This site is dedicated to the memory of Dr. Alan William Smolowe who gave birth to the creation of this database.
"The Columbia faculty was not, of course, composed wholly of young skeptics and esthetes. By any count of academic noses, they were a small minority." - Whittaker Chambers, born Jay Vivian Chambers, aka Jay David Whittaker Chambers
"The mass of Americans, who vehemently made known their views in (and during) a recent general election, know perfectly well that they are not living in a reign of terror and that they seldom look behind a door for anything more frightening than an umbrella." - Whittaker Chambers, born Jay Vivian Chambers, aka Jay David Whittaker Chambers
"There has never been a society or a nation without God. But history is cluttered with the wreckage of nations that became indifferent to God, and died." - Whittaker Chambers, born Jay Vivian Chambers, aka Jay David Whittaker Chambers
"To me many of my colleagues at Time, basically kind and intensely well-meaning people, seemed to me as charming and as removed from reality as fish in a fish bowl. To me they seemed to know little about the forces that were shaping the history of our time. To me they seemed like little children, knowing and clever little children, but knowing and clever chiefly about trifling things while they were extremely resistant to finding out about anything else." - Whittaker Chambers, born Jay Vivian Chambers, aka Jay David Whittaker Chambers
"Under the influence of politicos, the masses blame the powers that be for wars. In the first world war it was the munition magnates, in the second the Psychopath General. This is shifting the responsibility. The blame for the war belongs only and alone to the same masses of people who have all the means of preventing wars. The same masses of people who — partly through indolent passivity, partly through their active behavior — make possible the catastrophes from which they themselves suffer most horribly. To emphasize this fault of the masses, to give them the full responsibility, means taking them seriously. On the other hand, to pity the masses as a poor victim means treating them like a helpless child. The first is the attitude of the genuine fighter for freedom, the latter is the attitude of the politico." - Wilhelm Reich
"Unless we proceed cautiously, there might well arise a few generations of mystics who conceive of the orgone metaphysically, divorced from non-living nature and who do not comprehend it from the standpoint of natural science. And it seems to me that we have more than enough mysticism as it is." - Wilhelm Reich
"Beginning my studies, the first step pleas'd me so much, the mere fact, consciousness—these forms—the power of motion, the least insect or animal—the senses—eyesight; the first step, I say, aw'd me and pleas'd me so much, I have never gone, and never wish'd to go, any farther, but stop and loiter all my life, to sing it in extatic songs." - Walt Whitman, fully Walter "Walt" Whitman
"Get a good idea and stay with it. Dog it, and work at it until it's done right." - Walt Whitman, fully Walter "Walt" Whitman
"O past! O happy life! O songs of joy! In the air, in the woods, over fields, loved! loved! loved! loved! loved! But my mate no more, no more with me! We two together no more." - Walt Whitman, fully Walter "Walt" Whitman
"If you have to prove you are worthy of credit, your credit is already gone." - Walter Bagehot
"Popular religion in our midst, however, has greatly reduced the notion of obedience, so that it has become either a virtue too much celebrated or a burden too much dreaded." - Walter Brueggemann
"That, however, does not render the poetry as a failure or as an irrelevance. It only affirms that alternatives to the lethal reductionism of empire require imagination and courage and staying power. In that ancient world, it was required that old Jerusalem be relinquished and new Jerusalem be undertaken. It is no less required now that there be relinquishing and undertaking. Those who act in this way will do so at the behest of the poets who may eventually be seen as Spirit led." - Walter Brueggemann
"Franklin D. Roosevelt is no crusader. He is no tribune of the people. He is no enemy of entrenched privilege. He is a pleasant man who, without any important qualifications for the office, would very much like to be President." - Walter Lippmann
"In a democracy, the opposition is not only tolerated as constitutional, but must be maintained because it is indispensable." - Walter Lippmann
"Society can only exist on the basis that there is some amount of polished lying and that no-one says exactly what he thinks." - Walter Lippmann
"The principles of the good society call for a concern with an order of being -- which cannot be proved existentially to the sense organs -- where it matters supremely that the human person is inviolable, that reason shall regulate the will, that truth shall prevail over error." - Walter Lippmann
"The search for moral guidance which shall not depend upon external authority has invariably ended in the acknowledgment of some new authority." - Walter Lippmann
"The world is inherent in the United Nations as an oak tree is in an acorn." - Walter Lippmann
