This site is dedicated to the memory of Dr. Alan William Smolowe who gave birth to the creation of this database.
"Voices of the glorified urge us onward. they who have passed from the semblances of time to the realities of eternity call upon us to advance. The rest that awaits us invites us forward. We do not pine for our rest before God wills it. We long for no inglorious rest. We are thankful rather for the invaluable training of difficulty, the loving discipline of danger and strife. Yet in the midst of it all the prospect of rest invites us heavenward. Through all, and above all, God cries, “Go forward!” “Come up higher.”" - William Jones, fully Sir William Jones of Nayland, aka Trinity Jones
"Any religion... is for ever in danger of petrifaction into mere ritual and habit, though ritual and habit be essential to religion." - T. S. Eliot, fully Thomas Sterns Eliot
"A danger foreseen is half avoided." - Thomas Fuller
"Security is the mother of danger and the grandmother of destruction." - Thomas Fuller
"If a little knowledge is dangerous, where is the man who has so much as to be out of danger?" - Thomas Henry Huxley, aka T.H. Huxley and Darwin's Bulldog
"There is a danger in being persuaded before one understands." - Thomas Wilson
"If we want to know what happiness is we must seek it, not as if it were a part of gold at the end of the rainbow, but among human beings who are living richly and fully the good life. If you observe a really happy man you will find him building a boat, writing a symphony, educating his son, growing double Dahlias in his garden. He will not be searching for happiness as if it were a collar gold button that has rolled under the cupboard in his bed room. He will have become aware that he is happy in the course of living 24 crowded hours of the day. If you live only for yourself you are always an immediate danger of being bored to death with the repetition of your own views and interests. No one has learned the meaning of living until he has surrendered his ego to the service of his fellowmen. If your ambition has the momentum of an express train at full speed, if you can no longer stop your mad rush for glory, power, or intellectual supremacy, try to divert your energies into socially useful channels before it is too late. For those who seek the larger happiness and greater effectiveness open to human beings there can be but one philosophy of life, a philosophy of constructive altruism. The truly happy man is always a fighting optimist. Optimism includes not only altruism but also social responsibility, social courage and objectivity. The good life demands a working philosophy as an orientating map of conduct. This is the golden way of life. This is the satisfying life. This is the way to be happy though human. " - W. Béran Wolfe
"Freedom always entails danger." - W. E. B. Du Bois, fully William Edward Burghardt Du Bois
"In no direction that we turn do we find ease or comfort. If we are honest and if we have the will to win we find only danger, hard work and iron resolution." - Wendell Lewis Willkie
"A life of action and danger moderates the dread of death. It not only gives us fortitude to bear pain, but teaches us at every step the precarious tenure on which we hold our present being." - William Hazlitt
"Lying is like trying to hide in a fog. If you move about you are in danger of bumping your head against the truth. And as soon as the fog blows away you are gone anyhow." - William Hazlitt
"There are those who try to set fire to the world. We are in danger. There is only time to move slowly. There is no time not to love" - Deena Metzger
"Brave and loyal followers! Long ago we resolved to serve neither the Romans nor anyone other than God Himself, who alone is the true and just Lord of mankind. The time has now come that bids us prove our determination by our deeds we have never submitted to slavery, even when it brought no danger with it. We must not choose slavery now, and with it penalties that will mean the end of everything if we fall alive into the hands of the Romans God has given us this privilege, that we can die nobly and as free men and leave this world as free men in company with our wives and children. " - Eleazar ben Ya'ir
"Such a weapon goes far beyond any military objective and enters the range of very great natural catastrophes. By its very nature it cannot be confined to a military objective but becomes a weapon which in practical effect is almost one of genocide. It is clear that the use of such a weapon cannot be justified on any ethical ground which gives a human being a certain individuality and dignity even if he happens to be a resident of an enemy country... The fact that no limits exist to the destructiveness of this weapon makes its very existence and the knowledge of its construction a danger to humanity as a whole. It is necessarily an evil thing considered in any light." - Enrico Fermi
"The danger of the past was that men became slaves. The danger of the future is that man may become robots." - Erich Fromm, fully Erich Seligmann Fromm
