This site is dedicated to the memory of Dr. Alan William Smolowe who gave birth to the creation of this database.
"It is boorish to give with a bad grace. If the act of giving entails an effort, what matters the additional cost of a smile?" - Jean de La Bruyère
"Of all the animals on earth, man has shown himself to be the most cruel and brutal. He is the only animal that will create instruments of death for his own destruction. Man is the only animal on all the earth that has ever been known to burn its young as a sacrifice to appease the wrath of some imaginary deity. He is the only one that will build homes, towns, and cities at such a cost in sacrifice and suffering and turn around and destroy them in war." - James William Fulbright
"How much have cost us the evils that never happened!" - Thomas Jefferson
"Never put off till to-morrow what you can do to-day. Never trouble another for what you can do yourself. Never spend your money before you have earned it. Never buy what you do not want because it is cheap. Pride costs more than hunger, thirst and cold. We seldom report of having eaten too little. Nothing is troublesome that we do willingly. How much pain evils have cost us that have never happened! Take things always by the smooth handle. When angry, count ten before you speak, if very angry, count a hundred." - Thomas Jefferson
"The path we have chosen for the present is full of hazards, as all paths are... The cost of freedom is always high, but Americans have always paid it. And one path we shall never choose, and that is the path of surrender, or submission." - Otto Kahn, fully Otto Hermann Kahn
"Propriety of thought and propriety of diction are commonly found together. Obscurity and affection are the two great faults of style. Obscurity of expression generally springs from confusion of ideas; and the same wish to dazzle, at any cost, which produces affection in the manner of a writer, is likely to produce sophistry in his reasoning." -
"The things are most dear to us which have cost us most." - Michel de Montaigne, fully Lord Michel Eyquem de Montaigne
"Forgive an enemy and you win friends without cost." - Publius Syrus
"People generally do not appreciate what they do not suffer for. A thing is held to be cheap if it did not cost dearly." - Fred Robert Tiffany
"How little does a smile cost!" - Jean de La Bruyère
"You do not need to be loved, not at the cost of yourself. The single relationship that is truly central and crucial in a life is the relationship to the self. Of all the people you will know in a lifetime, you are the only one you will never lose." - Jo Coudert
"The "price of peace" can never reach such dimensions as to equal the smallest fraction of war's deadly cost." - Abba Eban, born Aubrey Solomon Meir Eban
"Pollution is nothing but resources we're not harvesting. We allow them to disperse because we've been ignorant of their value. But if we got onto a planning planning basis, the government could trap pollutants in the stacks and spillages and get back more money than this would cost out of the stockpiled chemistries they'd be collecting. Margaret Mead gets cross with me when I talk like this because she says people are doing some very important things because they're worried and excited and I'm going to make them relax and stop doing those things. But we're dealing with something much bigger than we're accustomed to understanding, we're on a very large course indeed. You speak of racism, for example, and I tell you that there's no such thing as race. The point is that racism is the product of tribalism and ignorance and both are falling victim to communications and world-around literacy." - Buckminster Fuller, fully Richard Buckminster "Bucky" Fuller
"The bravest and best men of all times have perished in the struggles against tyranny and despotism, and free government has never secured even a feeble existence save at a most fearful cost. The experiment of republican government in our own country is similar to that of all others. Here, however, liberty has won her grandest triumphs. Here freedom is enthroned securely and is the unchallenged boon of every inhabitant. But we contemplate the cost of victory with mournful and pitying hearts." - Harrison Eugene Havens
"Even the happiest choice, where favoring heaven has equal love and easy fortune given, think not, the husband gained, that all is done; the prize of happiness must still be won; and, oft, the careless find it to their cost, the lover in the husband may be lost; the graces might, alone, his heart allure; they and the virtues, meeting, must secure." - George Lyttleton, 1st Baron Lyttleton of Frankley
"The richer your friends, the more they will cost you." - Elisabeth Marbury, aka Bessy
"It will cost something to be religious: it will cost more to be not so." - John M. Mason, fully John Mitchell Mason
"Every step forward is made at the cost of mental and physical pain to someone." - Friedrich Nietzsche, fully Friedrich Wilhelm Nietzsche
"The uprisings of 1789 cost Louis XVI some prerogatives, but four years later a valueless currency cost him his head. German's inflation of the 1920's laid the foundation upon which Hitler built. Indeed, a runaway inflation is the goal of revolutionists. The maxim of that apostle of revolution, Lenin, was "Debauch the currency!"" - Edgar Monsanto Queeny
"You build on cost and borrow on value." - Paul Reichmann
"Wisdom is a fox who, after long hunting, will at last cost you the pains to dig out; it is a cheese, which, by how much the richer, has the thicker, the homelier, and the coarser coat; and whereof to a judicious palate, the maggots are best. It is a sack posset, wherein the deeper you go, you’ll find it the sweeter. Wisdom is a hen, whose cackling we must value and consider, because it is attended with an egg. But lastly, it is a nut, which, unless you choose with judgment, may cost you a tooth, and pay you with nothing but a worm." - Jonathan Swift, pen names, M.B. Drapier, Lemuel Gulliver, Isaac Bickerstaff
