This site is dedicated to the memory of Dr. Alan William Smolowe who gave birth to the creation of this database.
"There is no succession in the knowledge of God. The variety of successions and changes in the world make not succession, or new objects, in the Divine mind; for all things are present to him from eternity in regard of his knowledge, though they are not actually present in the world in regard of their existence. He doth not know one thing now, and another anon; he sees all things at once; “Known unto God are all things from the beginning of the world”; but in their true order of succession, as they lie in the eternal council of God, to be brought forth in time. Though there be a succession and order of things as they are wrought, there is yet no succession in God in regard of his knowledge of them." - Stephen Charnock
"But I am convinced that those Jews who stand aside today with a malicious smile and with their hands in their trousers' pockets will also want to dwell in our beautiful home." - Theodor Herzl, born Benjamin Ze’ev Herzl
"There is no life in the wrong." - Theodor W. Adorno, born Theodor Ludwig Wiesengrund
"Up to our days a man's membership of the upper or lower classes has been crudely determined by whether or not he accepted money. At times false pride became conscious criticism." - Theodor W. Adorno, born Theodor Ludwig Wiesengrund
"Never throughout history has a man who lived a life of ease left a name worth remembering." - Theodore “Teddy” Roosevelt
"We have no choice, we people of the United States, as to whether or not we shall play a great part in the world. That has been determined to us by fate, by the march of events. We have to play that part. All that we can decide is whether we shall play it well or ill." - Theodore “Teddy” Roosevelt
"You could no more make an agreement with them than you could nail currant jelly to a wall - and the failure to nail current jelly to a wall is not due to the nail; it is due to the currant jelly." - Theodore “Teddy” Roosevelt
"Our own life has to be our message." - Thich Nhất Hanh
"Every man acts truly so long as he acts his nature, or some way makes good the faculties in himself." - Thomas Browne, fully Sir Thomas Browne
"The beaten paths of literature lead safeliest to the goal, and the talent pleases us most which submits to shine with new gracefulness through old forms.-Nor is the noblest and most peculiar mind too noble or peculiar for working by prescribed laws." - Thomas Carlyle
"From whence it happens, that they which trust to books, do as they that cast up many little sums into a greater, without considering whether those little sums were rightly cast up or not; and at last finding the error visible, and not mistrusting their first grounds, know not which way to clear themselves; but spend time in fluttering over their books, as birds that entering by the chimney, and finding themselves enclosed in a chamber, flutter at the false light of a glass window, for want of wit to consider which way they came in." - Thomas Hobbes
"Do not be too severe upon the errors of the people, but reclaim them by enlightening them." - Thomas Jefferson
"For a people who are free, and who mean to remain so, a well-organized and armed militia is their best security." - Thomas Jefferson
"I do not believe it is for the interest of religion to invite the civil magistrate to direct its exercises, its discipline, or its doctrines; nor of the religious societies, that the General Government should be invested with the power of effecting any uniformity of time or matter among them." - Thomas Jefferson
"If we run into such debts as that we must be taxed in our meat and in our drink, in our necessaries and our comforts, in our labors and our amusements, for our callings and our creeds, as the people of England are, our people, like them, must come to labor sixteen hours in the twenty-four, and give the earnings of fifteen of these to the government for their debts and daily expenses; And the sixteenth being insufficient to afford us bread, we must live, as they do now, on oatmeal and potatoes, have no time to think, no means of calling the mismanagers to account; but be glad to obtain subsistence by hiring ourselves to rivet their chains around the necks of our fellow sufferers; And this is the tendency of all human governments. A departure from principle in one instance becomes a precedent for a second, that second for a third, and so on 'til the bulk of the society is reduced to be mere automatons of misery, to have no sensibilities left but for sinning and suffering ... And the forehorse of this frightful team is public debt. Taxation follows that, and in its train wretchedness and oppression." - Thomas Jefferson
"Man once surrendering his reason, has no remaining guard against absurdities the most monstrous, and like a ship without rudder, is the sport of every wind. With such persons, gullibility, which they call faith, takes the helm from the hand of reason, and the mind becomes a wreck." - Thomas Jefferson
