This site is dedicated to the memory of Dr. Alan William Smolowe who gave birth to the creation of this database.
America can't afford a Supreme Court justice -- let alone a chief justice -- with Roberts' record of eroding the rights of workers and turning back the clock on civil rights. There's no mistaking that he's a stealth right-wing candidate.
I was impressed by the earnestness of your struggle to find a purpose for the life of the individual and of mankind as a whole. In my opinion there can be no reasonable answer if the question is put this way. If we speak of the purpose and goal of an action we mean simply the question: which kind of desire should we fulfill by the action or its consequences or which undesired consequences should be prevented? We can, of course, also speak in a clear way of the goal of an action from the standpoint of a community to which the individual belongs. In such cases the goal of the action has also to do at least indirectly with fulfillment of desires of the individuals which constitute a society.
Politics is the practical exercise of the art of self-government, and somebody must attend to it if we are to have self-government; somebody must study it, and learn the art, and exercise patience and sympathy and skill to bring the multitude of opinions and wishes of self-governing people into such order that some prevailing opinion may be expressed and peaceably accepted. Otherwise, confusion will result either in dictatorship or anarchy. The principal ground of reproach against any American citizen should be that he is not a politician. Everyone ought to be, as Lincoln was.
Government | Important | Peace | People | Rights | Government |
Industry is a Christian obligation, imposed on our race to develop the noblest energies, and insures the highest reward.
Some must watch while some must sleep, so runs the world away.
So, of his gentleness, Knowing I loved my books, he furnished me from mine own library with volumes that I prize above my dukedom.
Business | Cause | Day | Death | Duty | Father | God | Greatness | Guilt | Law | Life | Life | Man | Men | Peace | Purpose | Purpose | Sin | Soul | Teach | Time | War | Business | God | Guilty | Think |
Elizabeth Browning, fully Elizabeth Barrett Browning
There's not a crime but takes its proper change out still in crime if once rung on the counter of this world.
Elizabeth Browning, fully Elizabeth Barrett Browning
"For if I wait," said she, "Till time for roses be,-- for the moss-rose and the musk-rose, maiden-blush and royal-dusk rose,-- “What glory then for me in such a company?-- Roses plenty, roses plenty and one nightingale for twenty?"
I have a card stuck on my refrigerator that shows a woman standing in reverence before an open freezer door, saying, 'Amazing! Perfect ice cubes again.' That's the kind of simple rapture I am talking about. I realize we are not put on this earth to stand around open freezers ranting like idiots about ice cubes. But a good quesiton to ask yourself is this: If perfect ice cubes or an evening sky or an old song on the radio has not made your heart flip-flop lately, why not? What is keeping you from feeling the rapture?
Change | Experience | Failure | Order | People | Safe | Failure |
Someday you're gonna look back on this moment of your life as such a sweet time of grieving. You'll see that you were in mourning and your heart was broken, but your life was changing...
Unlike many girlfriends I did not feel any painful longing sight of young children. (True, I felt the painful longing when they see a good used book shop.)
Wisdom |
There is a haunting phantom called Regret, a shadowy creature robed somewhat like woe, but fairer in the face, whom all men know by her said mien, and eyes forever wet. No heart would seek her; but once having met all take her by the hand, and to and fro they wander through those paths of long ago-- those hallowed ways 'twere wiser to forget.
Elizabeth Browning, fully Elizabeth Barrett Browning
What's this, Aurora Leigh, you write so of the poets and not laugh? Those virtuous liars, dreamers after dark, exaggerators of the sun and moon, and soothsayers in a tea-cup? I write so of the only truth-tellers, now left to God,— the only speakers of essential truth, opposed to relative, comparative, and temporal truths... the only teachers who instruct mankind, from just a shadow on a charnel-wall.
Emanuel Swedenborg, born Emanujel Swedberg
There exists only the present instant... a Now which always and without end is itself new. There is no yesterday nor any tomorrow, but only Now, as it was a thousand years ago and as it will be a thousand years hence.
All my life, I have lived with the feeling that I have been kept from my true place. If the expression "metaphysical exile" had no meaning, my existence alone would afford it one.