This site is dedicated to the memory of Dr. Alan William Smolowe who gave birth to the creation of this database.
Some would insist that man is primarily an economic animal interested only in his material well-being. This is too narrow a view of a species which has produced numberless brave men and women who are prepared to undergo relentless persecution to uphold deeply held beliefs and principles. It is my pride and inspiration that such men and women exist in my country today.
Inspiration | Man | Men | Pride |
Robert Southwell, also Saint Robert Southwell
Let our adversaries therefore load us with the infamous titles of traitors, and rebels, as the Ariansdid in the persecution of the Vandals, and as the Ethnicswere wont to call Christians sarmentitios, and semasios, because they were tied to halfpenny stakes, and burnt with shrubs: so let them draw us upon hurdles, hang us, unbowel us alive, mangle us, boil us, and set our quarters upon their gates, to be meat for the birds of the air, as they use to handle rebels: we will answer them as the Christians of former persecutions have done. Hic est habitus victoriae nostrae, hec palmata vestis, tali curru triumphamus, merito itaque victis non placemus. Such is the manner of our victory, such our conquerous garment, in such chariots do we triumph. What marvel therefore if our vanquished enemies mislike us?
Will |
S.G. Tallentyre, nom de plume for Evelyn Beatrice Hall
In his home-life Turgot remained most frugal and laborious, treating his servants with a benevolence then accounted contemptible, and working out his quiet schemes with an infinite patience and thoroughness. When he was offered the richer Intendancy of Lyons, he would not take it. Here, as he said of himself, though he was 'the compulsory instrument of great evil,' he was doing a little good. Only a little, it might be. But if every man did the little he could — what a different world!
Children | Joy | Life | Life | People | Superstition | Tenderness | Time |
Our Sages were enemies of ignorance. They regarded education, intellectual enlightenment, and the acquisition of knowledge as the first of all moral commandments. They viewed the dissemination of intellectual enlightenment among all classes of the population as the prime concern of the nation, and the training of a child's mind as the first and most sacred duty of fatherhood. They considered it a matter of conscience for every Jewish father to see that his child should not remain a boor and am ha'arets; no Jewish child must be allowed to grow up as an ignorant, uneducated person.
Children | Evil | Fulfillment | Isolation | Nations | Need | Obligation | Order | People | Practice | Praise | Purpose | Purpose | Redemption | Vows | Torah |
I do still see that my nature is not to be quite conquered, but will esteem pleasure above all things, though yet in the middle of it, it has reluctances after my business, which is neglected by my following my pleasure. However musique and women I cannot but give way to, whatever my business is.
Believing that religion is a matter which lies solely between man and his God, that he owes account to none other for his faith or his worship, that the legislative powers of government reach actions only, and not opinions, I contemplate with sovereign reverence that act of the whole American people which declared that their Legislature should make no law respecting an establishment of religion, or prohibiting the free exercise thereof, thus building a wall of separation between Church and State.
Church | Corruption | Force | Freedom of religion | Freedom | Government | Important | People | Power | Religion | Government |
The principle of rotation... in the body of [bank] directors... breaks in upon the espirit de corps so apt to prevail in permanent bodies; it gives a chance for the public eye penetrating into the sanctuary of those proceedings and practices, which the avarice of the directors may introduce for their personal emolument, and which the resentments of excluded directors, or the honesty of those duly admitted, might betray to the public; and it gives an opportunity at the end of the year, or at other periods, of correcting a choice, which on trial, proves to have been unfortunate.
Resolved... that it would be a dangerous delusion were a confidence in the men of our choice to silence our fears for the safety of our rights; that confidence is everywhere the parent of despotism; free government is founded in jealousy, and not in confidence; it is jealousy, and not confidence, which prescribes limited constitutions to bind down those whom we are obliged to trust with power; that our Constitution has accordingly fixed the limits to which, and no farther, our confidence may go…In questions of power, then, let no more be heard of confidence in man, but bind him down from mischief by the chains of the Constitution.
Church | Corruption | Force | Government | Power | Religion | Government |
There are days when I am convinced that Heaven starts already, now, in this ordinary life just as it is, in all its incompleteness, yet, this is where Heaven starts… see within yourself, if you can find it. I walked through the field in front of the house, lots of swallows flying, everywhere! Some very near me… it was magical. We are already one, yet we know it not.
Conscience | Evil | Individual | People | Price | Sense | Solitude |
Indeed, modern Jewish history in the Western countries is the recasting of the Jewish legacy in a Western matrix. The predicaments and attritions of the modern Jewish community and its civilization stem from the deluded quest of “Westernizing” Judaism. To be sure, Western versions of Judaism have been promulgated and millions of Jews in this country, as elsewhere in the Western world, are integrated as individuals into the Western culture and its way of life. But the stagnation of Jewish creativeness in the Western world and the Jewish loss by the total assimilation of complete alienation is the other side of the coveted coin of “being fully integrated into the Western world.”
There certainly are moments in history when poets and painters connect so closely as to be one and the same person.
Hearses coffins, long funeral processions, and all the dark emblems of mortality, were reflected, as it were, on the sky, from the terrible works of pestilence and famine which were going on the earth beneath it.
Blessings | Creed | God | Happy | Heart | Ignorance | Industry | Knowledge | Order | People | Principles | Progress | Religion | Right | Society | Spirit | Vengeance | Worship | Youth | Society | Youth | God |
They love the country, and none else, who seek for their own sake its silence and its shade. Delights which who would leave, that has a heart susceptible of pity, or a mind cultured and capable of sober thought.