"Questions of natural right are triable by their conformity with the moral sense and reason of man." - Thomas Jefferson
"The people are the only sure reliance for the preservation of our liberty." - Thomas Jefferson
"Were I to commence my administration again, the first question I would ask respecting a candidate would be, Does he use ardent spirits?" - Thomas Jefferson
"When injustice becomes law, resistance becomes duty." - Thomas Jefferson
"When the government fears the people there is liberty; when the people fear the government there is tyranny." - Thomas Jefferson
"But I believe that the desire to please You does in fact pleases You." - Thomas Merton
"In actual fact, conventions are the death of real tradition as they are of all real life. They are parasites which attach themselves to the living organism of tradition and devour all its reality, turning it into a hollow formality. Tradition is living and active, but convention is passive and dead. Tradition does not form us automatically: we have to work to understand it. Convention is accepted passively, as a matter of routine. Therefore, convention easily becomes an evasion of reality. It offers us only pretended ways of solving the problems of living - a system of gestures and formalities. Tradition really teaches us to live and shows us how to take full responsibility for our own lives. Thus tradition is often flatly opposed to what is ordinary, to what is mere routine. But convention, which is a mere repetition of familiar routines, follows the line of least resistance. One goes through an act, without trying to understand the meaning of it all, merely because everyone else does the same. Tradition, which is always old, is at the same time ever new because it is always reviving - born again in each new generation, to be lived and applied in a new and particular way. Convention is simply the ossification of social customs. The activities of conventional people are merely excuses for NOT acting in a more integrally human way. Tradition nourishes the life of the spirit; convention merely disguises its interior decay." - Thomas Merton
"Powerful as it has proven to be, this bleached-out physical conception of objectivity encounters difficulties if it is put forward as the method for seeking a complete understanding of reality. For the process began when we noticed that how things appear to us depends on the interaction of our bodies with the rest of the world. But this leaves us with no account of the perceptions and specific viewpoints which were left behind as irrelevant to physics but which seem to exist nonetheless, along with those of other creatures-- not to mention the mental activity of forming an objective conception of the physical world, which seems not itself capable of physical analysis. Faced with these facts one might think the only conceivable conclusion would be that there is more to reality than what can be accommodated by the physical conception of objectivity. But remarkably enough this has not been obvious to everyone. The physical has been so irresistibly attractive, and has so dominated ideas of what there is, that attempts have been made to beat everything into its shape and deny the reality of anything that cannot be so reduced. As a result, the philosophy of mind is populated with extremely implausible positions." - Thomas Nagel
"The point is... to live one's life in the full complexity of what one is, which is something much darker, more contradictory, more of a maelstrom of impulses and passions, of cruelty, ecstacy, and madness, than is apparent to the civilized being who glides on the surface and fits smoothly into the world." - Thomas Nagel
"There is a great deal of misery in the world, and many of us could easily spend our lives trying to eradicate it… One advantage of living in a world as bad as this one is that it offers the opportunity for many activities whose importance can’t be questioned. But how could the main point of human life be the elimination of evil? Misery, deprivation, and injustice prevent people from pursuing the positive goods which life is assumed to make possible. If all such goods were pointless and the only thing that really mattered was the elimination of misery, that really would be absurd." - Thomas Nagel
"Civilization, or that which is so called, has operated two ways to make one part of society more affluent and the other part more wretched than would have been the lot of either in a natural state." - Thomas Paine
"For though the flame of liberty may sometimes cease to shine, the coal can never expire." - Thomas Paine
"Government by kings was first introduced into the world by the Heathens, from whom the children of Israel copied the custom. It was the most prosperous invention the Devil ever set on foot for the promotion of idolatry." - Thomas Paine