"Man is born as a freak of nature, being within nature and yet transcending it. He has to find principles of action and decision-making which replace the principles of instincts. He has to have a frame of orientation which permits him to organize a consistent picture of the world as a condition for consistent actions. He has to fight not only against the dangers of dying, starving, and being hurt, but also against another danger which is specifically human: that of becoming insane. In other words, he has to protect himself not only against the danger of losing his life but also against the danger of losing his mind. " - Erich Fromm, fully Erich Seligmann Fromm
"We seldom break our leg so long as life continues a toilsome upward climb. The danger comes when we begin to take things easily and choose the convenient paths." - Friedrich Nietzsche, fully Friedrich Wilhelm Nietzsche
"Without education, we are in a horrible and deadly danger of taking educated people seriously. " - Gilbert Keith "G.K." Chesteron
"If you try to convince your child that he knows nothing, in other words, that he is stupid, the real danger is that he may believe you." - Haim Ginott, fully Haim G. Ginott, orignially Ginzburg
"But it is well to remember that we are dealing with nations every one of which has a direct individual interest to serve, and there is grave danger in an unshared idealism. " - Henry Cabot Lodge
"There is danger that we lose sight of what our friend is absolutely, while considering what she is to us alone. " - Henry David Thoreau, born David Henry Thoreau
"Love is the ark appointed for the righteous,Which annuls the danger and provides a way of escape. Sell your cleverness and buy bewilderment. Cleverness is mere opinion, bewilderment intuition." - Rumi, fully Jalāl ad-Dīn Muḥammad Rumi NULL
"Besides the danger of a direct mixture of religion and civil government, there is an evil which ought to be guarded against in the indefinite accumulation of property from the capacity of holding it in perpetuity by ecclesiastical corporations. The establishment of the chaplainship in Congress is a palpable violation of equal rights as well as of Constitutional principles. The danger of silent accumulations and encroachments by ecclesiastical bodies has not sufficiently engaged attention in the U.S." - James Madison
"The greatest danger to our future is apathy." - Jane Goodall, fully Dame Jane Morris Goodall, born Valerie Jane Morris-Goodall
"We cannot teach children the danger of telling lies to men without realizing, on the man's part, the danger of telling lies to children. A single untruth on the part of the master will destroy the results of his education." - Jean-Jacques Rousseau
"From a social standpoint, dependence denotes a power rather than a weakness; it involves interdependence. There is always a danger that increased personal independence will decrease the social capacity of an individual. In making him more self-reliant, it may make him more self-sufficient; it may lead to aloofness and indifference. It often makes an individual so insensitive in his relations to others as to develop an illusion of being really able to stand and act alone — an unnamed form of insanity which is responsible for a large part of the remedial suffering of the world." - John Dewey
"Through danger safety comes - through trouble rest. " - John Marston
"There is often less danger in the things we fear than in the things we desire." - John Churton Collins
"I seek to understand the present and the future while I disagree with those who think of the present in the past tense. I consider my own intellectual existence that the greatest danger is to become obsolete." - Abraham Joshua Heschel
"Science has become the handmaiden of the state. Now science must satisfy the demand of the state, and that demand is power. Therein lies the danger of its secular subservience and the cause of its conflict with humanity. For power, even if prompted by moral objectives, tends to become self-justifying and creates moral imperatives of its own." - Abraham Joshua Heschel
"A zealous soul without meekness, is like a ship in a storm, in danger of wrecks. A meek soul without zeal, is like a ship in a calm, that moves not so fast as it ought." - John M. Mason, fully John Mitchell Mason
"I am in favor of cutting taxes under any circumstances and for any excuse, for any reason, whenever it's possible. The reason I am is because I believe the big problem is not taxes, the big problem is spending. The question is, "How do you hold down government spending?" Government spending now amounts to close to 40% of national income not counting indirect spending through regulation and the like. If you include that, you get up to roughly half. The real danger we face is that number will creep up and up and up. The only effective way I think to hold it down, is to hold down the amount of income the government has. The way to do that is to cut taxes." - Milton Friedman, fully John Milton Friedman