"Things in which we do not take joy are either a burden upon our minds to be got rid of at any cost; or they are useful, and therefore in temporary and partial relation to us, becoming burdensome when their utility is lost; or they are like wandering vagabonds, loitering for a moment on the outskirts of our recognition, and then passing on. A thing is only completely our own when it is a thing of joy to us." -
"Good teachers are costly, but bad teachers cost more." - Bob Talbert
"Not prayer without faith, nor faith without prayer, but prayer in faith, is the cost of spiritual gifts and graces." - Henry Clay Trumbull
"War is just like bush-clearing – the moment you stop, the jungle comes back even thicker, but for a little while you can plant and grow a crop in the ground you have won at such a terrible cost." - Kenneth Kaunda, fully Kenneth David Kaunda
"Being a Christian in American doesn’t require a great cost. You can be Christian and fully participate in the secular culture. I have a sense that, more and more, being a Christian in this country will require a choice. The Christian will have to be willing to make big sacrifices… Right now, in this culture, you can have your cake and eat it too. But that is an illusion. You cannot be a fat sprinter. If you want to spring to the Kingdom, you had better be lean." - Henri Nouwen, fully Henri Jozef Machiel Nouwen
"We desire unity of religion but not when purchased at the cost of the unity of truth." - Fulton Sheen, fully Archbishop Fulton John Sheen
"Apparently, a democracy is a place where numerous elections are held at great cost without issues and with interchangeable candidates." - Gore Vidal, fully Eugene Luther Gore Vidal
"The truly moral person is the one who does the right thing without any promise of reward or threat of punishment - without engaging in a cost-benefit analysis." - Alan Morton Dershowitz
"One of the things a wise man knows and a foolish man does not is that such things as social position, wealth, and the good opinion of the world, are too dearly bought at the cost of health or friendship or family ties." - Philippa Foot, fully Philippa Ruth Foot, née Bosanquet
"There is but one rule of conduct for a man - to do the right thing. The cost may be dear in money, in friends, in influence, in labor, in a prolonged and painful sacrifice, but the cost not to do right is far more dear: You pay in the integrity of your manhood, in your honor, in strength of character; and, for a timely gain, you barter the infinite." - Archer G. Jones
"Of all things acquired through life, the one possession we hope to never attain is regret. For that is a possession which cannot be sold or traded for anything at any cost." - Aaron Waldie
"How could sincerity be a condition of friendship? A taste for truth at any cost is a passion which spares nothing." - Albert Camus
"If this world affords true happiness, it is to be found in a home where love and confidence increase with the years, where the necessities of life come without severe strain, where luxuries enter only after their cost has been carefully considered." - Alfred Edward Newton
"True heroism is remarkably sober, very un-dramatic. It is not the urge to surpass all others at whatever cost, but the urge to serve others at whatever cost." - Arthur Ashe
"Life is a process, a seamless garment, and there is a universal nexus connecting all phenomena so that every part pulsates sensitively to every other part. The truth is inexpressibly deeper than a harmony-between-parts relationship, but this can only be experienced mystically. Pragmatically, on the plane of our sensory experiencing, love is the witness of the unseen yet ever potent law of unity. The root of all sins is to be blind to this fundamental fact regarding the inner nature of the universe. If love rules us, no sins can be committed. En passant we may say that the doctrine of karma is a phenomenal expression of the organic unity of the universe. The individual cannot gain at the cost of the whole. Pain and suffering check us when harmony is disturbed. Love restores harmony and registers through us a deep compassion which dissolves our separative carapaces and releases our energies for impersonal service." - Arthur W Osborn
"Life is a process, a seamless garment, and there is a universal nexus connecting all phenomena so that every part pulsates sensitively to every other part. The truth is inexpressibly deeper than a harmony-between-parts relationship, but this can only be experienced mystically. Pragmatically, on the plane of our sensory experiencing, love is the witness of the unseen yet ever potent law of unity. The root of all sins is to be blind to this fundamental fact regarding the inner nature of the universe. IF love rules us, no sins can be committed. En passant we may say that the doctrine of karma is a phenomenal expression of the organic unity of the universe. The individual cannot gain at the cost of the whole. Pain and suffering check us when harmony is disturbed. Love restores harmony and registers through us a deep compassion which dissolves our separative carapaces and releases our energies for impersonal service." - Arthur W Osborn
"Kind words do not cost much. Yet they accomplish much." - Blaise Pascal
"He that has energy enough in his constitution to root out a vice should go a little further, and try to plant a virtue in its place; otherwise he will have his labor to renew. A strong soil that has produced weeds may be made to produce wheat with far less difficulty than it would cost to make it produce nothing." - Charles Caleb Colton
"No man can purchase his virtue too dear, for it is the only thing whose value must ever increase with the price it has cost us. Our integrity is never worth so much as when we have parted with our all to keep it." - Charles Caleb Colton
"Remember: one lie does not cost you one truth but the truth." - Christian Friedrich Hebbel
"To the diplomat of the middle of the twentieth century, war is something that must be averted at almost any cost." - Dag Hammarskjöld