This site is dedicated to the memory of Dr. Alan William Smolowe who gave birth to the creation of this database.
If Religion has raised us into a new world, if it has filled us with new ends of life, if it has taken possession of our hearts, and altered the whole turn of our minds, if it has changed all our ideas of things, given us a new set of hopes and fears, and taught us to live by the realities of an invisible world -- then we may humbly hope that we are true followers.
Children | Devotion | God | Growth | Influence | Parents | Rest | God |
The normal process of life contains moments as bad as any of those which insane melancholy is filled with, moments in which radical evil gets its innings and takes its solid turn. The lunatic's visions of horror are all drawn from the material of daily fact. Our civilization is founded on the shambles, and every individual existence goes out in a lonely spasm of helpless agony. If you protest, my friend, wait till you arrive there yourself! ... Here on our very hearths and in our gardens the infernal cat plays with the panting mouse, or holds the hot bird fluttering in her jaws. Crocodiles and rattlesnakes and pythons are at this moment vessels of life as real as we are; their loathsome existence fills every minute of every day that drags its length along; and whenever they or other wild beasts clutch their living prey, the deadly horror which an agitated melancholiac feels is the literally right reaction on the situation.
A man is in no danger so long as he talks his love; but to write it is to impale himself on his own pothooks.
O heaven, that such companions thou 'ldst unfold, and put in every honest hand a whip to lash the rascals naked through the world.
Any style formed in imitation of some model must be affected and straight-laced.
Elizabeth Dole, fully Mary Elizabeth Alexander Hanford "Liddy" Dole
If our leaders are not worthy, we have the power to elect leaders who are.
Evidence |
The religious feeling engendered by experiencing the logical comprehensibility of profound interrelations is of a somewhat different sort from the feeling that one usually calls religious. It is more a feeling of awe at the scheme that is manifested in the material universe. It does not lead us to take the step of fashioning a god-like being in our own image-a personage who makes demands of us and who takes an interest in us as individuals. There is in this neither a will nor a goal, nor a must, but only sheer being. For this reason, people of our type see in morality a purely human matter, albeit the most important in the human sphere.
The law of the survival of the fittest led inevitably to the survival and predominance of the men who were effective in war and who loved it because they were effective.
Government | Growth | Individual | Judgment | Practice | Reason | Government |
I'd like to go to Sicily because of what Goethe said: Without seeing Sicily, one can not have a clear idea of Italy .
Enough | Genius | Growth | Circumstance | Understand |
Elizabeth Stuart Phelps, fully Elizabeth Stuart Phelps Ward
It is in the nature of all passionate and uncontrolled emotion to prey upon and weaken the forces of reflective power, as much as it is in the nature of controlled emotion to strengthen them.
The prolonged slavery of women is the darkest page in human history.
We spend January 1 walking through our lives, room by room, drawing up a list of work to be done, cracks to be patched. Maybe this year, to balance the list, we ought to walk through the rooms of our lives ... not looking for flaws, but for potential.
Experience | Growth |
The road to Lourdes is littered with crutches, but not one wooden leg.
Family | Lying | Means | Revolution |
Served as inspiration for Roger Baldwin, a future founder of the American Civil Liberties Union.
Change | Improvement | Life | Life | Price | Revolution | Struggle | Worth | Loss |
No sacrifice is lost for a great ideal!
Ignorance | Inhumanity | Man | Means | Protest | Revolution | Spirit | System | Wrong |