This site is dedicated to the memory of Dr. Alan William Smolowe who gave birth to the creation of this database.
"If the intellectual has any function in society, it is to preserve a cool and unbiased judgment in the face of all solicitations to passion... During the war, the ordinary virtues, such as thrift, industry, and public spirit, were used to swell the magnitude of the disaster by producing a greater energy in the work of mutual extermination." -
"Debt is the secret foe of thrift, as vice and idleness are its open enemies." - John H. Aughey, fully John Hill Aughey
"Thrift is not, as many suppose, a self repression. It is self expression, the demonstration of a will and ability to raise one's self to a higher plane of living. No depression was ever caused by people having too much money in reserve. No human being ever became a social drifter through the practice of sensible thrift." - Harvey A. Blodgett
"I believe that thrift is essential to well-ordered living and that economy is a prime requisite of a sound financial structure, whether in government, business or personal affairs." - John Davison Rockefeller, Jr.
"The engine which drives Enterprise is not Thrift, but Profit." - John Maynard Keynes
"Thrift is misery with a good press agent." - Latin Proverbs
"The effects of opposition are wonderful. There are men who rise refreshed on hearing of a threat; men to whom a crisis which intimidates and paralyzes the majority - demanding, not the faculties of prudence and thrift, but comprehension, immovableness, the readiness to sacrifice - comes graceful and beloved as a bride." - Ralph Waldo Emerson
"There can be no substitute for elemental virtues... only by each of us steadfastly keeping in mind that there can be no substitute for the world-old commonplace qualities of truth, justice and courage, thrift, industry, common sense and genuine sympathy with the fellow feelings of others." - Theodore “Teddy” Roosevelt
"Simplicity deepens life. It magnifies the simple virtues on which man’s survival depends: humility, faith, courage, serenity, honesty, patience, justice, tolerance, thrift. Simplicity is the arrow of the spirit." - Wilferd Peterson, fully Wilferd Arlan Peterson
"If the intellectual has any function in society, it is to preserve a cool and unbiased judgment in the face of all solicitations to passion... During the war, the ordinary virtues, such as thrift, industry, and public spirit, were used to swell the magnitude of the disaster by producing a greater energy in the work of mutual extermination. " - Bertrand Russell, fully Bertrand Arthur William Russell, 3rd Earl Russell
"Thrift is a habit. A habit is a thing you do unconsciously or automatically, without thought. We are ruled by our habits... The habit of thrift proves your power to rule your own psychic self. You are the captain of your soul. You are able to take care of yourself, and then out of the excess of your strength you produce a surplus." - Harvey A. Blodgett
"I believe that thrift is essential to well-ordered living. " - John D. Rockefeller, fully John Davidson Rockefeller I
"We are not to judge thrift solely by the test of saving or spending. If one spends what he should prudently save, that certainly is to be deplored. But if one saves what he should prudently spend, that is not necessarily to be commended. A wise balance between the two is the desired end." - Owen D. Young
"This administration is totally colorblind." - Ronald Reagan, fully Ronald Wilson Reagan
"A life of slothful ease, a life of that peace which springs merely from lack either of desire or of power to strive after great things, is as little worthy of a nation as of an individual. [...] If you are rich and are worth your salt, you will teach your sons that though they may have leisure, it is not to be spent in idleness; for wisely used leisure merely means that those who possess it, being free from the necessity of working for their livelihood, are all the more bound to carry on some kind of non-remunerative work in science, in letters, in art, in exploration, in historical research—work of the type we most need in this country, the successful carrying out of which reflects most honor upon the nation. We do not admire the man of timid peace. We admire the man who embodies victorious effort; the man who never wrongs his neighbor, who is prompt to help a friend, but who has those virile qualities necessary to win in the stern strife of actual life. It is hard to fail, but it is worse never to have tried to succeed. In this life we get nothing save by effort. Freedom from effort in the present merely means that there has been stored up effort in the past. A man can be freed from the necessity of work only by the fact that he or his fathers before him have worked to good purpose. If the freedom thus purchased is used aright, and the man still does actual work, though of a different kind, whether as a writer or a general, whether in the field of politics or in the field of exploration and adventure, he shows he deserves his good fortune. But if he treats this period of freedom from the need of actual labor as a period, not of preparation, but of mere enjoyment, even though perhaps not of vicious enjoyment, he shows that he is simply a cumberer of the earth's surface, and he surely unfits himself to hold his own with his fellows if the need to do so should again arise." - Theodore “Teddy” Roosevelt
"There are depths in man that go to the lowest hell, and heights that reach the highest heaven, for are not both heaven and hell made out of him, everlasting miracle and mystery that he is." - Thomas Carlyle
"The visions of the mind have a debt to reality that it is hard to get the mind to pay when it is under the influence of its visions." - Wendell Berry
"A great believer in precedent,' Della Street said. 'I think if he were ever confronted with a really novel situation he'd faint. He runs to his law books, digs around like a mole and finally comes up with case that's what he calls on all fours and was decided seventy-five or a hundred years ago." - Erle Stanley Gardner
"Mr. President, there is no royal road to a balanced budget. If there is, I have never discovered it in all the time I have been dealing with the millions of little figures that come to us in what looks like an unexpurgated mail-order catalog but what we call the budget of the United States, which contains some 1,100 pages." - Everett Dirksen, fully Everett McKinley Dirksen