"I believe in the equality of man, and I believe that religious duties consist of doing justice, loving mercy, and endeavoring to make our fellow-creatures happy." - Thomas Paine
"Is it a fact that Jesus Christ died for the sins of the world, and how is it proved? If a God, he could not die, and as a man he could not redeem." - Thomas Paine
"It is important that we should never lose sight of this distinction. We must not confuse the peoples with their governments..." - Thomas Paine
"It is incumbent on every man who reverences the character of the Creator, and who wishes to lessen the catalogue of artificial miseries, and remove the cause that has sown persecutions thick among mankind, to expel all ideas of revealed religion, as a dangerous heresy and an impious fraud." - Thomas Paine
"It will be proper to take a review of the several sources from which governments have arisen, and on which they have been founded." - Thomas Paine
"What is it the New Testament teaches us? To believe that the Almighty committed debauchery with a woman engaged to be married; and the belief of this debauchery is called faith." - Thomas Paine
"What more does man want to know than that the hand or power that made these things is divine, is omnipotent? Let him believe this with the force it is impossible to repel, if he permits his reason to act, and his rule of moral life will follow of course." - Thomas Paine
"When all other rights are taken away, the right of rebellion is made perfect." - Thomas Paine
"Whenever we read the obscene stories, the voluptuous debaucheries, the cruel and torturous executions, the unrelenting vindictiveness, with which more than half the Bible is filled, it would be more consistent that we called it the word of a demon that the Word of God. It is a history of wickedness that has served to corrupt and brutalize mankind; and for my own part, I sincerely detest it, as I detest everything that is cruel." - Thomas Paine
"Every man is conscious of a power to determine in things which he conceives to depend upon his determination. To this power we give the name of will." - Thomas Reid
"It is an objective fact whether a certain experience is pleasurable or unpleasurable, and relatedly whether a particular conscious individual is presently experiencing something pleasurable or painful. It is an objective fact, so we may put it, about a subjective state." - Timothy Sprigge, fully Timothy L.S. Sprigge
"Man was meant to be a gardener, but by reason of his sin he became a farmer." - W. R. Forrester, fully William Roxburgh Forrester
"The Jews did one other seemingly contradictory thing. They individualized religion; they made it very real and personal. And yet at the same time they universalized religion! They proclaimed the moral world-rule of one God. All this, perhaps the greatest achievement in the history of religion, was the work of a mere handful of people in a tiny, obscure country at the eastern end of the Mediterranean Sea. And all of this was the heritage or the backg" - Waldemar Argow, fully Wendelin Waldemar Wieland Argow
"The power which money gives is that of brute force; it is the power of the bludgeon and the bayonet." - William Cobbett
"The more reliant we become upon computers and information systems, the more vulnerable we become to cyber-terrorists who will conceive unlimited ways to cripple our infrastructure, our power grids, our banking systems, our financial markets, our space based communications systems." - William Cohen, fully William Sebastian Cohen
"Drunkenness was in good repute in England till "Bloody Mary" frowned upon it; it remained popular in Germany. The French drank more stably, not being quite so cold." - Will Durant, fully William James "Will" Durant
"No animal in the world gets quite as hungry as a Democrat. He would rather make a speech than a dollar." - Will Rogers, fully William Penn Adair "Will" Rogers
"There is no credit to being a comedian, when you have the whole Government working for you. All you have to do is report the facts. I dont even have to exaggerate." - Will Rogers, fully William Penn Adair "Will" Rogers
"One good test is worth a thousand expert opinions." - Wernher von Braun, fully Wernher Magnus Maximilian, Freiherr von Braun
"To me many of my colleagues at Time, basically kind and intensely well-meaning people, seemed to me as charming and as removed from reality as fish in a fish bowl. To me they seemed to know little about the forces that were shaping the history of our time. To me they seemed like little children, knowing and clever little children, but knowing and clever chiefly about trifling things while they were extremely resistant to finding out about anything else." - Whittaker Chambers, born Jay Vivian Chambers, aka Jay David Whittaker Chambers