This site is dedicated to the memory of Dr. Alan William Smolowe who gave birth to the creation of this database.
Old trees in their living state are the only things that money cannot command.
We must protect the right of our opponents to speak because we must hear what they have to say.
Consequences | Events | Government | Men | Public | Thought | Will | Government | Crisis | Thought |
Walter Mondale, fully Walter Frederick "Fritz" Mondale
Mr. Reagan will raise taxes; and so will I. He won't tell you. I just did.
Fairness | Politics | Television |
Warren Buffett, fully Warren Edward Buffett, aka Oracle of Omaha
As a group, lemmings have a rotten image, but no individual lemming has ever received bad press.
Wang Yang-Ming or Yangming, aka Wang Shouren or Wang Shou-jen, courtesy name Bo'an
Knowledge is the beginning of practice; doing is the completion of knowing.
Events | Life | Life | Mind | Nothing | Principles | World | Following |
Such heaped up platters of cakes of various and almost indescribable kinds, known only to experienced Dutch housewives! There was the doughty doughnut, the tender oly koek, and the crisp and crumbling cruller; sweet cakes and short cakes, ginger cakes and honey cakes, and the whole family of cakes. And then there were apple pies, and peach pies, and pumpkin pies; besides slices of ham and smoked beef; and moreover delectable dishes of preserved plums, and peaches, and pears, and quinces; not to mention broiled shad and roasted chickens; together with bowls of milk and cream, all mingled higgledy-piggledy, pretty much as I have enumerated them, with the motherly teapot sending up its clouds of vapor from the midst-- Heaven bless the mark!
I am always at a loss to know how much to believe of my own stories.
Wayne Dyer, fully Wayne Walter Dyer
Virtually all fights revolve around the absurd thought, ‘If only you were more like me, then I wouldn’t have to be upset.’
Events |
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 |
W. H. Auden, fully Wystan Hugh Auden
Poor Poe! At first so forgotten that his grave went without a tomb-stone twenty-six years. . . today in danger of becoming the life study of a few professors.
To think better, to think like the best humans, we are probably going to have to learn again to judge a person's intelligence, not by the ability to recite facts, but by the good order or harmoniousness of his or her surroundings. We must suspect that any statistical justification of ugliness and violence is a revelation of stupidity.
Beginning | Family | Global | Good | Knowledge | Patience | People | Politics | Principles |
W. Brugh Joy, fully William Brugh Joy
Many people profess unconditional love, and yet below they are still working the mystery of the ego and attempting to compensate inadequacy and powerlessness. Crises are often the first opportunity of coming into wholeness – they are not what we think they are at the level of loss and humiliation. You think there’s nothing left, just a devastation, our eyes are so close to the problem that we can’t see the overview – to me, that’s why we pay attention to dreams, since the dream will reveal the dynamic if we can bring ourselves into accord with it, and we can let go of what we think we need, to move to “What does Life seek from us at this point, and how do we put ourselves into accord with that larger process?
Consciousness | Events | Mind | Reality |
W. E. B. Du Bois, fully William Edward Burghardt Du Bois
The theory of democratic government is not that the will of the people is always right, but rather that normal human beings of average intelligence will, if given a chance, learn the right and best course by bitter experience.
Change | Children | Church | Courage | Events | Men | Parents | Power | Public | Religion | Revolution | Time | Will | World | Learn |
The search is what anyone would undertake if he were not sunk in the everydayness of his own life. To become aware of the possibility of the search is to be onto something. Not to be onto something is to be in despair.
Age | Art | Beauty | Consciousness | Culture | Elegance | Evidence | Excitement | Failure | Family | Good | Hate | Health | Life | Life | Loneliness | Marriage | Past | People | Politics | Recreation | Reward | Science | Self | Talking | Time | Work | World | Failure | Loss | Art | Beauty |
All arguments between the traditional scientific view of man as organism, a locus of needs and drives, and a Christian view of man as a spiritual being not only unresolvable at the present level of discourse but are also profoundly boring...From the scientific view at least, a new model of man is needed, something other than man conceived as a locus of bio-psycho-sociological needs and drives. Such an anthropological model might be provided by semiotics, that is, the study of man as the sign-using creature and, specifically, the study of the self and consciousness as derivatives of the sign-function.
Events | Experience | Order | Past | Time |
W. E. H. Lecky, fully William Edward Hartpole Lecky
Almost all Europe, for many centuries, was inundated with blood, which was shed at the direct instigation or with the full approval of the ecclesiastical authorities.
Life | Life | Opposition | Politics |
Vladimir Lenin, fully Vladimir Ilyich Lenin
Everyone is free to write and say whatever he likes, without any restrictions. But every voluntary association (including the party) is also free to expel members who use the name of the party to advocate anti-party views.
Vladimir Lenin, fully Vladimir Ilyich Lenin
Let the “socialist” snivelers croak, let the bourgeoisie rage and fume, but only people who shut their eyes so as not to see, and stuff their ears so as not to hear, can fail to notice that all over the world the birth pangs of the old, capitalist society, which is pregnant with socialism, have begun.
Failure | Politics | Will | Failure | Understand |
Vladimir Lenin, fully Vladimir Ilyich Lenin
Present-day society is wholly based on the exploitation of the vast masses of the working class by a tiny minority of the population, the class of the landowners and that of the capitalists. It is a slave society, since the free workers, who all their life work for the capitalists, are entitled only to such means of subsistence as are essential for the maintenance of slaves who produce profit, for the safeguarding and perpetuation of capitalist slavery.
Politics |