"In a sense it might even be said that our failure is to form habits: for, after all, habit is relative to a stereotyped world, and meantime it is only the roughness of the eye that makes two persons, things, situations, seem alike." - Walter Pater, fully Walter Horatio Pater
"That's the course that the first President Bush took in the Gulf War, and that's where Paul Wellstone stood, and that's where I will stand in the United States Senate." - Walter Mondale, fully Walter Frederick "Fritz" Mondale
"Fame often rests at first upon something accidental, and often, too, is swept away, or for a time removed; but neither genius nor glory, is conferred at once, nor do they glimmer and fall, like drops in a grotto, at a shout." - Walter Savage Landor
"Kingship is a profession which has produced both the most illustrious and the most contemptible of the human race." - Walter Savage Landor
"Most people get interested in stocks when everyone else is. The time to get interested is when no one else is. You can’t buy what is popular and do well." - Warren Buffett, fully Warren Edward Buffett, aka Oracle of Omaha
"The worst sort of business is one that grows rapidly, requires significant capital to engender the growth, and then earns little or no money. Think airlines. Here a durable competitive advantage has proven elusive ever since the days of the Wright Brothers. Indeed, if a farsighted capitalist had been present at Kitty Hawk, he would have done his successors a huge favor by shooting Orville down." - Warren Buffett, fully Warren Edward Buffett, aka Oracle of Omaha
"What motivates most gold purchasers is their belief that the ranks of the fearful will grow. During the past decade that belief has proved correct. Beyond that, the rising price has on its own generated additional buying enthusiasm, attracting purchasers who see the rise as validating an investment thesis. As 'bandwagon' investors join any party, they create their own truth — for a while." - Warren Buffett, fully Warren Edward Buffett, aka Oracle of Omaha
"Within sorrow is grace. When we come close to those things that break us down, we touch those things that also break us open. And in that breaking open, we uncover our true nature." - Wayne Muller
"And I say it's not. I tell them these men and women are over there because our country sent them, and we have the absolute necessity to try to bring them as much happiness as we can." - Wayne Newton, "Mr. Las Vegas"
"Again I resume the long lesson: how small a thing can be pleasing, how little in this hard world it takes to satisfy the mind and bring it to its rest." - Wendell Berry
"If we are looking for insurance against want and oppression, we will find it only in our neighbors' prosperity and goodwill and, beyond that, in the good health of our worldly places, our homelands. If we were sincerely looking for a place of safety, for real security and success, then we would begin to turn to our communities - and not the communities simply of our human neighbors but also of the water, earth, and air, the plants and animals, all the creatures with whom our local life is shared." - Wendell Berry
"If you start a conversation with the assumption that you are right or that you must win, obviously it is difficult to talk. He is author of the Citizenship Papers and answered questions at a Washington DC book store." - Wendell Berry
"In a society in which nearly everybody is dominated by somebody else's mind or by a disembodied mind, it becomes increasingly difficult to learn the truth about the activities of governments and corporations, about the quality or value of products, or about the health of one's own place and economy. In such a society, also, our private economies will depend less and less upon the private ownership of real, usable property, and more and more upon property that is institutional and abstract, beyond individual control, such as money, insurance policies, certificates of deposit, stocks, and shares. And as our private economies become more abstract, the mutual, free helps and pleasures of family and community life will be supplanted by a kind of displaced or placeless citizenship and by commerce with impersonal and self-interested suppliers... Thus, although we are not slaves in name, and cannot be carried to market and sold as somebody else's legal chattels, we are free only within narrow limits. For all our talk about liberation and personal autonomy, there are few choices that we are free to make. What would be the point, for example, if a majority of our people decided to be self-employed? The great enemy of freedom is the alignment of political power with wealth. This alignment destroys the commonwealth - that is, the natural wealth of localities and the local economies of household, neighborhood, and community - and so destroys democracy, of which the commonwealth is the foundation and practical means." - Wendell Berry
"People are fed by the food industry, which pays no attention to health, and are treated by the health industry, which pays no attention to food." - Wendell Berry
"This new war, like the previous one, would be a test of the power of machines against people and places; whatever its causes and justifications, it would make the world worse. This was true of that new war, and it has been true of every new war since." - Wendell Berry
