This site is dedicated to the memory of Dr. Alan William Smolowe who gave birth to the creation of this database.
The power of ideals is incalculable. We see no power in a drop of water. But let it get into a crack in the rock and be turned into ice, and it splits the rock; turned into steam, it drives the pistons of the most powerful engines. Something has happened to it which makes active the power that is latent in it.
Not one of us knows what effect his life produces, and what he gives to others; that is hidden from us and must remain so, though we are often allowed to see some little fraction of it, so that we may not lose courage. The way in which power works is a mystery.
The legislative power belongs to the people, and can belong to it alone... What then is government? An intermediate body set up between the subjects and the Sovereign, to secure their mutual correspondence, charged with the execution of the laws and the maintenance of liberty, both civil and political.
Charles P. Steinmetz, fully Charles Proteus Steinmetz, born Karl August Rudolf Steinmetz
Spiritual power is a force which history clearly teaches has been the greatest force in the development of men... Some day people will learn that material things do not bring happiness, and are of little use in making people creative and powerful. Then the scientists of the world will turn their laboratories over to the study of spiritual forces which have hardly been scratched.
Day | Force | History | Little | Men | People | Power | Study | Will | Wisdom | World | Learn |
John B. Tabb, fully John Banister Tabb
Every year that I live I am more convinced that the waste of life lies in the love we have not given, the powers we have not given, the power we have not used, the selfish prudence which will risk nothing, and which, shirking pain, misses happiness as well.
Life | Life | Love | Nothing | Pain | Power | Prudence | Prudence | Risk | Waste | Will | Wisdom | Happiness |
Alfred Tennyson, 1st Baron Tennyson, Commonly called Alfred Lord Tennyson
Every man at time of Death, would fain set forth some saying that may live after his death and better humankind; for death gives life’s last word a power to live, and, like the stone-cut epitaph, remain after the vanished voice, and speak to men.
Better | Death | Life | Life | Man | Men | Power | Time | Wisdom |
W. B. Stevens, fully William Baker Stevens or William Bacon Stevens
Strength is power in action. Beauty is the assemblage of all graces. The strength and the beauty, being connected with God’s sanctuary, must be divine strength and divine beauty. In what, then, consist this strength and beauty which so emphasize and make distinctive His sanctuary?
Action | Beauty | God | Power | Strength | Wisdom | Beauty |
What marks the artist is his power to shape the material of pain we all have.
Stewart Udall, Fully Stewart Lee Udall
Intoxicated with the power to manipulate nature, some misguided men have produced a rationale to replace the Myth of Superabundance. It might be called the Myth of Scientific Supremacy, for it rests on the rationalization that the scientists can fix everything tomorrow.
What are the sciences but maps of universal laws; and universal laws but the channels of universal power; and universal power but the outgoings of a supreme universal mind.
Alexis de Tocqueville, fully Alexis-Charles-Henri Clérel de Tocqueville
Men are not corrupted by the exercise of power or debased by the habit of obedience, but by the exercise of a power which they believe to be illegitimate, and by obedience to a rule which they consider to be usurped and oppressive.
Let us recognize the beauty and power of true enthusiasm; and whatever we may do to enlighten ourselves and others, guard against checking or chilling a single earnest sentiment.
We are, without permission but with our tacit approval, the subjects of a giant electrical experiment. Nor is there any end in sight. The density of radio waves around us now is 100 million times the natural level reaching us from the Sun, and by 1990 it will have doubled again. When superconducting cables are introduced, the field strength around power line will be increased by another twenty times. And electric cars and vehicles moved by magnetic levitation will add entirely new sources of electropollution to the stew with which we are already assailed. Meanwhile, the first results of the experiment are starting to come in and there is, it seems, no place to hide.
Experiment | Power | Strength | Will | Wisdom |
That the truths of the Bible have the power of awakening an intense moral feeling in every human being; that they make bad men good, and send a pulse of healthful feeling through all the domestic, civil, and social relations; that they teach men to love right, and hate wrong, and seek each other's welfare as children of a common parent; that they control the baleful passions of the heart, and thus make men proficient in self-government; and finally that they teach man to aspire after conformity to a being of infinite holiness, and fill him with hopes more purifying, exalted, and suited to his nature than any other book the world has ever known - these are facts as incontrovertible as the laws of philosophy, or the demonstrations of mathematics.
Awakening | Bible | Children | Conformity | Control | Good | Government | Hate | Heart | Love | Man | Mathematics | Men | Nature | Philosophy | Power | Right | Self | Teach | Wisdom | World | Wrong | Bible | Truths |