This site is dedicated to the memory of Dr. Alan William Smolowe who gave birth to the creation of this database.
All of us confronts limits of body, talent, temperament. But that is not all. We are, all of us, also constrained by our time, our place, our civilization. We are bound by the culture we have in common, that culture which distinguishes us from other people in other times. Cultural constraints condition and limit our choices, shaping our characters with their imperatives.
The test of interesting people is that subject matter doesn't matter.
We are making the price of power much too high in this society. I worry that we are making the conditions of public life so tough that nobody except people really obsessed with power will be willing finally to pay that price. That would be tragic from the point of view of public well-being.
Life | Life | People | Power | Price | Public | Society | Will | Wisdom | Worry |
Nikolai Lenin, aka Vladimir Ilyich Lenin, born Vladimir llyich Ulyanov
Even if for every hundred correct things we did we committed ten thousand mistakes, our revolution would still be - and it will be in the judgment of history - great and invincible; for this is the first time that not a minority, not the rich alone, not the educated alone, but the real masses, the overwhelming majority of the working people are themselves building a new life and are by their own experience solving the most difficult problems of socialist organization.
Experience | History | Judgment | Life | Life | Majority | Organization | People | Problems | Revolution | Time | Will | Wisdom |
Worship is the earthly act by which we most distinctly recognize our personal immortality; men who think that they will be extinct a few years hence do not pray. In worship we spread out our insignificant life, which yet is the work of the Creator’s hands... before the Eternal and All-Merciful, that we may learn the manners of a higher sphere, and fit ourselves for companionship with saints and angels, and for the everlasting sight of the face of God.
Angels | Eternal | God | Immortality | Life | Life | Manners | Men | Will | Wisdom | Work | Worship | Companionship | Learn | Think |
We cannot consider the people truly educated if they think of education only as the gathering of facts, data and information. The intelligent person is one who has learned how to choose wisely and therefore has a sense of values, a purpose in life and a sense of direction.
Education | Life | Life | People | Purpose | Purpose | Sense | Wisdom | Think |
Stephen Leacock, fully Stephen Butler Leacock
The work that the schoolmaster is doing is inestimable in its consequence. He is laying the foundation of the careers of men who are to lead the next generation. He is also knocking all the best stuff out of a great number of them.
Compton Mackenzie, fully Sir Edward Montague Compton Mackenzie
If I were a godfather wishing a gift on a child, it would be that he should always be more interested in other people than in himself. That's a real gift.
Karl Marx (1818-1883) German Philosopher, Socialist and Friedrich Engels
It has been objected that upon the abolition of private property all work will cease and universal laziness will overtake us. According to this, bourgeois society ought long ago to have gone to the dogs through sheer idleness; for those of its members who work acquire nothing, and those who acquire anything do not work.
Idleness | Laziness | Nothing | Property | Society | Will | Wisdom | Work | Society |
This country, with its institutions, belongs to the people who inhabit it. Whenever they shall grow weary of the existing government, they can exercise their constitutional right of amending it or their revolutionary right to dismember or overthrow it.
Government | People | Right | Wisdom |