This site is dedicated to the memory of Dr. Alan William Smolowe who gave birth to the creation of this database.
Baron de Montesquieu, fully Charles-Louis de Secondat, Baron de La Brède et de Montesquieu
Peace is the natural effect of trade. Two nations who traffic with each other become reciprocally dependent; for if one has an interest in buying, the other has an interest in selling; and thus their union is founded on their mutual necessities. But if the spirit of commerce unites nations, it does not in the same manner unite individuals. We see that in countries where the people move only by the spirit of commerce, they make a traffic of all the humane, all the moral virtues; the most trifling things, those which humanity would demand, are there done, or there given, only for money.
Commerce | Humanity | Money | Nations | Peace | People | Spirit | Wisdom | Commerce |
Just as education without humanity is the most dangerous thing in the world, so education in love, human understanding and cooperation is the greatest hope of the world.
Cooperation | Education | Hope | Humanity | Love | Understanding | Wisdom | World |
Genetic mutation is not, it would seem, due to chance, but directed in some way, perhaps toward a spiritual regeneration of humanity - a bridge, as it were, between a lower, and a higher level of consciousness.
Chance | Consciousness | Humanity | Wisdom |
Bound only by birth and death, life is both the ultimate mystery and the process of solving it. Life is a dance, a leap into the unknown. After you jump and before you land, is God. God is ecstasy: that state of being when everything comes together, nothing is missing, and it’s all vibrating and electric. Life is an excuse for ecstasy.
Birth | Death | Ecstasy | God | Land | Life | Life | Mystery | Nothing | Wisdom | God |
Astronomy was born of superstition; eloquence of ambition, hatred, falsehood, and flattery; geometry of avarice; physics of an idle curiosity; and even moral philosophy of human pride. Thus the arts and sciences owe their birth to our vices.
Ambition | Avarice | Birth | Curiosity | Falsehood | Flattery | Philosophy | Pride | Superstition | Wisdom |
Russell Schweikart, fully Russell Louis "Rusty" Schweickart aka Schweikart
[The earth] is so small and so fragile and such a precious little spot in that universe that you can block it out with your thumb, and you realize that on that small spot, that little blue and white thing, is everything that means anything to you - all of history and music and poetry and art and death and birth and love.
Art | Birth | Death | Earth | History | Little | Love | Means | Music | Poetry | Universe | Wisdom | Art |
Terence, full Latin name Publius Terentius Afer NULL
I am a human being; no part of humanity do I consider foreign to me.
Alexis de Tocqueville, fully Alexis-Charles-Henri Clérel de Tocqueville
Amid the ruins which surround me I shall dare to say that revolutions are not what I most fear for coming generations?... It is believed by some that modern society will be always changing its aspect; for myself, I fear that it will ultimately be too invariably fixed in the same institutions, the same prejudices, the same manners, so that mankind will be stopped and circumscribed; that the mind will swing backwards and forwards forever without begetting fresh ideas; that man will waste his strength in bootless and solitary trifling, and, though in continual motion, that humanity will cease to advance.
Fear | Humanity | Ideas | Man | Mankind | Manners | Mind | Society | Strength | Waste | Will | Wisdom | Society |
High birth is a thing which I never knew any one to disparage except those who had it not; and I never knew any; one to make a boast of it who had anything else to be proud of.
There is no such thing as an average man. Each one of us is a unique individual. Each one of us expresses his humanity and his divinity in some distinctly different way. The beauty and the bloom of each human soul is a thing apart - a separate holy miracle under God, never once repeated throughout all the millenniums of time.
Beauty | Divinity | God | Humanity | Individual | Man | Soul | Time | Unique | Wisdom | Beauty |
Haku'un Ryoko Yasutani, aka Yasutani Roshi
The fundamental delusion of humanity is to supposed that I am here and you are out there.
Raymond Aron, fully Raymond-Claude-Ferdinand Aron
In the atomic age, each individual, each party, each state, must feel itself responsible to humanity in its entirety and not merely to its own group or ideal.
Age | Humanity | Individual |