This site is dedicated to the memory of Dr. Alan William Smolowe who gave birth to the creation of this database.
W. Winwood Reade, fully William Winwood Reade
As for the system of the Commune, which makes it impossible for a man to rise or fall, it is merely the old caste system revived; if it could be put into force, all industry would be disheartened, emulation would cease, and mankind would go to sleep.
W. E. H. Lecky, fully William Edward Hartpole Lecky
We may not lay much stress on such isolated instances of depravity as that of Pope John XXII, who was condemned, among many other crimes, for incest and adultery; or the abbot-elect of St Augustine, at Canterbury, who in 1171 was found, on investigation, to have seventeen illegitimate children in a single village; or an abbot of St Pelayo, in Spain, who in 1130 was proved to have kept no less than seventy concubines; or Henry III, bishop of Liege, who was deposed in 1274 for having sixty-five illegitimate children; but it is impossible to resist the evidence of a long chain of Councils and ecclesiastical writers, who conspire in depicting far greater evils than simple concubinage.... The writers of the middle ages are full of accounts of nunneries that were like brothels, of the vast multitude of infanticides within their walls, and of that inveterate prevalence of incest among the clergy, which rendered it necessary again and again to issue the most stringent enactments that priests should not be permitted to live with their mothers or sisters.
Attention | Individual | Mind | Persuasion | Practice | Time | Old |
W. Winwood Reade, fully William Winwood Reade
The philosophic spirit of inquiry may be traced to brute curiosity, and that to the habit of examining all things in search of food.
Tinsel in February, tinsel in august. There are things in a man besides his reason.
Vita Sackville-West, fully The Hon Victoria Mary Sackville-West, Lady Nicolson
It is no good my telling you. One never believes other people's experiences and one is only very gradually convinced by one's own.
That scrawny cry—it was a chorister whose C preceded the choir. It was part of the colossal sun, surrounded by its choral rings, still far away. It was like a new knowledge of reality.
The most beautiful thing in the world is, of course, the world itself.
The night is of the color of a woman's arm: night, the female, obscure, fragrant and supple, conceals herself.
Mind |
The mind is the terriblest force in the world, father, because, in chief, it, only, can defend against itself. At its mercy, we depend upon it.
Mind |
The way through the world is more difficult to find than the way beyond it.
The poem refreshes life so that we share, for a moment, the first idea . . . It satisfies belief in an immaculate beginning and sends us, winged by an unconscious will, to an immaculate end. We move between these points: from that ever-early candor to its late plural.
It is the sea that whitens the roof. The sea drifts through the winter air. It is the sea that the north wind makes. The sea is in the falling snow. This gloom is the darkness of the sea.
Mind |
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
Disarmament is the ideal of socialism. There will be no wars in socialist society; consequently, disarmament will be achieved. But whoever expects that socialism will be achieved without a social revolution and the dictatorship of the proletariat is not a socialist. Dictatorship is state power based directly on violence. And in the twentieth century — as in the age of civilization generally — violence means neither a fist nor a club, but troops. To put “disarmament” in the program is tantamount to making the general declaration: We are opposed to the use of arms. There is as little Marxism in this as there would be if we were to say: We are opposed to violence!
Mind |