This site is dedicated to the memory of Dr. Alan William Smolowe who gave birth to the creation of this database.
"It is indifference which is the cause of most of our unhappiness. Indifference to religion, to the happiness of others, and to the precious gift of freedom, and the wide liberty that is the inheritance of all in a free land. Are we our "Brother's Keeper"? We certainly are! If we had no regard for others' feelings or fortune, we would grow cold and indifferent to life itself. Bound up with selfishness, we could not hope for the success that could easily be ours." - George Matthew Adams
"A conscience void of offense, before God and man, is an inheritance for eternity." - Daniel Webster
"The best inheritance a parent can give his children is a few minutes of his time each day." - Orlando A. Battistam, fully Orlando Aloysius Battista, aka O.A. Battista
"The stream of time sweeps away errors, and leaves the truth for the inheritance of humanity." - Georg Brandes, fully Georg Morris Cohen Brandes
"It is interesting to contemplate a tangled bank, clothed with many plants of many kinds, with birds singing on the bushes, with various insects flitting about, and with worms crawling through the damp earth, and to reflect that these elaborately constructed forms, so different from each other, and dependent upon each other in so complex a manner, have all been produced by laws acting around us. These laws, taken in the largest sense, being Growth with Reproduction; Inheritance which is almost implied by reproduction; Variability from the indirect and direct action of the conditions of life and from use and disuse: a Ratio of Increase so high as to lead to a Struggle for Life, and as a consequence to Natural Selection, entailing Divergence of Character and the Extinction of less-improved forms, Thus, from the war of nature, from famine and death, the most exalted object which we are capable of conceiving, namely, the production of the higher animals, directly follows. There is grandeur in this view of life, with its several powers, having been originally breathed by the Creator into a few forms or into one; and that, whilst this planet has gone cycling on according to the fixed law of gravity, from so simple a beginning endless forms most beautiful and wonderful have been, and are being evolved." - Charles Darwin, fully Charles Robert Darwin
"To listen well is a second inheritance." - Publius Syrus
"Though an inheritance of acres may be bequeathed, an inheritance of knowledge and wisdom cannot. The wealthy man may pay others for doing his work for him, but it is impossible to get his thinking done for him by another, or to purchase any kind of self-culture." - Samuel Smiles
"Real goodness does not attach itself merely to this life - it points to another world. Political or professional reputation cannot last forever, but a conscience void of offense before God and man is an inheritance for eternity." - Daniel Webster
"Sin is an affair of the will. It is not “a vestige of our animal inheritance.” That trivial notion comes from an unexamined, too-quickly swallowed doctrine of evolution. Why blame the brute creation? No self-respecting wolf would be guilty of our modern wars." - George Arthur Buttrick
"The best inheritance a parent can give to his children is a few minutes of their time each day." - M. Grundler
"Time is the solemn inheritance to where every man is born heir, who has a life-rent of this world – a little section cut out of eternity and given to us to do our work in: an eternity before, and eternity behind; and the small stream between, floating swiftly from one into the vast bosom of the other." -
"The greatest thing to leave children is the love they have in them not the inheritance you might leave them." - Author Unknown NULL
"The finest inheritance you can give to a child is to allow it to make its own way, completely on its own feet." - Isadora Duncan
"When the “sacredness of property” is talked of, it should always be remembered, that any such sacredness does not belong in the same degree to landed property. No man made the land. It is the original inheritance of the whole species. Its appropriation is wholly a question of general expediency. When private property in land is not expedient, it is unjust. It is no hardship to any one, to be excluded from what others have produced: they were not bound to produce it for his use, and he loses nothing by not sharing in what otherwise would not have existed at all. But it is some hardship to be born into a world and to find all nature’s gifts previously engrossed, and no place left for the new-comer. To reconcile people to this, after they have once admitted into their minds the idea that any moral rights belong to them as human beings, it will always be necessary to convince them that the exclusive appropriation is good for mankind as a whole, themselves included. But this is what no sane human being could be persuaded of." - John Stuart Mill
"The main fact about education is that there is no such thing. Education is a word like "transmission" or "inheritance"; it is not an object, but a method." - Lord Chesterfield, Philip Dormer Stanhope, 4th Earl of Chesterfield
"It reflects a prevailing myth that production technology is no more amenable to human judgment or social interests than the laws of thermodynamics, atomic structure or biological inheritance. " - Barry Commoner
