This site is dedicated to the memory of Dr. Alan William Smolowe who gave birth to the creation of this database.
"The real difference between men is energy. A strong will, a settled purpose, an invincible determination, can accomplish almost anything; and in this lies the distinction between great men and little men." - Thomas Fuller
"If we are serious about reducing the size of government and its burdens, then we need to return economic self-determination to the people… We must do it by fostering economic democracy. We must do everything possible to assure ordinary citizens the possibility of owning a small, usable share of the country." - Wendell Berry
"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
"Even the striving for equality by means of a directed economy can result only in an officially enforced inequality - an authoritarian determination of the status of each individual in the new hierarchical order." - F. A. Hayek, fully Friedrich August Hayek or von Hayek
"You've got to get up every morning with determination if you're going to go to bed with satisfaction. " - George Horace Lorimer
"No degree of dullness can safeguard a work against the determination of critics to find it fascinating." - Harold Rosenberg
"If a person goes to his job with a firm determination to give of himself the best of which he is capable, that job no matter what it is takes on dignity and importance." - Hortense McQuarrie Odlum
"At the core of life is a hard purposefulness, a determination to live" - Howard Therman
"Continuous, unflagging effort, persistence and determination will win. Let not the man be discouraged who has these." - James Whitcomb Riley
"Civilized man has been more ruthlessly wasteful and grasping in his attitude toward the natural world than has served even his most material best interests. Possibly - as some hope - a mere enlightened selfishness will save it in time. Even if we should learn just in the nick of time not to destroy what is necessary for our own preservation, the mere determination to survive is not sufficient to save very much of the variety and beauty of the natural world. They can e preserved only if man feels the necessity of sharing the earth with at least some of his fellow creatures to be a privilege rather han an irritation. And he is not likely to feel that without something more than intellectual curiosity - that something more you may call love, fellow-feeling, or reverence for life. Without reverence or love the increasing awareness of what the science of ecology teaches us can come to be no more than a shrewder exploitation of what it would be better to admire, to enjoy, and to share in." - Joseph Wood Krutch
"Be fearless and pure; never waver in your determination or your dedication to the spiritual life. Give freely. Be self-controlled, sincere, truthful, loving, and full of the desire to serve...Learn to be detached and to take joy in renunciation. Do not get angry or harm any living creature, but be compassionate and gentle; show good will to all. Cultivate vigor, patience, will, purity; avoid malice and pride. Then, you will achieve your destiny." - Krishna, also Kreeshna, Krsna, Lord Krishna NULL
"A strong determination to get the best out of life; a keen desire to enjoy what one has, and no regrets if one fails; this is the secret of the Chinese genius for contentment." - Lin Yutang
"G-d, Who looks into the heart, on seeing the determination behind these good resolutions, will send His blessing for their realization in the fullest measure - in joy and gladness of heart and affluence, materially and spiritually." - Menachem Mendel Schneerson, known as the Lubavitcher Rebbe
"Children of any religion who have true faith must realize that God is the only One who knows all of everything. Therefore, only God can judge whether a person has faith, certitude, and determination or not and whether a person lives with that purity that can be called Islam or not. No one else can give that judgment. Do not wave your religion like a banner and go out to capture others. Only one kind of war is permissible in the eyes of God: the war you wage within yourself to defeat the demonic forces of lust, anger, jealousy, desire for revenge, and other evil feelings and attributes that may exist within your heart. God has sent each of the prophets as witnesses to the grace of God and as supports to help us in this inner war. This is the reason for the Qur'an. It is to help the true Muslim fight this inner battle and win victory over his own base desires that God sent the Messenger with the Qur'an." - Bawa Mahaiyadden, fully Muhammad Raheem Bawa Muhaiyaddeen
"A strong determination to be happy will help you. Do not wait for your circumstances to change, thinking falsely that in them lies the trouble. Do not make unhappiness a chronic habit, thereby afflicting yourself and your associates. It is blessedness for yourself and others if you are happy. If you possess happiness you possess everything; to be happy is to be in tune with God. That power to be happy comes through meditation." - Paramahansa Yogananda, born Mukunda Lal Ghosh
