This site is dedicated to the memory of Dr. Alan William Smolowe who gave birth to the creation of this database.
"It is in fact no exaggeration to say that we live in terror that Senator McCarthy will one day make some irreparable blunder that will play directly into the hands of our common enemy and discredit the whole anti-Communist effort for a long while to come." - Whittaker Chambers, born Jay Vivian Chambers, aka Jay David Whittaker Chambers
"Anything that has been accomplished by any other human being in the physical realm is within the field of possibility." - Wayne Dyer, fully Wayne Walter Dyer
"Choose to see death as simply removing a garment or moving from one room to another... it's merely a transition." - Wayne Dyer, fully Wayne Walter Dyer
"Have you ever noticed when you’re in the presence of certain people that you feel better about yourself? Their compassionate energy has the noticeably pleasant impact of simply making you feel really good about yourself. You’ll impact others with this energy of compassion as you develop your connection to intention." - Wayne Dyer, fully Wayne Walter Dyer
"There is a voice in the Universe urging us to remember our purpose for being on this great Earth. This is the voice of inspiration, which is within each and every one of us." - Wayne Dyer, fully Wayne Walter Dyer
"My grandfather returned to what he called ‘studying.’ He sat looking down at his lap, his left hand idle on the chair arm, his right scratching his head, his white hair gleaming in the lamplight. I knew that when he was studying he was thinking, but I did not know what about. Now I have aged into knowledge of what he thought about. He thought of his strength and endurance when he was young, his merriment and joy, and how his life’s burdens had then grown upon him. He thought of that arc of country that centered upon Port William as he first had known it in the years just after the Civil War, and as it had changed, and as it had become; and how all that time, which would have seemed almost forever when he was a boy, now seemed hardly anytime at all. He thought of the people he remembered, now dead, and of those who had come and gone before his knowledge, and of those who would come after, and of his own place in that long procession." - Wendell Berry
"The care of the earth is our most ancient and most worthy and, after all, our most pleasing responsibility. To cherish what remains of it, and to foster its renewal, is our only legitimate hope." - Wendell Berry
"When it began, Christianity was regarded as a system entirely beyond the range and scope of human reason; it was impious to question; it was impious to examine; it was impious to discriminate. On the other hand, it was visibly instinct with the supernatural. Miracles of every order and degree of magnitude were flashing forth incessantly from all its parts." - W. E. H. Lecky, fully William Edward Hartpole Lecky
"A religion so cheerless, a philosophy so sorrowful, could never have succeeded with the masses of mankind if presented only as a system of metaphysics. Buddhism owed its success to its catholic spirit and its beautiful morality." - W. Winwood Reade, fully William Winwood Reade
"The search is what anyone would undertake if he were not sunk in the everydayness of his own life. To become aware of the possibility of the search is to be onto something. Not to be onto something is to be in despair." - Walker Percy
"But every little difference may become a big one if it is insisted on." - Vladimir Lenin, fully Vladimir Ilyich Lenin
"God is behind any and all efforts that a human being makes toward him." - Vernon Howard, fully Vernon Linwood Howard
"One false idea is that anyone can hurt you. Events can ruin your reputation, take your money, mistreat you, revenge itself upon you, deceive, betray, abandon you, but cannot hurt you." - Vernon Howard, fully Vernon Linwood Howard
"The present has its élan because it is always on the edge of the unknown and one misunderstands the past unless one remembers that this unknown was once part of its nature." - V. S. Pritchett, fully Sir Victor Sawdon Pritchett
"Because the regime is captive to its own lies, it must falsify everything. It falsifies the past. It falsifies the present, and it falsifies the future. It falsifies statistics. It pretends not to possess an omnipotent and unprincipled police apparatus. It pretends to respect human rights. It pretends to prosecute no one. It pretends to fear nothing. It pretends to pretend nothing." - Václav Havel
"There is a new profession of trail blazers, those who find delight in the task of establishing useful trails through the enormous mass of the common record." - Vannevar Bush
"Our actions are neither so good nor so vicious that our wills." - Vauvenargues, Luc de Clapiers, Marquis de Vauvenargues NULL
"Mere knowledge is comparatively worthless unless digested into practical wisdom and common sense as applied to the affairs of life." - Tryon Edwards
"Piety and morality are but the same spirit differently manifested. Piety is religion with its face toward God; morality is religion with its face toward the world." - Tryon Edwards