"This religion that scorned the beauty and goodness of this world was a puzzle to me." - Wendell Berry
"To husband is to use with care, to keep, to save, to make last, to conserve. Old usage tells us that there is a husbandry also of the land, of the soil, of the domestic plants and animals - obviously because of the importance of these things to the household. And there have been times, one of which is now, when some people have tried to practice a proper human husbandry of the nondomestic creatures in recognition of the dependence of our households and domestic life upon the wild world. Husbandry is the name of all practices that sustain life by connecting us conservingly to our places and our world; it is the art of keeping tied all the strands in the living network that sustains us. And so it appears that most and perhaps all of industrial agriculture's manifest failures are the result of an attempt to make the land produce without husbandry." - Wendell Berry
"We have forgotten that Vietnam, and Iraq resent being invaded and know the ground better than we do." - Wendell Berry
"A craftsman knows in advance what the finished result will be, while the artist knows only what it will be when he has finished it. But it is unbecoming in an artist to talk about inspiration; that is the reader's business." - W. H. Auden, fully Wystan Hugh Auden
"Let us honor if we can the vertical man, though we value none but the horizontal one" - W. H. Auden, fully Wystan Hugh Auden
"The dark world is going to submit to its present treatment just as long as it must and not one moment longer." - W. E. B. Du Bois, fully William Edward Burghardt Du Bois
"I would that my photographs might be, not the coverage of a news event, but an indictment of war – the brutal corrupting viciousness of its doing to the minds and bodies of men; and, that my photographs might be a powerful emotional catalyst to the reasoning which would help this vile and criminal stupidity from beginning again." - W. Eugene Smith, fully William Eugene Smith
"I... made brash, dashing interpretive photographs which were overly clever and with too much technique… with great depth of field, very little depth of feeling, and with considerable 'success'." - W. Eugene Smith, fully William Eugene Smith
"Birth is the sudden opening of a window, through which you look out upon a stupendous prospect. For what has happened? A miracle. You have exchanged nothing for the possibility of everything." - W. Macneile Dixon, fully William Macneile Dixon
"Industry is the only true source of wealth, and there was no industry in Rome. By day the Ostia road was crowded with carts and muleteers, carrying to the great city the silks and spices of the East, the marble of Asia Minor, the timber of the Atlas, the grain of Africa and Egypt; and the carts brought nothing out but loads of dung. That was their return cargo. London turns dirt into gold. Rome turned gold into dirt." - W. Winwood Reade, fully William Winwood Reade
"All our lives we fought against exalting the individual, against the elevation of the single person, and long ago we were over and done with the business of a hero, and here it comes up again: the glorification of one personality. This is not good at all. I am just like everybody else." - Vladimir Lenin, fully Vladimir Ilyich Lenin
"If you want to help the “masses” and win the sympathy and support of the “masses,” you should not fear difficulties, or pinpricks, chicanery, insults and persecution from the “leaders,” but must absolutely work wherever the masses are to be found." - Vladimir Lenin, fully Vladimir Ilyich Lenin
"In the beginning we had to teach the workers the ABC, both in the literal and in the figurative senses. Now the standard of political literacy has risen so gigantically that we can and should concentrate all our efforts on the more direct Social-Democratic objectives aimed at giving an organized direction to the revolutionary stream." - Vladimir Lenin, fully Vladimir Ilyich Lenin
"No natural science can hold its own in the struggle against the onslaught of bourgeois ideas and the restoration of the bourgeois world outlook unless it stands on solid philosophical ground. In order to hold his own in this struggle and carry it to a victorious finish, the natural scientist must be a modern materialist, a conscious adherent of the materialism represented by Marx, i.e., he must be a dialectical materialist." - Vladimir Lenin, fully Vladimir Ilyich Lenin
"Stalin is too rude and this defect, although quite tolerable in our midst and in dealing among us Communists, becomes intolerable in a Secretary-General. That is why I suggest that the comrades think about a way of removing Stalin from that post and appointing another man in his stead." - Vladimir Lenin, fully Vladimir Ilyich Lenin
"The class-conscious proletariat can give its consent to a revolutionary war, which would really justify revolutionary defensism, only on condition: (a) that the power pass to the proletariat and the poorest sections of the peasants aligned with the proletariat; (b) that all annexations be renounced in deed and not in word; (c) that a complete break be effected in actual fact with all capitalist interests." - Vladimir Lenin, fully Vladimir Ilyich Lenin