This site is dedicated to the memory of Dr. Alan William Smolowe who gave birth to the creation of this database.
"We can go a stage beyond talking about things and drawing pictures of things by arranging for the actual handling of things. There is evidence that this greatly increases the proportion of the population capable of learning mathematics and this evidence is on a mass scale." - W. W. Sawyer, fully Walter Warwick Sawyer
"Consequently, since this study is vast in extent, embellished and enriched as it is with many different kinds of learning, I think that men have no right to profess themselves architects hastily, without having climbed from boyhood the steps of these studies and thus, nursed by the knowledge of many arts and sciences, having reached the heights of the holy ground of architecture." - Vitruvius, fully Marcus Vitruvius Pollio NULL
"In a country ruled by an autocracy, with a completely enslaved press, in a period of desperate political reaction in which even the tiniest outgrowth of political discontent and protest is persecuted, the theory of revolutionary Marxism suddenly forced its way into the censored literature before the government realized what had happened and the unwieldy army of censors and gendarmes discovered the new enemy and flung itself upon him." - Vladimir Lenin, fully Vladimir Ilyich Lenin
"The real emancipation of the Chinese people from age-long slavery would be impossible without the great, sincerely democratic enthusiasm which is rousing the working masses and making them capable of miracles, and which is evident from every sentence of Sun Yat-sen’s platform." - Vladimir Lenin, fully Vladimir Ilyich Lenin
"Green in nature is one thing, green in literature another. Nature and letters seem to have a natural antipathy; bring them together and they tear each other to pieces." - Virginia Woolf, nee Stephen, fully Adeline Virginia Woolf
"If we help an educated man's daughter to go to Cambridge are we not forcing her to think not about education but about war? - not how she can learn, but how she can fight in order that she might win the same advantages as her brothers?" - Virginia Woolf, nee Stephen, fully Adeline Virginia Woolf
"If woman had no existence save in the fiction written by men, one would imagine her a person of the utmost importance; very various; heroic and mean; splendid and sordid; infinitely beautiful and hideous in the extreme; as great as a man, some think even better." - Virginia Woolf, nee Stephen, fully Adeline Virginia Woolf
"It’s not catastrophes, murders, deaths, diseases, that age and kill us; it’s the way people look and laugh, and run up the steps of omnibuses." - Virginia Woolf, nee Stephen, fully Adeline Virginia Woolf
"In vain we chisel, as best we can, the mysterious block of which our life is made, the black vein of destiny reappears continually." - Victor Hugo
"Sorrow is a fruit. God does not make it grow on limbs too weak to bear it." - Victor Hugo
"That a cat may change into a lion, prefects of police do not believe possible; this can happen, nonetheless." - Victor Hugo
"The quantity of civilization is measured by the quality of imagination." - Victor Hugo
"I believe that during the intervention of NATO in Kosovo there is an element nobody can question: the air attacks, the bombs, are not caused by a material interest. Their character is exclusively humanitarian: What is at stake here are the principles, human rights which have priority above state sovereignty. This makes it legitimate to attack the Yugoslav Federation, although without the United Nations mandate." - Václav Havel
"Man is not born crowned like the natural king of beasts, for beasts by this investiture have need to know the head they must obey." - Tommaso Campanella, baptized Giovanni Domenico Campanella
"If rich men would remember that shrouds have no pockets, they would, while living, share their wealth with their children, and give for the good of others, and so know the highest pleasure wealth can give." - Tryon Edwards
"The highest attainment, as well as enjoyment of the spiritual life, is to be able at all times and in all things to say, "Thy will be done."" - Tryon Edwards
"Of course, when all is said, it is not learning but the spirit of service that will give a college place in the public annals of the nation." - Woodrow Wilson, fully Thomas Woodrow Wilson
"The old theory of the sovereignty of the States, which used so to engage our passions, has lost its vitality. The war between the States established at least this principle, that the federal government is, through its courts, the final judge of its own powers... We are impatient of state legislatures because they seem to us less representative of the thoughtful opinion of the country than Congress is. We know that our legislatures do not think alike, but we are not sure that our people do not think alike..." - Woodrow Wilson, fully Thomas Woodrow Wilson
