This site is dedicated to the memory of Dr. Alan William Smolowe who gave birth to the creation of this database.
Walter J. Ong, fully Walter Jackson Ong
Deeply typographic folk forget to think of words as primarily oral, as events, and hence as necessarily powered: for them, words are rather to be assimilated to things, "out there". Such "things" are not actions, but are in a radical sense dead.
Walter J. Ong, fully Walter Jackson Ong
By contrast with vision, the dissecting sense, sound is thus a unifying sense. A typical visual ideal is clarity and distinctness, a taking apart. The auditory ideal, by contrast, is harmony, a putting together.
Art | Contemplation | Man | Will | Work | Art | Contemplation |
Warren Buffett, fully Warren Edward Buffett, aka Oracle of Omaha
Putting people into homes, though a desirable goal, shouldn’t be our country’s primary objective. Keeping them in their homes should be the ambition.
Can we actually suppose that we are wasting, polluting, and making ugly this beautiful land for the sake of patriotism and the love of God? Perhaps some of us would like to think so, but in fact this destruction is taking place because we have allowed ourselves to believe, and to live, a mated pair of economic lies: that nothing has a value that is not assigned to it by the market; and that the economic life of our communities can safely be handed over to the great corporations.
Control | Dependence | Economics | Era | Failure | Freedom | Need | Nothing | People | Politics | Rationality | Society | System | Will | World | Worry | Society | Failure |
Connection is health. And what our society does its best to disguise from us is how ordinary, how commonly attainable, health is. We lose our health - and create profitable diseases and dependences - by failing to see the direct connections between living and eating, eating and working, working and loving. In gardening, for instance, one works with the body to feed the body. The work, if it is knowledgeable, makes for excellent food. And it makes one hungry. The work thus makes eating both nourishing and joyful, not consumptive, and keeps the eater from getting fat and weak. This is health, wholeness, a source of delight.
Conservation | Discussion | Indispensable | People |
And I declare myself free from ignorant love. You easy lovers and forgivers of mankind, stand back! I will love you at a distance, and not because you deserve it. My love must be discriminate or fail to bear its weight.
The passive American consumer, sitting down to a meal of pre-prepared food, confronts inert, anonymous substances that have been processed, dyed, breaded, sauced, gravied, ground, pulped, strained, blended, prettified, and sanitized beyond resemblance to any part of any creature that ever lived. The products of nature and agriculture have been made, to all appearances, the products of industry. Both eater and eaten are thus in exile from biological reality.
Sometimes I knew in all my mind and heart why I had done what I had done, and I welcomed the sacrifice. But there were times too when I lived in a desert and felt no joy and saw no hope and could not remember my old feelings. Then I lived by faith alone, faith without hope.
A proper community, we should remember also, is a commonwealth: a place, a resource, an economy. It answers the needs, practical as well as social and spiritual, of its members - among them the need to need one another. The answer to the present alignment of political power with wealth is the restoration of the identity of community and economy.
Ability | Change | Exploit | Mind | Mistrust | Will | Wrong | Understand |
Monsanto doesn't care about feeding the world. We have to think about the wage slavery of migrant workers and salary slavery of those who are desperately unhappy.
Ability | Diversion | Energy | Heart | Marriage | Nothing | Rights | System | Television | Wife | Will | Work | Negotiation | Understand |
Too much of our history will seem to have taken place in the halls of capitols, where the accusers have mostly been guilty, and so have borne witness to nothing.
Why is there such a gap between nonspeaking animals and speaking man, when there is no other such gap in nature? Is it possible that a theory of man is nothing more nor less than a theory of the speaking creatures?
Past |
W. Winwood Reade, fully William Winwood Reade
What a state of society is this in which freethinker is a term of abuse, and in which doubt is regarded as sin?
It was soldiers went marching over the rocks and still the birds came, came in watery flocks, because it was spring and the birds had to come. No doubt that soldiers had to be marching and that drums had to be rolling, rolling, rolling.