with which they are made to blend; but at last this too fades away. Religious ideas die like the sun; their last rays, possessing little heat, are expended in creating beauty.
W. E. H. Lecky, fully William Edward Hartpole Lecky
Nothing, indeed, could be more unlike the tone of the [Patristic] Fathers, than the cold, passionless, and prudential theology of the eighteenth century; a theology which regarded Christianity as an admirable auxiliary to the police force, and a principle of decorum and of cohesion in society, but which carefully banished from it all enthusiasm, veiled or attenuated all its mysteries, and virtually reduced it to an authoritative system of moral philosophy.
Extreme | History | Hypothesis |
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 |