"That so few now dare to be eccentric, marks the chief danger of the time. " - John Stuart Mill
"The amount of eccentricity in a society has generally been proportional to the amount of genius, mental vigor, and moral courage it contained. That so few now dare to be eccentric marks the chief danger of the time. " - John Stuart Mill
"I think that it is a relatively good approximation to truth — which is much too complicated to allow anything but approximations — that mathematical ideas originate in empirics. But, once they are conceived, the subject begins to live a peculiar life of its own and is ... governed by almost entirely aesthetical motivations. In other words, at a great distance from its empirical source, or after much "abstract" inbreeding, a mathematical subject is in danger of degeneration. Whenever this stage is reached the only remedy seems to me to be the rejuvenating return to the source: the reinjection of more or less directly empirical ideas." - John Von Newmann
"They trespassed upon my thoughts. They were intruders whose knowledge of life was to me an irritating pretense, because I felt so sure they could not possibly know the things I knew. Their bearing, which was simply the bearing of commonplace individuals going about their business in the assurance of perfect safety, was offensive to me like the outrageous flauntings of folly in the face of a danger it is unable to comprehend. I had no particular desire to enlighten them, but I had some difficulty in restraining myself from laughing in their faces, so full of stupid importance." - Joseph Conrad, born Teodor Josef Konrad Korzeniowski
"The danger of success is that it makes us forget the world's dreadful injustice." - Jules Renard, aka Pierre-Jules Renard
"There would be no danger of an atomic war if advances in history, the science of right and of state, philosophy, psychology, literature, art, etc. were as great as in physics. But instead of such progress, one is struck by significant regresses in many of the spiritual sciences. " - Kurt Gödel, also Goedel
"We prefer self-government with danger to servitude in tranquility." - Kwame Nkrumah
"Philosophy has been called the search for the Permanent amid the changing. With this account of philosophy there is no need to quarrel. But having accepted it, a distinction remains to be observed, a distinction of capital importance, which we are in constant danger of forgetting. It is one thing to find the Permanent; it is another thing to find a form of words in which the Permanent shall stand permanently expressed. It is one thing to experience something fixed and changeless; it is another thing to fix this something by a changeless definition. The first may be possible, while the second remains impossible for ever." - L. P. Jacks, fully Lawrence Pearsall Jacks
"There is no greater evil than making light of the enemy... There is nothing so unfortunate as entering lightly into battle, for by so doing we are in danger of losing that which is most precious. " - Lao Tzu, ne Li Urh, also Laotse, Lao Tse, Lao Tse, Lao Zi, Laozi, Lao Zi, La-tsze
"I want movement, not a calm course of existence. I want excitement and danger and the chance to sacrifice myself for my love. I feel in myself a superabundance of energy which finds no outlet in our quiet life." - Leo Tolstoy, aka Count Lev Nikolayevich Tolstoy or Tolstoi
"Curiosity, that is, the separate drive to explore the world disinterestedly, without being stimulated by danger or physiological dissatisfaction, is, according to students of evolution, rooted in specific morphological characteristics of our species and thus cannot be eliminated from our minds as long as our species retains its identity. As both Pandora’s most deplorable accident and the adventures of our progenitors in Paradise testify, curiosity has been a main cause of all the calamities and misfortunes that have befallen mankind, and it has unquestionably been the source of all its achievements." - Leszek Kolakowski
"While the laughter of joy is in full harmony with our deeper life, the laughter of amusement should be kept apart from it. The danger is too great of thus learning to look at solemn things in a spirit of mockery, and to seek in them opportunities for exercising wit." - Lewis Carroll, pseudonym for Charles Lutwidge Dodgson
"I am a member of a fragile species, still new to the earth, the youngest creatures of any scale, here only a few moments as evolutionary time is measured, a juvenile species, a child of a species. We are only tentatively set in place, error prone, at risk of fumbling, in real danger at the moment of leaving behind only a thin layer of of our fossils, radioactive at that." - Lewis Thomas
"A vague uncritical idealism always lends itself to ridicule and too much of it might be a danger to mankind, leading it round in a futile wild-goose chase for imaginary ideals." - Lin Yutang
"There is danger in delay. " - Livy, formally Titus Livius, aka Titus Livy NULL