This site is dedicated to the memory of Dr. Alan William Smolowe who gave birth to the creation of this database.
Rutherford B. Hayes, fully Rutherford Birchard Hayes
Universal suffrage should rest upon universal education. To this end, liberal and permanent provision should be made for the support of free schools by the State governments, and, if need be, supplemented by legitimate aid from national authority.
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Rutherford B. Hayes, fully Rutherford Birchard Hayes
Coming in, I was denounced as a fraud by all the extreme men of the opposing party, and as an ingrate and a traitor by the same class of men in my own party. Going out, I have the good will, blessings, and approval of the best people of all parties and sections.
Confidence | Contrast | Fame | Giving | Greatness | History | Honesty | Logic | Modesty | Position | Sound | Success | Think |
Rutherford B. Hayes, fully Rutherford Birchard Hayes
The President of the United States of necessity owes his election to office to the suffrage and zealous labors of a political party... but he should strive to be always mindful of the fact that he serves his party best who serves the country best.
Saint Augustine, aka Augustine of Hippo, St. Austin, Bishop of Hippo NULL
I probably felt more resentment for what I personally was to suffer than for the wrong they were doing to anyone and everyone. But at that time I was determined not to put up with badly behaved people more out of my own interest than because I wanted them to become good people.
Beauty | Eternal | Life | Life | Love | Mystery | Sound | Time | Will | Beauty |
Sammy Davis, Jr., born Samuel George "Sammy" Davis Jr.
The ultimate mystery is one's own self.
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Several times the proposition to form a labor party has been considered by the trade union movement, but after careful and thorough consideration it has been invariably decided that we can attain our purposes more quickly and more effectively by continuing our political policy of independent political action partisan to principles rather than to a party.
Samuel Johnson, aka Doctor Johnson
The two great movers of the human mind are the desire of good, and the fear of evil.
If anyone possesses this faculty, then his attention is in reality directed beyond the world, whether he is aware of it or not. The link which attaches the human being to the reality outside the world is, like the reality itself, beyond the reach of human faculties. The respect that it makes us feel as soon as it is recognized cannot be shown to us by evidence or testimony.
Simone de Beauvoir, fully Simone-Ernestine-Lucie-Marie Bertrand de Beauvoir
In itself, homosexuality is as limiting as heterosexuality: the ideal should be to be capable of loving a woman or a man; either, a human being, without feeling fear, restraint, or obligation.
Arthur Conan Doyle, fully Sir Arthur Ignatius Conan Doyle
His sanguine spirit turns every firefly into a star.
Arthur Conan Doyle, fully Sir Arthur Ignatius Conan Doyle
My dear Watson, Professor Moriarty is not a man who lets the grass grow under his feet.
Isidore of Seville, fully Saint Isidore of Seville NULL
Learning unsupported by grace may get into our ears; it never reaches the heart. But when God's grace touches our innermost minds to bring understanding, his word which has been received by the ear sinks deep into the heart.
Stanley Kunitz, fully Stanley Jasspon Kunitz
I refuse to turn to theology to justify the life or redeem it. There is a question always of the connection to the eternal. I say to myself above all, keep alive your conviction that there are sacred elements in the life in the practice of the life that must be respected. But the conviction in the existence of the sacred does not necessarily imply that you need to believe in a creator, because we are the ones that made the sacred.
Stanley Baldwin, 1st Earl of Bewdley
True to our traditions, we have avoided all extremes. We have steered clear of fascism, communism, dictatorship, and we have shown the world that democratic government, constitutional methods and ordered liberty are not inconsistent with progress and prosperity.
I have often been amused by our vulgar tendency to take complex issues, with solutions at neither extreme of a continuum of possibilities, and break them into dichotomies, assigning one group to one pole and the other to an opposite end, with no acknowledgment of subtleties and intermediate positions—and nearly always with moral opprobrium attached to opponents.
Aesthetic | Decision | History | Ridicule | Sound | Wonder |
Truly grand and powerful theories… do not and cannot rest upon single observations. Evolution is an inference from thousands of independent sources, the only conceptual structure that can make unified sense of all this disparate information. The failure of a particular claim usually records a local error, not the bankruptcy of a central theory... If I mistakenly identify your father's brother as your own dad, you don't become genealogically rootless and created de novo. You still have a father; we just haven't located him properly.
On seeing the Enterprise's warp engine while visiting the set of Star Trek: The Next Generation (where he would briefly play himself in the 1993 episode Descent, Part I), Hawking smiled and said: I'm working on that.
Day | Destroy | Experiment | Famous | Fun | Future | Giving | Guests | Nothing | Past | Reason | Rule | Sound | Thinking | Thought | Time | Universe | Will | Think | Thought |
The idea that space and time may form a closed surface without boundary also has profound implications for the role of God in the affairs of the universe. With the success of scientific theories in describing events, most people have come to believe that God allows the universe to evolve according to a set of laws and does not intervene in the universe to break these laws. However, the laws do not tell us what the universe should have looked like when it started -- it would still be up to God to wind up the clockwork and choose how to start it off. So long as the universe had a beginning, we could suppose it had a creator. But if the universe is really completely self-contained, having no boundary or edge, it would have neither beginning nor end: it would simply be. What place, then, for a creator?