"We want the spirit of America to be efficient; we want American character to be efficient; we want American character to display itself in what I may, perhaps, be allowed to call spiritual efficiency--clear, disinterested thinking and fearless action along the right lines of thought. America is not anything if it consists of each of us. It is something only if it consists of all of us; and it can consist of all of us only as our spirits are banded together in a common enterprise. That common enterprise is the enterprise of liberty and justice and right. And, therefore, I, for my part, have a great enthusiasm for rendering American spiritually efficient; and that conception lies at the basis of what seems very far removed from it, namely, the plans that have been proposed for the military efficiency of this nation." - Woodrow Wilson, fully Thomas Woodrow Wilson
"It was full of wounding remarks rather brilliantly said, perhaps said for the sheer virtuosity of giving pain neatly. Each of its phrases found its way through the eyes of the Marquesa, then, carefully wrapped in understanding and forgiveness, it sank into her heart." - Thornton Wilder, fully Thornton Niven Wilder
"Man is not an end but a beginning. We are at the beginning of the second week. We are children of the eighth day." - Thornton Wilder, fully Thornton Niven Wilder
"In fine, I have written my work, not as an essay which is to win the applause of the moment, but as a possession for all time." - Thucydides NULL
"What must be the knowledge of Him, from whom all created minds have derived both their power of knowledge, and the innumerable objects of their knowledge! What must be the wisdom of Him, from whom all things derive their wisdom!" - Timothy Dwight, fully Timothy Dwight IV
"Books have been handed down from generation to generation, as the true teachers of piety and the love of God, that represent him as so merciless and tyrannical a despot, that, if they were considered otherwise than through the medium of prejudice, they could inspire nothing but hatred. It seems that the impression we derive from a book, depends much less on its real contents, than upon the temper of mind and preparation with which we read it." - William Godwin
"Government, as it was forced upon mankind by their vices, so has it commonly been the creature of their ignorance and mistake." - William Godwin
"What... can be more shameless than for society to make an example of those whom she has goaded to the breach of order, instead of amending her own institutions which, by straining order into tyranny, produced the mischief?" - William Godwin
"Sobriety diminishes, discriminates, and says no; drunkenness expands, unites, and says yes. Not through mere perversity do men run after it." - William James
"The attitude of unhappiness is not only painful, it is mean and ugly. What can be more base and unworthy than the pining, puling, mumping mood, no matter by what outward ills it may have been engendered? What is more injurious to others? What less helpful as a way out of the difficulty? It but fastens and perpetuates the trouble which occasioned it, and increases the total evil of the situation. At all costs, then, we ought to reduce the sway of that mood; we ought to scout it in ourselves and others, and never show it tolerance." - William James
"The sovereign cure for worry is prayer." - William James
"The whole drift of my education goes to persuade me that the world of our present consciousness is only one out of many worlds of consciousness that exist, and that those other worlds must contain experiences which have a meaning for our life also; and that although in the main their experiences and those of this world keep discrete, yet the two become continuous at certain points, and higher energies filter in." - William James
"The world is all the richer for having a devil in it, so long as we keep our foot upon his neck." - William James
"Those thoughts are truth which guide us to beneficial interaction with sensible particulars as they occur, whether they copy these in advance or not." - William James
"No vice can harbor in you, no infirmity take any root, no good desire can languish, when once your heart is in this method of prayer; never beginning to pray, till you first see how matters stand with you; asking your heart what it wants, and having nothing in your prayers, but what the known state of your heart puts you upon demanding, saying, or offering, unto God. A quarter of an hour of this prayer, brings you out of your closet a new man; your heart feels the good of it; and every return of such a prayer, gives new life and growth to all your virtues, with more certainty, than the dew refreshes the herbs of the field: whereas, overlooking this true prayer of your own heart, and only at certain times taking a prayer that you find in a book, you have nothing to wonder at, if you are every day praying, and yet every day sinking further and further under all your infirmities." - William Law