"Eternity is with us, inviting our contemplation perpetually, but we are too frightened, lazy, and suspicious to respond; too arrogant to still our thought, and let divine sensation have its way. It needs industry and goodwill if we would make that transition; for the process involves a veritable spring-cleaning of the soul, a turning-out and rearrangement of our mental furniture, a wide opening of closed windows, that the notes of the wild birds beyond our garden may come to us fully charged with wonder and freshness, and drown with their music the noise of the gramaphone within. Those who do this, discover that they have lived in a stuffy world, whilst their inheritance was a world of morning-glory:where every tit-mouse is a celestial messenger, and every thrusting bud is charged with the full significance of life." - Evelyn Underhill
"The Jewish people have unchallengeable, eternal, historic right to the Land of Israel [including the West Bank and Gaza Strip], the inheritance of their forefathers," and pledged to build rural and urban exclusive Jewish colonies in the West Bank and Gaza Strip." - Menachem Begin
"It is very difficult to be wholly joyous or wholly sad on this earth. The comic, when it is human, soon takes upon itself a face of pain and some of our griefs... their source in weaknesses which must be recognized with smiling compassion as the common inheritance of us all." - Miguel de Cervantes, fully Miguel de Cervantes Saaversa
"Children can have no better inheritance than believing parents. Religion can become real in the midst of the family as in practically no other way. Many of us have inherited great riches from our parents - the bank account of their personal faith and family prayers." - Nels F. S. Ferré, fully Nels Fredrick Solomon Ferré
"The purpose of life, therefore, is the realizing of that prophesy; the unveiling of the immortal man; the birth of the spiritual from the physical, whereby we enter our divine inheritance and come to inhabit Eternity. This is, indeed, salvation, the purpose of all true religion in all times. " - Patañjali NULL
"Bear in mind that the wonderful things you learn in your schools are the work of many generations. All this is put in your hands as your inheritance in order that you may receive it, honor it, add to it, and one day faithfully hand it on to your children. " - Albert Einstein
"He who refuses to teach a precept to his pupil is guilty of theft, just as one who steals from the inheritance of his father," - Rabbinical Proverbs
"One must be restless for God. If a son clamors persistently for his share of the property, his parents consult with each other and give it to him even though he is a minor. God will certainly listen to your prayers if you feel restless for Him. Since He has begotten us, surely we can claim our inheritance from Him. He is our own Father, our own Mother. We can force our demand on Him." - Ramakrishna, aka Ramakrishna Paramhamsa or Sri Ramakrishna, born Gadadhar Chattopadhyay NULL
"There are historic situations in which refusal to defend the inheritance of a civilization, however imperfect, against tyranny and aggression may result in consequences even worse than war." - Reinhold Niebuhr, fully Karl Paul Reinhold Niebuhr
"Animated by Christian motives and directed to Christian ends, it shall in no wise go unrewarded: here, by the testimony of an approving conscience; hereafter, by the benediction of our blessed Redeemer, and a brighter inheritance his Father's house." - Richard Mant
"Let the numerous isles rejoice with trembling, For He is high and exalted and acknowledged as One In the height of the firmament. The Lord reigneth, let the earth rejoice. The clouds acclaim Thee beyond every other power, In every mouth is thy unity uttered, And by the people of God is Thy praise proclaimed. And who is like to Thy people Israel, The one nation on earth, To give thanks to Thee upstanding, O God inhabiting the heights, And to proclaim Thee as One? The Lord reigneth, let the nations quake. He sitteth among the Cherubim, let the earth tremble. The scattered shalt Thou assemble and the sighing redeem, To Thy holy house Thou shalt lead them with rejoicing, And from earth’s four corners gather the exiles." - Salomon ibn Gabirol, aka Solomon ben Judah or Avicebron
"The natural liberty of man is to be free from any superior power on Earth, and not to be under the will or legislative authority of man, but only to have the law of nature for his rule." - Samuel Adams
"A hot topic of late, expressed most notably in Bernie Siegel's best-selling books, has emphasized the role of positive attitude in combating such serious diseases as cancer. From the depths of my skeptical and rationalist soul, I ask the Lord to protect me from California touchie-feeliedom." - Stephan Jay Gould
"Historical science is not worse, more restricted, or less capable of achieving firm conclusions because experiment, prediction, and subsumption under invariant laws of nature do not represent its usual working methods. The sciences of history use a different mode of explanation, rooted in the comparative and observational richness in our data. We cannot see a past event directly, but science is usually based on inference, not unvarnished observation (you don't see electrons, gravity, or black holes either)." - Stephan Jay Gould
"The history of a species, or any natural phenomenon that requires unbroken continuity in a world of trouble, works like a batting streak. All are games of a gambler playing with a limited stake against a house with infinite resources. The gambler must eventually go bust. His aim can only be to stick around as long as possible, to have some fun while he's at it, and, if he happens to be a moral agent as well, to worry about staying the course with honor." - Stephan Jay Gould