"Behold affronts and indignities which the world thinks it right never to pardon, which the Son of God endures with a divine meekness! Let us cast at the feet of Jesus that false honor, that quick sense of affronts, which exaggerates everything, and pardons nothing, and, above all, that devilish determination in resenting injuries." - Pasquier Quesnel
"Crystallize your goals. Make a plan for achieving them and set yourself a deadline. Then, with supreme confidence, determination and disregard for obstacles and other people's criticisms carry out your plan." - Paul J. Meyer
"Develop a dogged determination to follow through on your plan, regardless of obstacles, criticism, or circumstances ... or what other people say, think, or do." - Paul J. Meyer
"Construct your Determination with Sustained Effort, Controlled Attention, and Concentrated Energy. opportunities never come to those who wait... they are captured by those who dare to attack. " - Paul J. Meyer
"Have the dogged determination to follow through to achieve your goal; regardless of circumstances or whatever other people say, think, or do." - Paul J. Meyer
"To have courage means to claim your freedom, to reconnect with your will power, to reach the source of your resoluteness and determination as a person ... Seizing that freedom, claiming that truth, actually living out our lives in the experience of our freedom means being wiling to face grave anxiety, uncertainty, and doubt. It means facing guilt, anger, and depression -- what Saint John of the Cross called "the dark night of the soul" and Jonas called "the belly of the whale." It means that we accept pain as natural to growth, as the actual feeling of maturation. We recognize that the meaning of life is to be deep rather than to have fun, to understand rather than be entertained, to see rather than to be blind. We come face-to-face with our self-deception, with how we deny our true nature. We discover the perniciousness of ignorance and the worthlessness of superficiality. And these become emotional insights and experienced confirmations." - Peter Koestenbaum
"The scientific method is a potentiation of common sense, exercised with a specially firm determination not to persist in error if any exertion of hand or mind can deliver us from it. Like other exploratory processes, it can be resolved into a dialogue between fact and fancy, the actual and the possible; between what could be true and what is in fact the case. The purpose of scientific enquiry is not to compile an inventory of factual information, nor to build up a totalitarian world picture of Natural Laws in which every event that is not compulsory is forbidden. We should think of it rather as a logically articulated structure of justifiable beliefs about nature. It begins as a story about a Possible World—a story which we invent and criticise and modify as we go along, so that it ends by being, as nearly as we can make it, a story about real life. " - Peter Medawar, fully Sir Peter Brian Medawar
"A remorseful change of mind renders even a noble action base, whereas the determination which is grounded on knowledge and reason cannot change even if its actions fail." - Plutarch, named Lucius Mestrius Plutarchus after becoming Roman citizen NULL
"Private property is a natural fruit of labor, a product of intense activity of man, acquired through his energetic determination to ensure and develop with his own strength his own existence and that of his family, and to create for himself and his own an existence of just freedom, not only economic, but also political, cultural and religious." - Pope Pius X, aka Saint Pope Pius X and Pope of the Eucharist, born Giuseppe Melchiorre Sarto NULL
"Private property is a natural fruit of labor, a product of intense activity of man, acquired through his energetic determination to ensure and develop with his own strength his own existence and that of his family, and to create for himself and his own an existence of just freedom, not only economic, but also political, cultural and religious." - Pope Pius XII, born Eugenio Marìa Giuseppe Giovanni Pacelli NULL
"The quintessential revolution is that of the spirit, born of an intellectual conviction of the need for change in those mental attitudes and values which shape the course of a nation's development. A revolution which aims merely at changing official policies and institutions with a view to an improvement in material conditions has little chance of genuine success. Without a revolution of the spirit, the forces which produced the iniquities of the old order would continue to be operative, posing a constant threat to the process of reform and regeneration. It is not enough merely to call for freedom, democracy and human rights. There has to be a united determination to persevere in the struggle, to make sacrifices in the name of enduring truths, to resist the corrupting influences of desire, ill will, ignorance and fear." - Daw Aung San Suu Kyi