"I half wish that I had not been born with a sense of romance and beauty in this accursed age." - William Morris
"Now For self-culture nothing equals respect for others. To counteract firmness nothing equals compliance. Consequently it can be said that the Way of respect and acquiescence is woman's most important principle of conduct. So respect may be defined as nothing other than holding on to that which is permanent; and acquiescence nothing other than being liberal and generous. Those who are steadfast in devotion know that they should stay in their proper places; those who are liberal and generous esteem others, and honor and serve chem." - Ban Zhao, courtesy name Huiban
"Love is the vital essence that pervades and permeates, from the center to the circumference, the graduating circles of all thought and action. Love is the talisman of human weal and woe - the open sesame to every soul." - Elizabeth Cady Stanton
"To-day the woman is Mrs. Richard Roe, to-morrow Mrs. John Doe, and again Mrs. James Smith according as she changes masters, and she has so little self-respect that she does not see the insult of the custom." - Elizabeth Cady Stanton
"Everything, everything in war is barbaric... But the worst barbarity of war is that it forces men collectively to commit acts against which individually they would revolt with their whole being." - Ellen Key, fully Ellen Karolina Sofia Key
"We in the US can learn a good deal from studying those who achieve great things without having huge resources. this video is a strong statement against the mistake of Big Government thinking. imagine the access to health care we could achieve if we simply stepped back from our current unthinking debates and refactored the broken system." - Ernest Madu
"The use of text messaging for propaganda purposes – known as “red-texting” – reveals another creative streak among China’s propaganda virtuosos. The practice may have grown out of a competition organized by one of China’s mobile phone operators to compose the most eloquent Party-admiring text message. Fast forward a few years, and senior telecom officials in Beijing are already busily attending “red-texting” symposia. “I really like these words of Chairman Mao: ‘The world is ours, we should unite for achievements. Responsibility and seriousness can conquer the world and the Chinese Communist Party members represent these qualities.’ These words are incisive and inspirational.” This is a text message that thirteen million mobile phone users in the Chinese city of Chongqing received one day in April 2009. Sent by Bo Xilai, the aggressive secretary of the city’s Communist Party who is speculated to have strong ambitions for a future in national politics, the messages were then forwarded another sixteen millions times. Not so bad for an odd quote from a long-dead Communist dictator." - Evgeny Morozov
"The greatest power in the world is the power our thought, for it is Creative Mind in action." - Fenwicke Lindsay Holmes
"For the first time, individual hackers could afford to have home machines comparable in power and storage capacity to the minicomputers of ten years earlier - Unix engines capable of supporting a full development environment and talking to the Internet." - Eric S. Raymond
"Not everyone is as honest as Freud was when he said that he cured the miseries of the neurotic only to open him up to the normal misery of life." - Ernest Becker
"The word that most perfectly describes the city of Cuzco is evocative. Intangible dust of another era settles on its streets, rising like the disturbed sediment of a muddy lake when you touch its bottom." - Che Guevara, fully Ernesto “Che” Guevara
"We see that man entirely resembles the higher mammals, and most of all the apes, in embryonic development as well as in anatomic structure. And if we seek to understand this ontogenetic agreement in the light of the biogenetic law, we find that it proves clearly and necessarily the descent of man from a series of other mammals, and proximately from the primates." - Ernst Haeckel, full name Ernst Heinrich Phillip August Haeckel
"Before we can talk about giving aid, we must have something to give. We do not have thousands of poverty-stricken villages in our country; so what do we know about effective methods of self-help in such circumstances?" - E. F. Schumacher, fully Ernst Friedrich "Fritz" Schumacher
"What we have today, in modern industrial society, is not romantic and certainly not utopianÂ…But it is in very deep trouble and holds no promise of survival. We jolly well have to have the courage to dream if we want to survive and give our children a chance of survival." - E. F. Schumacher, fully Ernst Friedrich "Fritz" Schumacher