This site is dedicated to the memory of Dr. Alan William Smolowe who gave birth to the creation of this database.
There are but two ways of rising in the world: either by one’s own industry or profiting by the foolishness of others.
Air pollution is not merely a nuisance and a threat to health. It is a reminder that our most celebrated technological achievements - the automobile, the jet plane, the power plant, industry in general, and indeed the modern city itself - are, in the environment, failures.
Poverty is, except where there is an actual want of food an raiment, a thing much more imaginary than real. The shame of poverty - the shame of being though poor - it is a great and fatal weakness, though arising in this country, from the fashion of the times themselves.
Cyril Connolly, fully Cyril Vernon Connolly
There is no hate without fear. Hate is crystallized fear, fear's dividend, fear objectivises. We hate what we fear and so where hate is, fear is lurking. Thus we hate what threatens our person, our liberty, our privacy, our income, popularity, vanity and our dreams and plans for ourselves. If we can isolate this element in what we hate we may learn to cease from hating.
Dreams | Fear | Hate | Liberty | Popularity | Wisdom | Learn |
Alice Thomas Ellis, nom de plume for Anna Haycraft, born Anna Margaret Lindholm
Those who live on vanity must, not unreasonably, expect to die of mortification.
Wisdom |
George Eliot, pen name of Mary Ann or Marian Evans
Mighty is the force of motherhood! It transforms all things by its vital heat; it turns timidity into fierce courage, and dreadless defiance into tremulous submission; it turns thoughtlessness into foresight, and yet stills all anxiety into calm content; it makes selfishness become self-denial, and gives even to hard vanity the glance of admiring love.
Anxiety | Anxiety | Courage | Defiance | Force | Foresight | Love | Self | Self-denial | Selfishness | Submission | Wisdom |
The advertising industry is one of our most basic forms of communication and, allegedly, of information. Yet, obviously, much of this ostensible information is not purveyed to inform but to manipulate and to achieve a result -- to make somebody think he needs something that very possibly he doesn't need, or to make him think one version of something is better than another version when the ground for such a belief really doesn't exist.
Advertising | Belief | Better | Industry | Need | Wisdom | Think |
Of all our infirmities, vanity is the dearest to us; a man will starve his other vices to keep it alive.
Remember, that time is money... Remember that credit is money... In short, the way to wealth, if you desire it, is as plain as the way to market. It depends chiefly on two words, industry and frugality; that is, waste neither time nor money, but make the best use of both. Without industry and frugality, nothing will do. With them, everything.
Credit | Desire | Frugality | Industry | Money | Nothing | Time | Waste | Wealth | Will | Wisdom | Words |
The way to wealth is as plain as the way to market. It depends chiefly on two words, industry and frugality; that is, waste neither time or money, but make the best use of both Without industry and frugality, nothing will do; and with them, everything.
Frugality | Industry | Money | Nothing | Time | Waste | Wealth | Will | Wisdom | Words |
The children who go to bed hungry in a Harlem slum or a West Virginia mining town are not being deprived because no food can be found to give them; they are going to bed hungry because, despite all our miracles of invention and production, we have not yet found a way to make necessities of life available to all of our citizens - including those whose failure is not lack of personal industry or initiative, but only an unwise choice of parents.
Children | Choice | Failure | Industry | Initiative | Invention | Life | Life | Miracles | Parents | Wisdom | Failure |
The essential element of successful strategy is that it derives its success from the differences between competitors with a consequent difference in their behavior. Ordinarily, this means that any corporate policy and plan which is typical of the industry is doomed to mediocrity. Where this is not so, it should be possible to demonstrate that all other competitors are at a distinct disadvantage.
Behavior | Industry | Means | Mediocrity | Plan | Policy | Success | Wisdom |
The great end of all human industry is the attainment of happiness.
Attainment | Industry | Wisdom |
Beauty too often sacrifices to fashion. The spirit of fashion is not the beautiful, but the willful; not the graceful, but the fantastic; not the superior in the abstract, but the superior in the worst of all concretes - the vulgar. The high point of taste and elegance is to be sought for, not in the most fashionable circles, but in the best-bred, and such as can dispense with the eternal necessity of never being twice the same.
Abstract | Beauty | Elegance | Eternal | Necessity | Spirit | Taste | Wisdom |
Herbert Hoover, fully Herbert Clark Hoover
You cannot extend the mastery of the government over the daily working life of a people without at the same time making it the master of the people’s souls and thoughts. Every expansion of government in business means that government in order to protect itself from the political consequences of its errors and wrongs is driven irresistibly without peace to greater and greater control of the nation’s press and platform. Free speech does not live many hours after free industry and free commerce die.
Business | Commerce | Consequences | Control | Free speech | Government | Industry | Life | Life | Means | Order | Peace | People | Speech | Time | Wisdom | Government | Business | Commerce |
Ted Kennedy, fully Edward Moore "Ted" Kennedy
Based on some estimates, guns are statistically like rats. They outnumber our population. Not surprisingly, our output of ammunition for civilian firearms almost staggers the imagination. American industry outdoes all other nations in the production of bullets. Nearly 5 billion rounds of ammunition flow through the marketplace each year. that is enough, laid end to end, to stretch a bandoleer of ammunition three times around the equator. All of those bullets could not only wipe out the world’s entire human population, but they could decimate practically most of the world’s species of wildlife.
Enough | Imagination | Industry | Nations | Wisdom | World |
André Maurois, born born Emile Salomon Wilhelm Herzog
Some truths between husband and wife must be spoken with sweetness. Wounded vanity is fatal to love. It makes one hate the person who inflicted the wound. In married conversation, as in surgery, the knife must be used with care.
Care | Conversation | Hate | Husband | Love | Wife | Wisdom | Truths |