"The strength of the Constitution lies entirely in the determination of each citizen to defend it. Only if every single citizen feels duty bound to do his share in this defense are the constitutional rights secure." - Albert Einstein
"He who does not at some time, with definite determination consent to the terribleness of life, or even exalt in it, never takes possession of the inexpressible fullness of the power of our existence." - Rainer Maria Rilke, full name René Karl Wilhelm Johann Josef Maria Rilke
"As without strong determination the farmer cannot bring water to his field, so also without intense yearning a man cannot realize God." - Ramakrishna, aka Ramakrishna Paramhamsa or Sri Ramakrishna, born Gadadhar Chattopadhyay NULL
"The long ages of infancy and childhood, through which the human race has to pass, have receded into the background. Humanity is now experiencing the commotions invariably associated with the most turbulent stage of its evolution, the stage of adolescence, when the impetuosity of youth and its vehemence reach their climax, and must gradually be superseded by the calmness, the wisdom, and the maturity that characterize the stage of adulthood. Mankind, in these fateful years... is... being simultaneously called upon to give account of its past actions, and is being purged and prepared for its future mission. It can neither escape the responsibilities of the past, nor shirk those of the future. Then will a world civilization be born, flourish, and perpetuate itself, a civilization with a fullness of life such as the world has never seen nor can as yet conceive... Then will the promise enshrined in all the books of God be redeemed, and all the prophecies uttered by the prophets of old come to pass, and the vision of seers and poets be realized. Then will the planet, galvanized through the universal belief of its dwellers in one God, and their allegiance to one common revelation... be acclaimed as the earthly heaven, capable of fulfilling that ineffable destiny fixed for it from time immemorial by the love and wisdom of its Creator." - Shoghí Effendi, fully Shoghí Effendí Rabbání
"A nation that cannot control its borders is not a nation." - Ronald Reagan, fully Ronald Wilson Reagan
"The Russo-Japanese War now gives to all an awareness that even war and peace in Europe – its destiny – isn’t decided between the four walls of the European concert, but outside it, in the gigantic maelstrom of world and colonial politics. And it’s in this that the real meaning of the current war resides for social-democracy, even if we set aside its immediate effect: the collapse of Russian absolutism. This war brings the gaze of the international proletariat back to the great political and economic connectedness of the world, and violently dissipates in our ranks the particularism, the pettiness of ideas that form in any period of political calm. The war completely rends all the veils which the bourgeois world – this world of economic, political and social fetishism – constantly wraps us in. The war destroys the appearance which leads us to believe in peaceful social evolution; in the omnipotence and the untouchability of bourgeois legality; in national exclusivism; in the stability of political conditions; in the conscious direction of politics by these statesmen or parties; in the significance capable of shaking up the world of the squabbles in bourgeois parliaments; in parliamentarism as the so-called center of social existence. War unleashes – at the same time as the reactionary forces of the capitalist world – the generating forces of social revolution which ferment in its depths." - Rosa Luxemburg, aka Rosalia Luxemburg, "Bloody Rosa"
"Thus man could use a portion of the energy which previously he employed for the production of beings like himself, in order to perfect his own nature. The force by which mankind forms a thinking brain for itself is the same by which man impregnated himself in ancient times. The price of thought is single-sexedness. By no longer impregnating themselves, but rather by impregnating each other, human beings can turn a part of their productive energy within, and so become thinking creatures... In this way man has become a spiritual being of the kind which he is now. But one must not suppose that no beings which possessed cognition had been in contact with the earth before then. When one follows the Akasha Chronicle it does indeed appear that in the first Lemurian period, later physical man, because of his double sex, was a totally different being from that which one today designates as man. He could not connect any sensory perceptions with thoughts; he did not think. His life was one of impulses. His soul expressed itself only in instincts, in appetites, in animal desires and so on. His consciousness was dreamlike; he lived in dullness" - Rudolf Steiner, fully Rudolf Joseph Lorenz Steiner
