This site is dedicated to the memory of Dr. Alan William Smolowe who gave birth to the creation of this database.
Alexis de Tocqueville, fully Alexis-Charles-Henri Clérel de Tocqueville
As the principle of the division of labor is more extensively applied, the workman becomes more weak, more narrow-minded, and more dependent.
The most sublime labor of poetry is to give sense and passion to insensate things; and it is characteristic of children to take inanimate things in their hands and talk to them in play as if they were living persons... in the world's childhood, men were by nature sublime poets.
Childhood | Children | Labor | Men | Nature | Passion | Play | Poetry | Sense | Wisdom | World |
If you divorce capital from labor, capital is hoarded, and labor starves.
Employment gives health, sobriety, and morals. Constant employment and well-paid labor produce, in a country like ours, general prosperity, content, and cheerfulness. Thus happy have we seen the country.
Cheerfulness | Happy | Health | Labor | Prosperity | Wisdom |
Sloth (like Rust) consumes faster than Labor wears: the used Key is always bright.
Is not hope of being one day able to purchase and enjoy luxuries a great spur to labor and industry? May not luxury, therefore, produce more than it consumes, if without such a spur people would be, as they are naturally enough inclined to be, lazy and indolent?
Happiness cannot be overtaken by those who pursue her. Happiness is a by-product of cheerful, honest labor dedicated to a worthwhile task… We cannot have happiness unless we give of ourselves… If it is true that we cannot get happiness unless we give it, it is also true that we cannot give it without getting it. Happiness has correctly been compared to a perfume. You cannot pour it on others without getting a few drops on yourself.
Happiness is a by-product of cheerful, honest labor dedicated to a worthwhile task… We cannot have happiness unless we give of ourselves…
Those who labor on the earth are the chosen people of God, if ever he had a chosen people, whose breasts he has made his peculiar deposit for substantial and genuine virtue. It is the focus in which he keeps alive that sacred fire, which otherwise might escape from the face of the earth.
Earth | Focus | God | Labor | People | Sacred | Virtue | Virtue |
A wise and frugal Government, which shall restrain men from injuring one another, shall leave them otherwise free to regulate their own pursuits of industry and improvement, and shall not take from the mouth of labor the bread it has earned. This is the sum of good government.
Good | Government | Improvement | Industry | Labor | Men | Wise |
Like every good teacher, authority should labor to render itself useless.