This site is dedicated to the memory of Dr. Alan William Smolowe who gave birth to the creation of this database.
Melvin Tolson, fully Melvin Beaunorus Tolson
The white man’s civilization with its inhuman economic competition and rugged individualism has produced millions of physical and mental wrecks. It has produced enough vices to fill Dante’s hell. Nine-tenths of the people who reach forty are suffering from shattered nerves.
Civilization | Competition | Enough | Hell | Man | People | Suffering | Wisdom |
The farmers are the founders of civilization and prosperity.
Civilization | Prosperity | Wisdom |
If all Earth history is compressed into one “day”, the sea is mixed two thousand times in every “minute” of it, distributing warmth and energy evenly round our water-cooled and air-conditioned planet. Every eighteen “seconds” on this collapsed time scale, the world’s rivers dump enough dissolved salts into the sea to double its concentration, but this nevertheless remains around a resolute and reasonable 3 per cent. It is vital that this should be so, because few living cells can survive a salinity which exceeds, even for just a few seconds, a value of 6 per cent. Half the living matter in the world is still found in the sea, and that fact alone seems to make the chemical regulation not only necessary, but possible.
Day | Earth | Energy | Enough | History | Regulation | Time | Wisdom | World | Value |
Throughout history there has never been an evitable war. The greatest danger of war always lies in the widespread acceptance of its inevitability.
H. G. Wells, fully Herbert George Wells
Human history is, in essence, a history of ideas.
The history of Christendom would have been far happier if we all had remembered one rule of intelligence - not to believe a thing more strongly at the end of a bitter argument than at the beginning, not to believe it with the energy of the opposition rather than one's own.
Argument | Beginning | Energy | History | Intelligence | Opposition | Rule | Wisdom |
The whole history of civilization is strewn with creeds and institutions which were invaluable at first, and deadly afterward.
Civilization | History |
The whole history of civilization is strewn with creeds and institutions which were invaluable at first and deadly afterwards.
Civilization | History |
James Baldwin, fully James Arthur Baldwin
People are trapped in history and history is trapped in them.
If we fight a war and win it with H-bombs, what history will remember is not the ideals we were fighting for but the methods we used to accomplish them. These methods will be compared to the warfare of Genghis Khan who ruthlessly killed every last inhabitant of Persia.
Upon the sacredness of property civilization itself depends – the right of the laborer to this hundred dollars in the savings bank, and equally the right of the millionaire to his millions.
Civilization | Property | Right |
Nicolas Chamfort,fully Sébastien-Roch Nicolas De Chamfort, also spelled Nicholas
Almost the whole of history is nothing but a series of horrors.