This site is dedicated to the memory of Dr. Alan William Smolowe who gave birth to the creation of this database.
Walt Whitman, fully Walter "Walt" Whitman
Sail Forth- Steer for the deep waters only. Reckless O soul, exploring. I with thee and thou with me. For we are bound where mariner has not yet dared go. And we will risk the ship, ourselves, and all.
It did not compute the profound contradiction between the claim of "leader of the free world" and the rapacious occupation of the world for the sake of markets, resources, and control. The empire doesn't question itself; it "sucks it up" and moves on, restoring its hegemony and bringing the dissenters to justice.
Walter J. Ong, fully Walter Jackson Ong
An oral culture simply does not deal in such items as geometrical figures, abstract categorization, formally logical reasoning processes, definitions, or even comprehensive descriptions, or articulated self-analysis, all of which derive not simply from thought itself but from text-formed thought.
I've waited decades for this chance to exercise my rights to free speech. But the Chinese people have been waiting for centuries.
Revolution | Truth | World |
W. E. B. Du Bois, fully William Edward Burghardt Du Bois
The theory of democratic government is not that the will of the people is always right, but rather that normal human beings of average intelligence will, if given a chance, learn the right and best course by bitter experience.
Change | Children | Church | Courage | Events | Men | Parents | Power | Public | Religion | Revolution | Time | Will | World | Learn |
W. W. Sawyer, fully Walter Warwick Sawyer
It is widely recognized that the weakest students can be very unhappy if their special needs are not met. It is often not recognized that the ablest too can suffer acutely, if they are captive in a lockstep class and have to work, at what seems to them a snail's pace, through material they could have disposed of quickly when they were several years younger. The root of the trouble lies in the concept that education is something done to a pupil by a teacher. This is entirely untrue, at any rate for mathematics. Young mathematicians are hungry for knowledge and nothing delights them more than to be given the opportunity to read ahead on their own. The strongest students will then reach topics far beyond anything that a school curriculum could possibly contain or a school teacher be expected to expound. Even those, who are slightly above the level the curriculum envisages, will benefit from the relief of boredom and the extra knowledge acquired.
Music | People | Revolution |
Vitruvius, fully Marcus Vitruvius Pollio NULL
All the gifts which fortune bestows she can easily take away; but education, when combined with intelligence, never fails, but abides steadily on to the very end of life.
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 Lenin, fully Vladimir Ilyich Lenin
Monopolies, oligarchy, the striving for domination and not for freedom, the exploitation of an increasing number of small or weak nations by a handful of the richest or most powerful nations — all these have given birth to those distinctive characteristics of imperialism which compel us to define it as parasitic or decaying capitalism.
Problems | Revolution | Will | Learn |
Vladimir Lenin, fully Vladimir Ilyich Lenin
Socialism, by organizing production without class oppression, by ensuring the well-being of all members of the state, gives full play to the “sympathies” of the population, thereby promoting and greatly accelerating the drawing together and fusion of the nations.
Proletariat | Revolution | Struggle | Will |
Vladimir Lenin, fully Vladimir Ilyich Lenin
The working class cannot play its world-revolutionary role unless it wages a ruthless struggle against this renegacy, spinelessness, subservience to opportunism and unexampled vulgarization of the theories of Marxism.
Hunger | People | Qualities | Revolution | Work |
Vladimir Lenin, fully Vladimir Ilyich Lenin
Only an armed people can be the real bulwark of popular liberty.
Revolution | Work |
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
In view of the fact that this criticism of Marxism has long been directed from the political platform, from university chairs, in numerous pamphlets and in a series of learned treatises, in view of the fact that the entire younger generation of the educated classes has been systematically reared for decades on this criticism, it is not surprising that the new critical trend in Social-Democracy should spring up, all complete, like Minerva from the head of Jove.
Revolution | Following |
Vladimir Lenin, fully Vladimir Ilyich Lenin
The first step towards the emancipation of the people from this penal servitude is the confiscation of the landed estates, the introduction of workers’ control and the nationalization of the banks. The next steps will be the nationalization of the factories, the compulsory organization of the whole population in consumers’ societies, which are at the same time societies for the sale of products, and the state monopoly of the trade in grain and other necessities.
Democracy | Individuality | Revolution | Will |
Vladimir Lenin, fully Vladimir Ilyich Lenin
The revolutionary way is the way of quick amputation, which is the least painful to the proletariat, the way of the direct removal of the decomposing parts, the way of fewest concessions to and least consideration for the monarchy and the disgusting, vile, rotten and contaminating institutions which go with it.
Revolution | War |
Vladimir Lenin, fully Vladimir Ilyich Lenin
To become a power the class-conscious workers must win the majority to their side.As long as no violence is used against the people there is no other road to power. We are not Blancists, we do not stand for the seizure of power by a minority.
Conspiracy | Distinguish | Enemy | History | People | Question | Revolution | Friends |
Vladimir Lenin, fully Vladimir Ilyich Lenin
A bourgeois revolution is absolutely necessary in the interests of the proletariat. The more complete and determined, the more consistent the bourgeois revolution, the more assured will be the proletarian struggle against the bourgeoisie for Socialism. Only those who are ignorant of the rudiments of scientific Socialism can regard this conclusion as new or strange, paradoxical.
Need | Revolution |
Vladimir Lenin, fully Vladimir Ilyich Lenin
No support for the Provisional Government; the utter falsity of all its promises should be made clear, particularly of those relating to the renunciation of annexations. Exposure in place of the impermissible, illusion-breeding demand that this government, a government of capitalists, should cease to be an imperialist government.
Revolution | Worth |
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 |