This site is dedicated to the memory of Dr. Alan William Smolowe who gave birth to the creation of this database.
Vitruvius, fully Marcus Vitruvius Pollio NULL
Neither natural ability without instruction nor instruction without natural ability can make the perfect artist.
Knowledge | Means | Right | Understand |
Vladimir Lenin, fully Vladimir Ilyich Lenin
You cannot do anything without rousing the masses to action. A plenary meeting of the Soviet must be called to decide on mass searches in Petrograd and the goods stations. To carry out these searches, each factory and company must form contingents, not on a voluntary basis: it must be the duty of everyone to take part in these searches under the threat of being deprived of his bread card. We can't expect to get anywhere unless we resort to terrorism: speculators must be shot on the spot. Moreover, bandits must be dealt with just as resolutely: they must be shot on the spot.
Vladimir Lenin, fully Vladimir Ilyich Lenin
Dialectics is the teaching which shows how Opposites can be and how they happen to be (how they become) identical,—under what conditions they are identical, becoming transformed into one another,—why the human mind should grasp these opposites not as dead, rigid, but as living, conditional, mobile, becoming transformed into one another.
Vladimir Lenin, fully Vladimir Ilyich Lenin
I am a bad, wicked man, but I am practicing moral self-purification; I don't eat meat any more, I now eat rice cutlets.
Vladimir Lenin, fully Vladimir Ilyich Lenin
Human reason has discovered many amazing things in nature and will discover still more, and will thereby increase its power over nature.
Vitruvius, fully Marcus Vitruvius Pollio NULL
Furthermore, since I have observed that our citizens are distracted with public affairs and private business, I have thought it best to write briefly, so that my readers, whose intervals of leisure are small, may be able to comprehend in a short time.
Knowledge | Philosophy | Principles | Problems | Will |
Vitruvius, fully Marcus Vitruvius Pollio NULL
The design of a temple depends on symmetry, the principles of which must be most carefully observed by the architect.
Ability | Authority | Design | Judgment | Knowledge | Men | Object | Position | Practice | Principles | Skill | Study | Theories | Work | Child |
Vladimir Lenin, fully Vladimir Ilyich Lenin
One cannot live in society and be free from society.
Discovery | History | Knowledge | Life | Life | Science | Technology | Discovery |
Vladimir Nabokov, fully Vladimir Vladimirovich Nabokov
I felt instinctively that toilets - as also telephones - happened to be for reasons unfathomable, the points where my destiny was liable to catch. We all have such fateful objects - it may be a recurrent landscape, a number in another - carefully chosen by the gods to attract events of special significance for us: here shall John always stumble; there shall Jane's heart always break.
Vladimir Nabokov, fully Vladimir Vladimirovich Nabokov
The contemplation of beauty, whether it be a uniquely tinted sunset, a radiant face, or a work of art, makes us glance back unwittingly at our personal past and juxtapose ourselves and our inner being with the utterly unattainable beauty revealed to us.
Compensation | Death | Knowledge |
Voltaire, pen name of François-Marie Arouet NULL
All men are by nature free; you have therefore an undoubted liberty to depart whenever you please, but will have many and great difficulties to encounter in passing the frontiers.
Voltaire, pen name of François-Marie Arouet NULL
I've had some experience of this love, this love that rules our hearts, which is the soul of our souls, all it got me was a kiss and twenty kicks in the ass. How could so beautiful to causes have produced in you such an abominable effect?
Vladimir Nabokov, fully Vladimir Vladimirovich Nabokov
Van sealed the letter, found his Thunderbolt pistol in the place he had visualized, introduced one cartridge into the magazine, and translated it into its chamber. Then, standing before a closet mirror, he put the automatic to his head, at the point of the pterion, and pressed the comfortably concaved trigger. Nothing happened - or perhaps everything happened, and his destiny simply forked at that instant, as it probably does sometimes at night, especially in a strange bed, at stages of great happiness or great desolation, when we happen to die in our sleep, but continue our normal existence, with no perceptible break in the fakes serialization, on the following, neatly prepared morning, with a spurious past discreetly but firmly attached behind.