This site is dedicated to the memory of Dr. Alan William Smolowe who gave birth to the creation of this database.
W. W. Sawyer, fully Walter Warwick Sawyer
Most teachers who are honest with themselves are forced to admit that, in the main, the class would make the same progress if the teacher were not there at all, the clever remaining clever and the dull remaining dull.
Controversy | Discovery | Ideas | Important | Music | Problems | Discovery |
W. E. H. Lecky, fully William Edward Hartpole Lecky
There have certainly been many periods in history when virtue was more rare than under the Caesars; but there has probably never been a period when vice was more extravagant or uncontrolled.
Doubt | Feelings | Ideas | Little | Order | Purity | World |
Vita Sackville-West, fully The Hon Victoria Mary Sackville-West, Lady Nicolson
All her lovers have passed, her beautiful lovers have passed, the young and eager men that fought for her arrogant hand, and the only voice which endures to mourn for her at the last
Reality |
The major men that is different. They are characters beyond reality, composed thereof. They are the fictive man created out of men. They are men but artificial men.
In that November off Tehuantepec, the slopping of the sea grew still one night and in the morning summer hued the deck and made one think of rosy chocolate and gilt umbrellas.
The wind had seized the tree and ha, and ha, it held the shivering, the shaken limbs, then bathed its body in the leaping lake.
Ideas |
Vladimir Lenin, fully Vladimir Ilyich Lenin
The crisis in Germany has only begun. It will inevitably end in the transfer of political power to the German proletariat. The Russian proletariat is following events with the keenest attention and enthusiasm. Now even the blindest workers in the various countries will see that the Bolsheviks were right in basing their whole tactics on the support of the world workers' revolution.
Aims | Ideas | Individual | Method | Organization | Present | Struggle | System | Work |
Vladimir Lenin, fully Vladimir Ilyich Lenin
Without a revolutionary theory there cannot be a revolutionary movement.
Ideas | Literature | Power |
Vladimir Lenin, fully Vladimir Ilyich Lenin
Dialectics is the teaching which shows how Opposites can be and how they happen to be (how they become) identical,—under what conditions they are identical, becoming transformed into one another,—why the human mind should grasp these opposites not as dead, rigid, but as living, conditional, mobile, becoming transformed into one another.
Vladimir Lenin, fully Vladimir Ilyich Lenin
No revolution is worth anything unless it can defend itself.
Vladimir Nabokov, fully Vladimir Vladimirovich Nabokov
A sense of security, of well-being, of summer warmth pervades my memory. That robust reality makes a ghost of the present. The mirror brims with brightness; a bumblebee has entered the room and bumps against the ceiling. Everything is as it should be, nothing will ever change, nobody will ever die.
Vladimir Lenin, fully Vladimir Ilyich Lenin
1) Things exist independently of our consciousness, independently of our perceptions, outside of us, for it is beyond doubt that alizarin existed in coal tar yesterday and it is equally beyond doubt that yesterday we knew nothing of the existence of this alizarin and received no sensations from it. 2) There is definitely no difference in principle between the phenomenon and the thing-in-itself, and there can be no such difference. The only difference is between what is known and what is not yet known. And philosophical inventions of specific boundaries between the one and the other, inventions to the effect that the thing-in-itself is “beyond” phenomena (Kant), or that we can and must fence ourselves off by some philosophical partition from the problem of a world which in one part or another is still unknown but which exists outside us (Hume)—all this is the sheerest nonsense, Schrulle, crotchet, invention. 3) In the theory of knowledge, as in every other branch of science, we must think dialectically, that is, we must not regard our knowledge as ready-made and unalterable, but must determine how knowledge emerges from ignorance, how incomplete, inexact knowledge becomes more complete and more exact.
Proletariat | Reality |
Vladimir Lenin, fully Vladimir Ilyich Lenin
To carry on a war for the overthrow of the international bourgeoisie, a war which is a hundred times more difficult, protracted and complex than the most stubborn of ordinary wars between states, and to renounce in advance any change of tack, or any utilization of a conflict of interests (even if temporary) among one’s enemies, or any conciliation or compromise with possible allies (even if they are temporary, unstable, vacillating, or conditional allies)—is that not ridiculous in the extreme?”
Equality | Family | Ideas | Principles | Struggle | Weapons | World |
Vladimir Lenin, fully Vladimir Ilyich Lenin
Modern militarism is the result of capitalism. In both its forms it is the vital expression of capitalism—as a military force used by the capitalist states in their external conflicts and as a weapon in the hands of the ruling classes for suppressing every kind of movement, economic and political, of the proletariat.
Ideas |
Vladimir Lenin, fully Vladimir Ilyich Lenin
The Bolsheviks could not have retained power for two and a half months, let alone two and a half years, without the most rigorous and truly iron discipline in our Party.
Ideas |