"You have no idea how unimportant is all that the teacher says or does not say on the surface, and how important what he himself is as teacher." - Rudolf Steiner, fully Rudolf Joseph Lorenz Steiner
"The liberties of our Country, the freedom of our civil constitution are worth defending at all hazards: And it is our duty to defend them against all attacks. We have receiv'd them as a fair Inheritance from our worthy Ancestors: They purchas'd them for us with toil and danger and expence of treasure and blood; and transmitted them to us with care and diligence. It will bring an everlasting mark of infamy on the present generation, enlightened as it is, if we should suffer them to be wrested from us by violence without a struggle; or be cheated out of them by the artifices of false and designing men. Of the latter we are in most danger at present: Let us therefore be aware of it. Let us contemplate our forefathers and posterity; and resolve to maintain the rights bequeath'd to us from the former, for the sake of the latter. - Instead of sitting down satisfied with the efforts we have already made, which is the wish of our enemies, the necessity of the times, more than ever, calls for our utmost circumspection, deliberation, fortitude, and perseverance. Let us remember that if we suffer tamely a lawless attack upon our liberty, we encourage it, and involve others in our doom. It is a very serious consideration, which should deeply impress our minds, that millions yet unborn may be the miserable sharers of the event." - Samuel Adams
"The World War in which we are engaged in is on such a tremendous scale that we must readjust practically the whole nation's social and economic structure from a peace to a war basis. It devolves upon liberty-loving citizens, and particularly the workers of this country, to see to it that the spirit and the methods of democracy are maintained within our own country while we are engaged in a war to establish them in international relations. The fighting and the concrete issues of the war are so removed from our country that not all of our citizens have a full understanding of the principles of autocratic force which the Central Powers desire to substitute for the real principles of freedom." - Samuel Gompers
"Ignorance is a mere privation, by which nothing can be produced; it is a vacuity in which the soul sits motionless and torpid for want of attraction." - Samuel Johnson, aka Doctor Johnson
"Any attempt at recovering the bodies was absolutely hopeless, and there, deep down in that dreadful caldron of swirling water and seething foam, will lie for all time the most dangerous criminal and the foremost champion of the law of their generation." - Arthur Conan Doyle, fully Sir Arthur Ignatius Conan Doyle
"Faith is the wing of prayer, and without it my prayer will return to my bosom. Faith is the unshaken stance of the soul and is unmoved by any adversity." - John Climacus, fully Saint John Climacus, aka John of the Ladder, John Scholasticus and John Sinaites
"Former arbiters of taste must have felt (as so many apostles of traditional values and other high-minded tags for restriction and conformity do today) that maintaining the social order required a concept of unalloyed heroism. Human beings so designated as role models had to embody all virtues of the paragon—which meant, of course, that they could not be described in their truly human and ineluctably faulted form." - Stephan Jay Gould
"It is not merely that we want to see the game played fairly. We also want to see the rules changed, so that there shall be both less opportunity and less temptation to cheat, and less chance for some few people to gain a pro?t to which either they are not entitled at all, or else which is so enormous as to be greatly in excess of what they deserve, even though their services have been great. We wish to do away with the pro?t that comes from the illegitimate exercise of cunning and craft. We also wish to secure a measurable equality of opportunity, a measurable equality of reward for services of similar value. To do all this, two, mutually supplementary movements are necessary. On the one hand, there must be - I think there now is - a genuine and permanent moral awakening, without which no wisdom of legislation or administration really means anything; and, on the other hand, we must try to secure the social and economic legislation without which any improvement due to purely moral agitation is necessarily evanescent." - Theodore “Teddy” Roosevelt
