This site is dedicated to the memory of Dr. Alan William Smolowe who gave birth to the creation of this database.
Fix your eyes on the greatness of Athens as you have it before you day by day, fall in love with her, and when you feel her great, remember that this greatness was won by men with courage, with knowledge of their duty, and with a sense of honor in action... So they gave their bodies to the commonwealth and received, each for his own memory, praise that will never die, and with it the grandest of all sepulchers, not that in which their mortal bones are laid, but a home in the minds of men, where their glory remains fresh to stir to speech or action as the occasion comes by. For the whole earth is the sepulcher of famous men; and their story is not graven only on stone over their native earth, but lives on far away, without visible symbol, woven into the stuff of other men's lives. For you now it remains to rival what they have done and, knowing the secret of happiness to be freedom and the secret of freedom a brave heart, not idly to stand aside from the enemy's onset.
Right or community of blood was not the bond of union between them, so much as interest or compulsion as the case may be.
War |
It is frequently a misfortune to have very brilliant men in charge of affairs. They expect too much of ordinary men.
Justice will not come to Athens until those who are not injured are as indignant as those who are injured.
Woodrow Wilson, fully Thomas Woodrow Wilson
It has never been natural, it has seldom been possible, in this country for learning to seek a place apart and hold aloof from affairs. It is only when society is old, long settled to its ways, confident in habit, and without self-questioning upon any vital point of conduct, that study can affect seclusion and despise the passing interests of the day.
Woodrow Wilson, fully Thomas Woodrow Wilson
One cool judgment is worth a thousand hasty councils. The thing to do is to supply light and not heat. At any rate, if it is heat it ought to be white heat and not sputter, because sputtering heat is apt to spread the fire. There ought, if there is any heat at all, to be that warmth of the heart which makes every man thrust aside his own personal feeling, his own personal interest, and take thought of the welfare and benefit of others.
Woodrow Wilson, fully Thomas Woodrow Wilson
We are glad, now that we see the facts with no veil of false pretense about them, to fight thus for the ultimate peace of the world and for the liberation of its peoples, the German peoples included; for the rights of nations great and small and the privilege of men everywhere to choose their way of life and of obedience. The world must be made safe for democracy....It is a fearful thing to lead this great peaceful people into war, into the most terrible and disastrous of all wars, civilization itself seeming to be in the balance. But the right is more precious than peace, and we shall fight for the things which we have always carried nearest our hearts.
Woodrow Wilson, fully Thomas Woodrow Wilson
We are to beware of all men who would turn the tasks and the necessities of the nation to their own private profit or use them for the building up of private power. United alike in the conception of our duty and in the high resolve to perform it in the face of all men, let us dedicate ourselves to the great task to which we must now set our hand. For myself I beg your tolerance, your countenance and your united aid. The shadows that now lie dark upon our path will soon be dispelled, and we shall walk with the light all about us if we be but true to ourselves—to ourselves as we have wished to be known in the counsels of the world and in the thought of all those who love liberty and justice and the right exalted.
Business | Little | Men | Order | Quiet | Time | World | Business | Learn |
Woodrow Wilson, fully Thomas Woodrow Wilson
I come from the South and I know what war is, for I have seen its terrible wreckage and ruin. It is easy for me as President to declare war. I do not have to fight, and neither do the gentlemen on the Hill who now clamor for it. It is some poor farmer's boy, or the son of some poor widow - who will have to do the fighting and dying.
Woodrow Wilson, fully Thomas Woodrow Wilson
The only reason I read a book is because I cannot see and converse with the man who wrote it.
Government | Opinion | People | War | Government | Old | Think |
Woodrow Wilson, fully Thomas Woodrow Wilson
You cannot become thorough Americans if you think of yourselves in groups. America does not consist of groups. A man who thinks of himself as belonging to a particular national group in America has not yet become an American.
Thornton Wilder, fully Thornton Niven Wilder
The dead don't stay interested in us living people for very long. Gradually, gradually, they let go hold of the earth . . . and the ambitions they had . . . and the things they suffered . . . and the people they loved. They get weaned away from the earth - that's the way I put it - weaned away.
Deference | Order | Solitude | Leadership |
Thorstein Veblen, fully Thorstein Bunde Veblen, born Torsten Bunde Veblen
In point of substantial merit the law school belongs in the modern university no more than a school of fencing or dancing
Order |
Tom Hayden, fully Thomas Emmet "Tom" Hayden
Imagine a nineteenth-century Jane Fonda visiting the Oglala Sioux in the Black Hills before the battle at Little Big Horn. Imagine her examining Crazy Horse's arrows or climbing upon Sitting Bull's horse. Such behavior by a well-known actress no doubt would have infuriated Gen. George Armstrong Custer, but what would the rest of us feel today
Todd Rundgren, fully Todd Harry Rundgren
There are still people who believe in that and wake up every day believing it's possible, and invest their whole selves in that.
Dishonesty | Existence | Order | Sense |