This site is dedicated to the memory of Dr. Alan William Smolowe who gave birth to the creation of this database.
Surely the shortest commencement address in history - and for me one of the most memorable - was that of Dr. Harold E. Hyde, President of New Hampshire's Plymouth State College. He reduced his message to the graduating class to these three ideals: 'Know yourself - Socrates. Control yourself - Cicero; Give yourself - Christ'
Educate your children of self-control, to the habit of holding passion and prejudice and evil tendencies subject to an upright and reasoning will, and you have done much to abolish misery from their future lives and crimes from society.
Character | Children | Control | Evil | Future | Habit | Passion | Prejudice | Self | Self-control | Society | Will |
Thomas Arnold, aka Thomas "Tom" Arnold the Younger
The major fact about history is that in large part it appears criminal.
Dada Vaswani, born Jashan Pahalraj Vaswani
What is the meaning of life? The meaning may not be expressed in words. It transcends the mind and the intellect. The meaning is to be experienced, realized... It is open to everyone who would live according to certain disciplines... The discipline of duty. Life is a field of duty, not a dance of desires... The discipline of service... We are here to help others... The opposite of love is not hate but apathy... The discipline of silence... The meaning of life is to love God and to give the service of love to the suffering children of God. And to the birds and animals who are God’s children as well.
Apathy | Character | Children | Discipline | Duty | God | Hate | Life | Life | Love | Meaning | Mind | Service | Silence | Suffering | Words | God |
Mark Twain, pen name of Samuel Langhorne Clemens
The very ink with which all history is written is merely fluid prejudice.
What a power has Death to awe and hush the voices of this earth! How mute we stand when that presence confronts us, and we look upon the silence he has wrought in a human life! We can only gaze, and bow our heads, and creep with our broken stammering utterances under the shelter of some great word which God has spoken, and in which we see through the history of human sorrow the outstretching and overshadowing of the eternal arms.
Awe | Death | Earth | Eternal | God | History | Life | Life | Power | Silence | Sorrow | Wisdom | God |
Orlando A. Battistam, fully Orlando Aloysius Battista, aka O.A. Battista
The best inheritance a parent can give his children is a few minutes of his time each day.
Bernard Baruch, fully Bernard Mannes Baruch
There is no more dangerous misconception than this which misconstrues the arms race as the cause rather than a symptom of the tensions and divisions which threaten nuclear war. If the history of the past fifty years teaches us anything, it is that peace does not follow disarmament - disarmament follows peace.
Be more prudent for your children than perhaps you have been for yourself. When they, too, are parents they will imitate you, and each of you will have prepared happy generations who will transmit, together with your memory, the worship of your wisdom.
Children | Happy | Memory | Parents | Will | Wisdom | Worship |
Ludwig Börne, fully Karl Ludwig Börne
Governments which suppress freedom of speech... act like children who shut their eyes in order not to be seen.
Children | Freedom of speech | Freedom | Order | Speech | Wisdom |