"If love is in our hearts, every thought, word, and deed can bring about a miracle. Because understanding is the very foundation of love, words and actions that emerge from our love are always helpful." - Thich Nhất Hanh
"Our smile will bring happiness to us and to those around us. Even if we spend a lot of money on gifts for everyone in our family, nothing we buy could give them as much happiness as the gift of our awareness, our smile. And this precious gift costs nothing. At the end of a retreat in California, a friend wrote this poem: I have lost my smile, but don't worry. The dandelion has it. If you have lost your smile and yet are still capable of seeing that a dandelion is keeping it for you, the situation is not too bad. You still have enough mindfulness to see that the smile is there. You only need to breathe consciously one or two times and you will recover your smile. The dandelion is one member of your community of friends. It is there, quite faithful, keeping your smile for you." - Thich Nhất Hanh
"Your true home is in the here and the now. It is not limited by time, space, nationality, or race. Your true home is not an abstract idea. It is something you can touch and live in every moment. With mindfulness and concentration, the energies of the Buddha, you can find your true home in the full relaxation of your mind and body in the present moment. No one can take it away from you. Other people can occupy your country, they can even put you in prison, but they cannot take away your true home and your freedom." - Thich Nhất Hanh
"We might well believe that the law of universal gravitation whereby each physical reality attracts and is attracted to every other physical reality has its correspondence in the hidden or overt attraction of all human beings and all human societies to each other. This attraction takes place within a functional balance of tensions whereby each is sustained in its existence by all the others even as each sustains the others in existence. This seems to be demonstrated in the extensive and continuing efforts of humans to encounter each other and to establish a universal network of communication throughout the human order." - Thomas Berry
"A first attempt to recover the right of self-government may fail, so may a second, a third, etc. But as a younger and more instructed race comes on, the sentiment becomes more and more intuitive, and a fourth, a fifth, or some subsequent one of the ever renewed attempts will ultimately succeed... To attain all this, however, rivers of blood must yet flow, and years of desolation pass over; yet the object is worth rivers of blood and years of desolation. For what inheritance so valuable can man leave to his posterity?" - Thomas Jefferson
"If we live with possibilities we are exiles from the present which is given us by God to be our own, homeless and displaced in a future or a past which are not ours because they are always beyond our reach. The present is our right place, and we can lay hands on whatever it offers us." - Thomas Merton
"I believe in one God, and no more; and I hope for happiness beyond this life. I believe in the equality of man; and I believe that religious duties consist in doing justice, loving mercy, and endeavoring to make our fellow-creatures happy. But, lest it should be supposed that I believe in many other things in addition to these, I shall, in the progress of this work, declare the things I do not believe, and my reasons for not believing them. I do not believe in the creed professed by the Jewish church, by the Roman church, by the Greek church, by the Turkish church, by the Protestant church, nor by any church that I know of. My own mind is my own church. All national institutions of churches, whether Jewish, Christian or Turkish, appear to me no other than human inventions, set up to terrify and enslave mankind, and monopolize power and profit. I do not mean by this declaration to condemn those who believe otherwise; they have the same right to their belief as I have to mine. But it is necessary to the happiness of man, that he be mentally faithful to himself. Infidelity does not consist in believing, or in disbelieving; it consists in professing to believe what he does not believe." - Thomas Paine
"Act…is always identified with the fully complete, the actually present. Pure act, therefore, is simply a correlative of the immutable, i.e., of pure actualized form, complete in all that is proper to it and incorruptible. It is this immutability, self-sufficiency, and incorruptibility which for Aristotle is the primary characteristic of the “divine” and the perfect. In the notion of act so conceived there is no necessary implication of infinity, at least in the substantial order. In fact, Aristotle has no difficulty in admitting some fifty five of his prime movers, each one pure act or pure form but in virtue of its form distinct from all others. Substantial infinity would simply have no meaning in this Aristotelian universe" - W. Norris Clarke