This site is dedicated to the memory of Dr. Alan William Smolowe who gave birth to the creation of this database.
We clasp the hands of those that go before us, And the hands of those who come after us. We enter the little circle of each other's arms And the larger circle of lovers, Whose hands are joined in a dance, And the larger circle of all creatures, Passing in and out of life, Who move also in a dance, To a music so subtle and vast that no ear hears it Except in fragments
This is the perennial danger which besets semiotics: what with man being preeminently the sign-using creature, and what with man using signs in everything that he does, semiotics runs the risk of being about everything and hence about nothing.
W. W. Sawyer, fully Walter Warwick Sawyer
The topics and treatment of the mathematics syllabus should be determined by the following principles: a. The course must be enjoyable and generate steadily increasing enthusiasm in the pupils, b. It should develop independence and activity of mind, curiosity, observation, and confidence, c. It should make pupils familiar with the basic ideas and processes of mathematics.
Children | Confidence | Life | Life | Mathematics | Truth | Will | Value |
William Slim, 1st Viscount Slim, fully Field Marshal Sir William Joseph "Bill" Slim
Moral courage is higher and a rarer virtue than physical courage.
W. E. H. Lecky, fully William Edward Hartpole Lecky
When the Church obtained the direction of the civil power, she soon modified or abandoned the tolerant maxims she had formerly inculcated; and, in the course of a few years, restrictive laws were enacted, both against the Jews and against the heretics.
Comes again the longing, the desire that has no name. Is it for Mrs. Prouty, for a drink, for both: for a party, for youth, for the good times, for dear good drinking and fighting comrades, for football-game girls in the fall with faces like flowers? Comes the longing and it has to do with being fifteen and fifty and with the winter sun striking down into a brick-yard and on clapboard walls rounded off with old hard blistered paint and across a doorsill onto linoleum. Desire has a smell: of cold linoleum and gas heat and the sour piebald bark of crepe myrtle. A good-humored thirty-five-year-old lady takes the air in a back lot in a small town.
Good | Life | Life | Little | Sin | Talking | Truth | Friends |
W. E. B. Du Bois, fully William Edward Burghardt Du Bois
What do nations care about the cost of war, if by spending a few hundred millions in steel and gunpowder they can gain a thousand millions in diamonds and cocoa?
Ends | Glory | Men | Right | Righteousness | Search | Training | Truth | Work | Think |
W. E. B. Du Bois, fully William Edward Burghardt Du Bois
There is always a certain glamour about the idea of a nation rising up to crush an evil simply because it is wrong. Unfortunately, this can seldom be realized in real life; for the very existence of the evil usually argues a moral weakness in the very place where extraordinary moral strength is called for.
The consolations of space are nameless things. It was after the neurosis of winter. It was in the genius of summer that they blew up the statue of Jove among the boomy clouds. It took all day to quieten the sky and then to refill its emptiness again.
The water never formed to mind or voice, like a body wholly body, fluttering its empty sleeves; and yet its mimic motion made constant cry,
Perhaps there is a degree of perception at which what is real and what is imagines are one: a state of clairvoyant observation, accessible or possibly accessible to the poet or, say, the acutest poet.
Truth |
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
The war is relentless: it puts the alternative in a ruthless relief: either to perish, or to catch up with the advanced countries and outdistance them, too, in economic matters.
Vladimir Lenin, fully Vladimir Ilyich Lenin
The Labor Party is a thoroughly bourgeois party, because, although made up of workers, it is led by reactionaries, and the worst kind of reactionaries at that, who act quite in the spirit of the bourgeoisie. It is an organization of the bourgeoisie, which exists to systematically dupe the workers with the aid of the British Noskes and Scheidemanns.
Appearance | Men | Order | Truth |
Vladimir Lenin, fully Vladimir Ilyich Lenin
It is impossible completely to understand Marx’s Capital, and especially it’s first Chapter, without having thoroughly studied and understood the whole of Hegel’s Logic. Consequently, half a century later none of the Marxists understood Marx!!