This site is dedicated to the memory of Dr. Alan William Smolowe who gave birth to the creation of this database.
Life (priest and poet say) is but a dream; I wish no happier one than to be laid beneath a cool syringa’s scented shade, or wavy willow, by the running stream, brimful of moral, where the dragon-fly, wanders as careless and content as I. Thanks for this fancy, insect king, of purple crest and filmy wing, who with indifference givest up the water-lily’s golden cup, to come again and overlook what I am writing in my book. Believe me, most who read the line will read with hornier eyes than thine; and yet their souls shall live forever, and thine drop dead into the river! God pardon them, O insect king, who fancy so unjust a thing!
His very faults smack of the raciness of his good qualities.
It is possible, I think, to say that... agriculture formed upon the understanding that it is sinful for people to misuse or destroy what they did not make. The Creation is a unique, irreplaceable gift, therefore to be used with humility, respect, and skill.
Business | Failure | Faith | Greed | History | Hope | Indignation | Land | Life | Life | Obligation | People | Present | Right | Study | Failure | Business |
Until we understand what the land is, we are at odds with everything we touch. And to come to that understanding it is necessary, even now, to leave the regions of our conquest - the cleared fields, the towns and cities, the highways - and re-enter the woods. For only there can a man encounter the silence and the darkness of his own absence. Only in this silence and darkness can he recover the sense of the world's longevity, of its ability to thrive without him, of his inferiority to it and his dependence on it. Perhaps then, having heard that silence and seen that darkness, he will grow humble before the place and begin to take it in - to learn from it what it is. As its sounds come into his hearing, and its lights and colors come into his vision, and its odors come into his nostrils, then he may come into its presence as he never has before, and he will arrive in his place and will want to remain. His life will grow out of the ground like the other lives of the place, and take its place among them. He will be with them - neither ignorant of them, nor indifferent to them, nor against them - and so at last he will grow to be native-born. That is, he must reenter the silence and the darkness, and be born again.
Behavior | Consideration | Hope |
Today, local economies are being destroyed by the "pluralistic," displaced, global economy, which has no respect for what works in a locality. The global economy is built on the principle that one place can be exploited, even destroyed, for the sake of another place.
Ability | Good | Justification | Order | Revelation | Learn | Think |
Want of imagination makes things unreal enough to be destroyed. By imagination I mean knowledge and love. I mean compassion. People of power kill children, the old send the young to die, because they have no imagination. They have power. Can you have power and imagination at the same time? Can you kill people you don’t know and have compassion for them at the same time?
Waking up from a dream of violence is much the same as waking up from a dream of love. You must go on living your life.
We could lose, and I think we need to face that. I was speaking in Nebraska the other day and a very intelligent man came up afterward and said in a very kind and intelligent way, Of course you know you may be fighting a losing battle. And I answered, I’ve known for 30 years that I may be fighting a losing battle. The question to me is not whether I’m going to win or not, but whether I’m going to fight or not.
Capital punishment | Hypocrisy | Life | Life | Opposition | Public | Punishment | Society | Society | Think |
To live, we must daily break the body and shed the blood of Creation. When we do this knowingly, lovingly, skillfully, reverently, it is a sacrament. When we do it ignorantly, greedily, clumsily, destructively, it is a desecration. In such desecration we condemn ourselves to spiritual and moral loneliness, and others to want.
Distinction | Intention | Nations | Terror | Work |
W. W. Sawyer, fully Walter Warwick Sawyer
I enjoyed the mathematics that I had time to learn. If I ever need or want to learn some more, I shall not be afraid to do so.
Crime | Energy | Force | Fulfillment | Good | Important | Individual | Learning | Little | Means | Sense | Society | Will | Wishes | Society |
Much of current speculation about the nature of ETIs--what level of technology have you achieved?, etc.--is misguided. The first question an earthling should ask of an ETI is not: What is the level of your science? but rather: Did it also happen to you? Do you have a self? If so, how do you handle it? Did you suffer a catastrophe.
W. W. Sawyer, fully Walter Warwick Sawyer
The aim of scientific education, as I see it, is to produce workers in all departments of knowledge in their due proportions; to encourage communication between workers in different fields, and also between them and the general community; to raise the intellectual standards and intellectual interests of the whole country.
Crime |
Vladimir Lenin, fully Vladimir Ilyich Lenin
And so in capitalist society we have a democracy that is curtailed, wretched, false, a democracy only for the rich, for the minority. The dictatorship of the proletariat, the period of transition to communism, will for the first time create democracy for the people, for the majority, along with the necessary suppression of the exploiters, of the minority.
Peace |
Vladimir Lenin, fully Vladimir Ilyich Lenin
No mercy for these enemies of the people, the enemies of socialism, the enemies of the working people! War to the death against the rich and their hangers-on, the bourgeois intellectuals; war on the rogues, the idlers and the rowdies!
Vladimir Lenin, fully Vladimir Ilyich Lenin
People always have been the foolish victims of deception and self-deception in politics, and they always will be, until they have learned to seek out the interests of some class or other behind all moral, religious, political and social phrases, declarations and promises.
Bourgeoisie | Power | Reason | Surrender | Will |
Vladimir Lenin, fully Vladimir Ilyich Lenin
Nothing will raise the revolutionary energy of the world proletariat so much, nothing will shorten the path leading to its complete victory to such an extent, as this decisive victory of the revolution that has now started in Russia.