This site is dedicated to the memory of Dr. Alan William Smolowe who gave birth to the creation of this database.
Of liberty I would say that, in the whole plenitude of its extent, it is unobstructed action according to our will. But rightful liberty is unobstructed action according to our will within limits drawn around us by the equal rights of others. I do not add 'within the limits of the law,' because law is often but the tyrant's will, and always so when it violates the right of an individual.
The Lord did not create suffering. Pain and death came into the world with the fall of man. But after man had chosen suffering in preference to the joys of union with God, the Lord turned suffering itself into a way by which man could come to the perfect knowledge of God.
Applause | Error | Life | Life | Logic | Perfection | Success |
The first step toward finding God, Who is Truth, is to discover the truth about myself: and if I have been in error, this first step to truth is the discovery of my error.
Action | Courage | Death | Destroy | Experience | Hope | Instinct | Life | Life | Logic | Love | Man | Need | Order | Peace | Power | Question | Sense | Taste | War | Will | Wise | Work | World | Learn |
There is a pervasive form of contemporary violence to which the idealist... most easily succumbs: activism and overwork. The rush and pressure of modern life are a form, perhaps the most common form, of its innate violence. To allow oneself to be carried away by the multitude of conflicting concerns, to surrender to too many demands, to commit oneself to too many projects, to want to help everyone in everything, is to succumb to violence... It destroys the fruitfulness of one's own work, because it kills the root of inner wisdom which makes work fruitful.
Abstract | Experience | Language | Logic | Mathematics | Necessity |
If there is a case for mental events and mental states, it must be that the positing of them, like the positing of molecules, has some indirect systematic efficacy in the development of theory.
I think my work has to do with a sense that we are attempting, all the time, to create a logical, rational path through the day. To the left and right there are an amazing set of distractions that we usually can't afford to follow. But the poet is willing to stop anywhere… And it's that willingness to slow down and examine the mysterious bits of fluff in our lives that is the poet's interest.
A tale should be judicious, clear, succinct; the language plain, and incidents well link'd; tell not as new what ev'ry body knows; and, new or old, still hasten to a close.
Andrew Jackson was the first one to think up the idea to promise everybody that if they will vote for you, you will give them an office when you get it, and the more times they vote for you, the bigger the office.
I don't know what's going to be done about it. One time the Government split up Standard Oil into 31 parts, and in two years each one of the 31 was bigger than the original. So it looked like they just thrived on being split up.
Humor |
It was the luckiest thing that ever happened to me. Betty [his wife] is to blame for it all. Whatever I am or have accomplished, I owe to Betty. I ain't got no sense. My wife made me what I am. In other words-local girl makes good in the city-makes good man.
Humor | People | Sense | Understand |
Yet, so strong is the hold which the insidious evil of Communism secures upon its disciples, that I could still say to someone at that time: I know that I am leaving the winning side for the losing side, but it is better to die on the losing side than to live under Communism.
Daughter | Experience | Father | Logic | Myth | Question | Reason | Soul | Vision | Will | Child |
I am quite serious when I say that I do not believe there are, on the whole earth besides, so many intensified bores as in these United States. No man can form an adequate idea of the real meaning of the word, without coming here.
Logic | Present | Will | Loss | Understand |
Improve memory and attention with scientific brain games.
How convenient it would be to many of our great men and great families of doubtful origin, could they have the privilege of the heroes of yore, who, whenever their origin was involved in obscurity, modestly announced themselves descended from a god.
Good | Humor | Laughter | Companionship |
Our model citizen is a sophisticate who before puberty understands how to produce a baby, but who at the age of thirty will not know how to produce a potato.
Efficiency | Logic | Power | Restraint | System |