This site is dedicated to the memory of Dr. Alan William Smolowe who gave birth to the creation of this database.
It behooves every man who values liberty of conscience for himself, to resist invasions of it in the case of others; or their case may, by change of circumstances, become his own. It behooves him, too, in his own case, to give no example of concession, betraying the common right of independent opinion, by answering questions of faith, which the laws have left between God and himself.
Birth | Education | Genius | Nature | Public | Regard | Rights | Sacred | Happiness |
We should be determined... to sever ourselves from the union we so much value rather than give up the rights of self-government... in which alone we see liberty, safety and happiness.
Bigotry | Discussion | Disease | Education | Enthusiasm | Will |
Thomas Mann, fully Paul Thomas Mann
You have never spent any time in theatrical circles, have you? So you do not know those thespian faces that can embody the features of a Julius Caesar, a Goethe and a Beethoven all in one, but whose owners, the moment they open their mouths, prove to be the most miserable ninnies under the sun.
The question of love is one that cannot be evaded. Whether or not you claim to be interested in it from the moment you are alive you are bound to be concerned with love because love is not just something that happens to you: It is a certain special way of being alive. Love is in fact an intensification of life a completeness a fullness a wholeness of life.
Better | Capacity | Choice | Education | Freedom | Life | Life | Light | Man | People | Perfection | Power | Purpose | Purpose | Relationship | Risk | Spirit | Taste | Wants | World |
The purpose of education is to show us how to define ourselves authentically and spontaneously in relation to our world—not to impose a prefabricated definition of the world, still less an arbitrary definition of ourselves as individuals. The world is made up of the people who are fully alive in it: that is, of the people who can be themselves in it and can enter into a living and fruitful relationship with each other in it. The world is, therefore, more real in proportion as the people in it are able to be more fully and more humanly alive: that is to say, better able to make a lucid and conscious use of their freedom. Basically, this freedom must consist first of all in the capacity to choose their own lives, to find themselves on the deepest possible level. A superficial freedom to wander aimlessly here and there, to taste this or that, to make a choice of distractions … is simply a sham. It claims to be a freedom of choice when it has evaded the basic task of discovering who it is that chooses. It is not free because it is unwilling to face the risk of self-discovery. Freedom of choice is not, itself, the perfection of liberty. But it helps us take our first step toward freedom or slavery, spontaneity or compulsion. The free man is the one whose choices have given him the power to stand on his own feet and determine his own life according to the higher light and spirit that are in him. The slave, in the spiritual order, is the man whose choices have destroyed all spontaneity in him and have delivered him over, bound hand and foot, to his own compulsions, idiosyncrasies and illusions, so that he never does what he really wants to do, but only what he has to do.
My native place was [alive] with old legends, tales, traditions, customs and superstitions; so that in my early youth, even beyond the walls of my own humble roof, they met me in every direction.
Better | Confidence | Education | Esteem | Father | Heart | Imagination | Integrity | Language | Legends | Man | Memory | Mind | Mother | Peculiarity | People | Piety | Present | Rank | Receive | Spirit | Will | Youth | Youth | Blessed | Circumstance | Old |
To find a young fellow that is neither a wit in his own eye, nor a fool in the eye of the world, is a very hard task.
Will Durant, fully William James "Will" Durant
So the story of man runs in a dreary circle, because he is not yet master of the earth that holds him.
Will Rogers, fully William Penn Adair "Will" Rogers
The football season is closing and college life is about over for the year. A few students will stay out the season for the dances, and some of the players may take up a couple of pipe courses and hang around till Spring practice starts, but most of the good ones will go home for the Winter to show the clippings.
Will Rogers, fully William Penn Adair "Will" Rogers
The idea that a tax on something keeps anybody from buying it is a lot of “hooey.” They put it on gasoline all over the country and it hasn’t kept a soul at home a single night or day. You could put a dollar a gallon on and still a pedestrian couldn’t cross the street with safety without armor.
Will Rogers, fully William Penn Adair "Will" Rogers
The more I see of politics...the more I wonder what in the world any man would ever want to take it up for. Then some people wonder why the best men of a community are not the office holders.
With this the [genuine] leader will cause many to turn against him. He will have robbed these many of an object to hold on to, like a bean stalk would feel robbed of comfort if you took away the supporting stick of wood.
Capacity | Criticism | Education | Enough | Future | Humanity | Ideas | Life | Life | Play | Sense | Sound | Thinking | Work | Think |
Walt Disney, fully Walter Elias "Walt" Disney
I don't believe in playing down to children, either in life or in motion pictures. I didn't treat my own youngsters like fragile flowers, and I think no parent should. Children are people, and they should have to reach to learn about things, to understand things, just as adults have to reach if they want to grow in mental stature.
If "freedom" means, first of all, the responsibility of every individual for the rational determination of his own personal, professional and social existence, then there is no greater fear than that of the establishment of general freedom. Without a thoroughgoing solution of this problem there never will be a peace lasting longer than one or two generations. To solve this problem on a social scale, it will take more thinking, more honesty and decency, more conscientiousness, more economic, social and educational changes in social mass living than all the efforts made in previous and future wars and post-war reconstruction programs taken together.
Ability | Anger | Deviation | Education | Fighting | Health | Joy | Love | Pain | People | Pleasure | Truth | World |
Poverty is an anomaly to rich people. It is very difficult to make out why people who want dinner do not ring the bell.
Walter Gropius, fully Walter Adolph Georg Gropius
Let us therefore create a new guild of craftsmen without the class-distinctions that raise an arrogant barrier between craftsmen and artists! Let us desire, conceive, and create the new building of the future together. It will combine architecture, sculpture, and painting in a single form, and will one day rise towards the heavens from the hands of a million workers as the crystalline symbol of a new and coming faith.
Education | Effort | Experience | Important | Integration | Knowledge | Method | Right | Sense | Will |