"No man who is not willing to bear arms and to fight for his rights can give a good reason why he should be entitled to the privilege of living in a free community." - Theodore “Teddy” Roosevelt
"But one of the Naturall Lawes deriv'd from this fundamentall one is this,That the right of all men, to all things, ought not to be retain'd, but that some certain rights ought to be transferr'd, or relinquisht: for if every one should retain his right to all things, it must necessarily follow, that some by right might invade; and others, by the same right, might defend themselves against them, (for every man, by naturall necessity, endeavours to defend his Body, and the things which he judgeth necessary towards the protection of his Body) therefore War would follow. He therefore acts against the reason of Peace, (i.e.) against the Law of Nature, whosoever he be, that doth not part with his Right to all things." - Thomas Hobbes
"A forty years' experience of popular assemblies has taught me that you must give them time for every step you take. If too hard pushed, they balk, and the machine retrogrades." - Thomas Jefferson
"Congress is so strange; a man gets up to speak and says nothing, nobody listens, and then everybody disagrees." - Will Rogers, fully William Penn Adair "Will" Rogers
"Get all the good laughs you can." - Will Rogers, fully William Penn Adair "Will" Rogers
"I doubt if a charging elephant, or a rhino, is as determined or hard to check as a socially ambitious mother." - Will Rogers, fully William Penn Adair "Will" Rogers
"Now you offered an opinion in my business, but the minute a comedian offers an opinion in your business, I am out of place. Your business is sacred and no one should mention it only in the highest terms." - Will Rogers, fully William Penn Adair "Will" Rogers
"They have passed the big inheritance tax, and that gets you when you are gone. You used to could die and be able to beat taxes, but not now. The undertaker don't go over your body as carefully as the assessor does your accumilated assets, and he gets his before the undertaker. They have it on these big fortunes now where they pay as high as 60 to 70 percent of what they leave. That's mighty expensive dying when it runs into money like that, and you won't see 'em dropping off as casually as they have been." - Will Rogers, fully William Penn Adair "Will" Rogers
"They may call me a rube and a hick, but I'd a lot rather be the man who bought the Brooklyn Bridge than the man who sold it." - Will Rogers, fully William Penn Adair "Will" Rogers
"It is a horrible fact that we can read in the daily paper, without interrupting our breakfast, numerical reckonings of death and destruction that ought to break our hearts or scare us out of our wits." - Wendell Berry
"The human mind does not work that way. It operates by association. With one item in its grasp, it snaps instantly to the next that is suggested by the association of thoughts, in accordance with some intricate web of trails carried by the cells of the brain. It has other characteristics, of course; trails that are not frequently followed are prone to fade, items are not fully permanent, memory is transitory. Yet the speed of action, the intricacy of trails, the detail of mental pictures, is awe-inspiring beyond all else in nature." - Vannevar Bush
"Our concern is rather with the unparalleled influence that Darwinism, and its application to man, have had during the last forty years on the whole province of science; and at the same time, with its irreconcilable opposition to the dogmas of the Churches." - Ernst Haeckel, full name Ernst Heinrich Phillip August Haeckel
"The doctrine of elimination, or the selection theory, as the doctrine especially of "choice of breed or selection," assumes that almost all, or at any rate most, organic species have originated by a process of selection; the artificial varieties under conditions of domestication—as the races of domestic animals and cultivated plants—through artificial choice of breeds; and the natural varieties of animals and plants in their wild state by natural choice of breeds: in the first case, the will of man effects the selection to suit a purpose; in the second, it is effected in a purposeless way by the "struggle for existence." In both cases the transformation of the organic forms takes place through the reciprocal action of the laws of inheritance and of adaptation; in both cases it depends on the survival or selection of the better-qualified minority." - Ernst Haeckel, full name Ernst Heinrich Phillip August Haeckel
"The gulf between this thoughtful mind of civilized man and the thoughtless animal soul of the savage is enormous -- greater than the gulf that separates the latter from the soul of the dog." - Ernst Haeckel, full name Ernst Heinrich Phillip August Haeckel
"I testify that wickedness is rapidly expanding in every segment of our society. It is more highly organized, more cleverly disguised, and more powerfully promoted than ever before. Secret combinations lusting for power, gain, and glory are flourishing. A secret combination that seeks to overthrow the freedom of all lands, nations, and countries is increasing its evil influence and control over America and the entire world." - Ezra Taft Benson
"Every organization of men, be it social or political, ultimately relies on man's capacity for making promises and keeping them." - Hannah Arendt