This site is dedicated to the memory of Dr. Alan William Smolowe who gave birth to the creation of this database.
Arianna Huffington, born Arianna Stassinopoulos
For most utopians, the incremental approach is far too slow and unglamorous. It lacks cataclysmic drama. They want to save the world today and send out a great press release tomorrow morning. Feeding a hungry child tonight doesn’t draw a crowd.
Plautus, full name Titus Maccius Plautus NULL
If you lend a person any money, it becomes lost for any purpose as one’s own. When you ask for it back again, you may find a friend made an enemy by your kindness. If you begin to press still further, either you must part with that which you have intrusted, or else you must lose that friend.
Character | Enemy | Friend | Kindness | Money | Purpose | Purpose |
Life is a journey, not a home; a road, not a city of habitation; and the enjoyments and blessings we have are but little inns on the roadside of life, where we may be refreshed for a moment, that we may with new strength press on to the end - to the rest that remaineth for the people of God.
Blessings | God | Journey | Life | Life | Little | People | Rest | Strength | Wisdom |
The press, important as is its office, is but the servant of the human intellect, and its ministry is for good or for evil, according to the character of those who direct it. The press is a mill which grinds all that is put into its hopper. Fill he hopper with poisoned grain, and it will grind it to meal, but there is death in the bread.
Character | Death | Evil | Good | Important | Office | Will | Wisdom |
God is not a cosmic bellboy for whom we can press a button to get things done.
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 |
Alphonse de Lamartine, fully Alphonse Marie Louis de Lamartine
When the press is the echo of sages and reformers, it works well; when it is the echo of turbulent cynics, it merely feeds political excitement.
Excitement | Wisdom |
E. B. White, fully Elwyn Brooks White
I have yet to see a piece of writing, political or non-political, that doesn’t have a slant. All writing slants the way a writer leans, and no man is born upright. The beauty of the American free press is that the slants and the twists and the distortions come from so many directions, and the special interests are so numerous, the reader must sift and sort and check and countercheck in order to find out what the score is.
Beauty | Free press | Man | Order | Wisdom | Writing | Beauty |
The mathematical odds of assembling a living organism are so astronomical that nobody still believes that random chance accounts for the origin of life. Even it you optimized the conditions, it wouldn’t work. If you took all the carbon in the universe and put it on the face of the earth, allowed it to chemically react at the most rapid rate possible, and left it for a billion years, the odds of creating just one functional protein molecule would be one chance in 10 with 60 zeros after it… The probability of linking together just one hundred amino acids to create one protein molecule by chance would be the same as a blindfolded man finding one marked grain of sand somewhere in the vastness of the Sahara Desert – and doing it not just once, but three different times.
The chromosome reproduces itself exactly and exactly once, building itself up from materials around it, mostly proteins. Nothing similar has been known to occur outside living matter, though regarded chemically, the DNA molecule is not fundamentally different from any other large molecule. Clearly then, some other principle prevails in living nature… Consider the DNA molecule… the main constituent of the chromosomes, with its 10,000 links, in which four different types occur in various arrangements… and assuming 32 links of the chain contain 8 of each type we get for the odds of a particular arrangement 1:1017 That is, one to a hundred thousand billion… the inevitable conclusion sis that whatever evolution may depend on, it certainly does not depend on chance.
Chance | Evolution | Inevitable | Nature | Nothing |