This site is dedicated to the memory of Dr. Alan William Smolowe who gave birth to the creation of this database.
The adult world is... built on the shifting grounds of friendship and competition. The double message of this society and economy are to get along and get ahead. We want our children to fit in and to stand out. We rarely address the conflict between these goals.
Character | Children | Competition | Goals | Society | World | Friendship | Society |
John H. Vincent, fully John Heyl Vincent
I will this day try to live a simple, sincere, and serene life; repelling promptly every thought of discontent, anxiety, discouragement, impurity, and self-seeking; cultivating cheerfulness, magnanimity, charity, and the habit of holy silence; exercising economy in expenditure, carefulness in conversation, diligence in appointed service, fidelity to every trust, and a childlike trust in God.
Anxiety | Anxiety | Character | Charity | Cheerfulness | Conversation | Day | Diligence | Discontent | Fidelity | God | Habit | Life | Life | Magnanimity | Self | Service | Silence | Thought | Trust | Will | Thought |
François Fénelon, fully Francois de Salignac de la Mothe-Fénelon
God, who is liberal in all his other gifts, shows us, by the wise economy of his providence, how circumspect we ought to be in the management of our time, for he never gives us two moments together.
God | Providence | Time | Wisdom | Wise |
If we care about the land, it will be necessary to redefine whole economies, not just the farm economy. A complex, solid economy could certainly grow around a policy of cooperation with natural environments. Why haven’t we proposed such policies - on a grand a scale as national defense - when our own species is at stake?
Care | Cooperation | Defense | Land | Policy | Will | Wisdom |
A good wife is heaven’s last, best gift to man - his gem of many virtues, his casket of jewels; her voice is sweet music, her smiles his brightest day, her kiss the guardian of his innocence, her arms the pale of his safety, her industry his surest wealth, her economy his safest steward, her lips his faithful counselors, her bosom the softest pillow of his care.
Care | Day | Good | Heaven | Industry | Innocence | Man | Music | Wealth | Wife | Wisdom |
Johann Georg Ritter von Zimmermann
Time is never more misspent than while we declaim against the want of it; all our actions are then tinctured with peevishness. The yoke of life is certainly the least oppressive when we carry it with good-humor; and in the shades of rural retirement, when we have once acquired a resolution to pass our hours with economy sorrowful lamentations on the subject of time misspent and business neglected never torture the mind.
Business | Good | Humor | Life | Life | Mind | Resolution | Retirement | Time | Torture | Wisdom | Business |
The opportunity offered by a shrinking economy to experience simple pleasures might be one of God’s better gifts to this generation.
Better | Experience | God | Opportunity |
Even while we mourn the death of a loved one, there is room in our hearts for thankfulness for that life… Sober reflection can also lead us to a more sympathetic appreciation of the vital role death plays in the economy of life. Life’s significant and zest issue from our awareness of its transiency, its “fragile contingency.” The urge to create, the passion to perfect, the will to heal and cure – all the noblest of human enterprises grow in the soil of human mortality.
Appreciation | Awareness | Death | Life | Life | Mourn | Passion | Reflection | Thankfulness | Will | Appreciation | Awareness |
No invention could ever take the hard work out of creating - out of good writing, painting, composing, inventing, etc. The economy of the spirit is incurably an economy of scarcity. An affluent society might be able to dispense with the ethic of work in its everyday life, but to attain any sort of excellence it will have to implant implacable taskmasters in the breasts of its people. Indeed, without the disciple of the creative effort the affluent society will be without stability. It might have to become a creative society in order to survive.
Effort | Excellence | Good | Invention | Life | Life | Order | People | Society | Spirit | Will | Work | Writing | Excellence | Society |
I believe that thrift is essential to well-ordered living and that economy is a prime requisite of a sound financial structure, whether in government, business or personal affairs.
Business | Government | Sound | Thrift | Business |
John Foster, fully John Watson Foster
Few are sufficiently sensible of the importance of that economy in reading which selects, almost exclusively, the very first order of books. Why should a man, except for some special reason, read an inferior book at the very time he might be reading one of the highest order.
Margaret Thatcher, fully Margaret Hilda Thatcher, Baroness Thatcher, née Roberts
We need a free economy not only for the renewed material prosperity it will bring, but because it is indispensable to individual freedom, human dignity and to a more just, more honest society.
Dignity | Freedom | Indispensable | Individual | Need | Prosperity | Society | Will |