This site is dedicated to the memory of Dr. Alan William Smolowe who gave birth to the creation of this database.
Warren Buffett, fully Warren Edward Buffett, aka Oracle of Omaha
I've seen more people fail because of liquor and leverage - leverage being borrowed money. You really don't need leverage in this world much. If you're smart, you're going to make a lot of money without borrowing.
Wei Wu Wei, pen name for Terence James Stannus Gray
Let us live gladly! Quite certainly we are free to do it. Perhaps it is our only freedom, but ours it is, and it is only phenomenally a freedom. "Living free" is being "as one is." Can we not do it now? Indeed can we not-do-it? It is not even a "doing": It is beyond doing and not-doing. It is being as-we-are.
Authority | Meaning | Metaphysics | Method | People | Question | Sense | Understand |
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. 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. 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 |
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.
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 |
Vladimir Nabokov, fully Vladimir Vladimirovich Nabokov
Some of my characters are, no doubt, pretty beastly, but I really don't care, they are outside my inner self like the mournful monsters of a cathedral facade -- demons placed there only to show they have been booted out. Actually, I'm a mild old gentleman who loathes cruelty.
The observation of the breathing rhythm is suggested as a support to those who cannot arrive at the spontaneous stillness of total mind without some support. But to depend upon the support for a long period is undesirable and unwarranted. One has to discover for oneself whether one is learning self-reliance through the support or not. Simple observation of the breathing rhythm culminates into silence or total awareness within a few weeks. Secondly the hour of silence should enable one to live in awareness throughout the day.
Discovery | Existence | Freedom | Journey | Meaning | Religion | Revolution | Truth | Discovery |