This site is dedicated to the memory of Dr. Alan William Smolowe who gave birth to the creation of this database.
Wernher von Braun, fully Wernher Magnus Maximilian, Freiherr von Braun
For my confirmation, I didn't get a watch and my first pair of long pants, like most Lutheran boys. I got a telescope. My mother thought it would make the best gift.
Design | Law | Necessity | Order | Purpose | Purpose | Universe |
Work-democracy adds a decisive piece of knowledge to the scope of ideas related to freedom. The masses of people who work and bear the burden of social existence on their shoulders neither are conscious of their social responsibility nor are they capable of assuming the responsibility for their own freedom. This is the result of the century-long suppression of rational thinking, the natural functions of love, and scientific comprehension of the living. Everything related to the emotional plague in social life can be traced back to this incapacity and lack of consciousness. It is work-democracy’s contention that, by its very nature, politics is and has to be unscientific, i.e., that it is an expression of human helplessness, poverty, and suppression.
Democracy | Existence | Insight | Love | Necessity | Politics | Responsibility | Suppression | Thinking | Work |
A large part of the mischief and folly of the world comes from rushing in, taking a position, and then not knowing how to retreat. There is something about making a speech or writing an article which perverts the human mind. When the utterance is published, the Rubicon has been crossed and the bridges have been burned. It seems to end in the inquiry, after that we almost cease to be interested in the truth, being so preoccupied to prove that we already possess it.
Criticism | Free press | Government | Necessity | Organic | People | Thinking | Government | Privilege |
A man’s mother is his misfortune, but his wife is his fault.
Good | Human nature | Nature | Necessity |
In Port William, more than anyplace else I had been, this religion that scorned the beauty and goodness of this world was a puzzle to me. To begin with, I don’t think anybody believed it. I still don’t think so. Those world-condemning sermons were preached to people who, on Sunday mornings, would be wearing their prettiest clothes. Even the old widows in their dark dresses would be pleasing to look at. By dressing up on the one day when most of them had leisure to do it, they had signified their wish to present themselves to one another and to Heaven looking their best. The people who heard those sermons loved good crops, good gardens, good livestock and work animals and dogs; they loved flowers and the shade of trees, and laughter and music; some of them could make you a fair speech on the pleasures of a good drink of water or a patch of wild raspberries. While the wickedness of the flesh was preached from the pulpit, the young husbands and wives and the courting couples sat thigh to thigh, full of yearning and joy, and the old people thought of the beauty of the children. And when church was over they would go home to Heavenly dinners of fried chicken, it might be, and creamed new potatoes and hot biscuits and butter and cherry pie and sweet milk and buttermilk. And the preacher and his family would always be invited to eat with somebody and they would always go, and the preacher, having just foresworn on behalf of everybody the joys of the flesh, would eat with unconsecrated relish.
Ability | Imagination | Inevitable | Necessity | Order | Understanding |
Why should conservationists have a positive interest in... farming? There are lots of reasons, but the plainest is: Conservationists eat.
W. H. Auden, fully Wystan Hugh Auden
Moreover, if great men are the only hope of the Evolutionary Process, they are morally bound to rule over the masses for their own good -- we are all here on earth to help others: what on earth the others are here for, I don't know -- and the masses have no right whatsoever to resist them.
W. E. H. Lecky, fully William Edward Hartpole Lecky
In looking back, with our present experience, we are driven to the melancholy conclusion that, instead of diminishing the number of wars, ecclesiastical influence has actually and very seriously increased it. We may look in vain for any period since Constantine, in which the clergy, as a body, exerted themselves to repress the military spirit, or to prevent or abridge a particular war, with an energy at all comparable to that which they displayed in stimulating the fanaticism of the crusaders, in producing the atrocious massacre of the Albigenses, in embittering the religious contests that followed the Reformation.
Vita Sackville-West, fully The Hon Victoria Mary Sackville-West, Lady Nicolson
Often on the painted stair, as I passed abstractedly, velvet footsteps, two and three, padded gravely after me. — There was nothing, nothing there, nothing there to see.
Vladimir Lenin, fully Vladimir Ilyich Lenin
Materialism is the recognition of "objects in themselves", or outside the mind; ideas and sensations are copies of images of those objects.
Bourgeoisie | Character | Means | Necessity | Rule | System |
Vladimir Lenin, fully Vladimir Ilyich Lenin
We would like to hope that developments in world socialism will increasingly remove the grounds for this difference between us.
Vladimir Nabokov, fully Vladimir Vladimirovich Nabokov
Neither in environment nor in heredity can I find the exact instrument that fashioned me, the anonymous roller that pressed upon my life a certain intricate watermark whose unique design becomes visible when the lamp of art is made to shine through life's foolscap.
Imitation | Individual | Inspiration | Land | Language | Light | Man | Means | Necessity | Reason | Submission | Time | Unique | Waste |
Vladimir Nabokov, fully Vladimir Vladimirovich Nabokov
And he absolutely had to find her at once to tell her that he adored her, but the large audience before him separated him from the door, and the notes reaching him through a succession of hands said that she was not available; that she was inaugurating a fire; that she had married an American businessman; that she had become a character in a novel; that she was dead.
Day | Gold | Luxury | Memory | Necessity | Pity | Public | Reason | Will | Child | Old |
Vine Deloria, fully Vine Victor Deloria, Jr.
The overwhelming majority of Indian people today have little understanding or remembrance of the powers once possessed by the spiritual leaders of their communities. What we do today is often simply a "walk-through" of a once-potent ceremony that now has little visible effect on the participants. The exercise of spiritual powers still continues in some places but lacks the definitive intensity of the old days.
Efficiency | Necessity |
Vincent van Gogh, fully Vincent Willem van Gogh
The world concerns me only in so far as I have a certain debt and duty to it, because I have lived in it for thirty years and owe to it to leave behind some souvenir in the shape of drawings and paintings – not done to please any particular movement, but within which a genuine human sentiment is expressed.
Absolute | Care | Melancholy | Necessity | Pleasure | Thought | Work | Thought |
Virginia Woolf, nee Stephen, fully Adeline Virginia Woolf
That she held herself well was true; and had nice hands and feet; and dressed well, considering that she spent little. But often now this body she wore (she stopped to look at a Dutch picture), this body, with all its capacities, seemed nothing - nothing at all. She had the oddest sense of being herself invisible; unseen; unknown; there being no more marrying, no more having of children now, but only this astonishing and rather solemn progress with the rest of them, up Bond Street, this being Mrs. Dalloway, not even Clarissa anymore; this being Mrs. Richard Dalloway.
Anger | Giving | Life | Life | Man | Necessity | Pain | Size | Writing |