"Right actions for the future are the best apologies for wrong ones in the past - the best evidence of regret for them that we can offer, or the world receive." - Tryon Edwards
"Right actions in the future are the best explanations or apologies for wrong ones in the past; the best evidence of regret for them that we can offer, or the world receive." - Tryon Edwards
"Science has sometimes been said to be opposed to faith, and inconsistent with it. But all science, in fact, rests on a basis of faith, for it assumes the permanence and uniformity of natural laws - a thing which can never be demonstrated." - Tryon Edwards
"Sinful and forbidden pleasures are like poisoned bread; they may satisfy appetite for the moment, but there is death in them at the end." - Tryon Edwards
"This world is the land of the dying; the next is the land of the living." - Tryon Edwards
"You take one bomber and deploy him in Baghdad, and another is manufactured in Riyadh the next day. It’s exactly like when you take the toy off the shelf at Wal-Mart and another is made in Shen Zhen the next day." - Thomas L. Friedman, fully Thomas Lauren Friedman
"These various habits of thought, or habitual expressions of life, are all phases of the single life sequence of the individual; therefore a habit formed in response to a given stimulus will necessarily affect the character of the response made to other stimuli. A modification of human nature at any one point is a modification of human nature as a whole." - Thorstein Veblen, fully Thorstein Bunde Veblen, born Torsten Bunde Veblen
"If there is no solution to the problem then don’t waste time worrying about it. If there is a solution to the problem then don’t waste time worrying about it." - Tibetan Proverbs
"Of all the beautiful truths pertaining to the soul None is more gladdening or fruitful than to know You can regenerate and make yourself what you will." - William James
"Any style formed in imitation of some model must be affected and straight-laced." - Edwin Percy Whipple
"If our leaders are not worthy, we have the power to elect leaders who are." - Elizabeth Dole, fully Mary Elizabeth Alexander Hanford "Liddy" Dole
"If you can plant yourself in stillness long enough, you will, in time, experience the truth that everything (both uncomfortable and lovely) does eventually pass." - Elizabeth Gilbert
"The prolonged slavery of women is the darkest page in human history." - Elizabeth Cady Stanton
"Recorded history starts with a patriarchal revolution. Let it continue with the matriarchal counterrevolution that is the only hope for the survival of the human race." - Elizabeth Gould Davis
"The oneself does not rest in peace under its identity, and yet its restlessness is not a dialectical scission, nor a process equalizing difference. Its unity is not just added on to some content of ipseity, like the indefinite article which substantifies even verbs, 'nominalizing' and thematizing them. Here the unity precedes every article and every process; it is somehow itself the content." - Emmanuel Lévinas , originally Emanuelis Lévinas
"What we experience is our own concept of things. That is why no two people see quite the same world, and why, in many cases, different people see such different worlds. To put it in another way, we make our own world by the way in which we think; for we really do live in a world of our own thoughts. It follows from this that if our thinking is faulty, our conditions must be faulty too until our thinking is corrected; and that it is useless to try to improve outer things if we leave our own mentality unchanged. Let us suppose for the sake of example that a deaf man goes to Carnegie Hall to a Kreisler recital; and that he happens to be a very foolish person. He sits in the middle of the orchestra and, of course, he does not hear a sound. He is annoyed at this, and changes his ticket for a seat in the first balcony. Here, naturally, he fares no better, and, foolishly thinking that the acoustics of the building are at fault, moves again to the top balcony. Still he cannot hear a sound; so now he goes downstairs again and this time chooses a seat in the very front of the orchestra, only a few yards from the violinist. Of course, he has no better fortune here, and so he stamps out of the theatre in a huff, declaring that evidently Kreisler cannot play, and that the hall is badly designed for music. It is easy for us to see that the trouble is really within himself, and that he cannot remedy matters by merely changing his seat. The only thing for him to do is to overcome his deafness in some way, and then he will enjoy the concert. He must change himself. This parable applies literally to all the problems of life. We see in harmony because of a spiritual lack within ourselves. As we gain greater spiritual understanding, the true Nature of Being opens up. As long as we move from one place to another in search of harmony, or try to bring it about by changing outer things, we are like the foolish man who could not hear Kreisler, and ran about all over the theatre." - Emmet Fox
"Above all, always be capable of feeling deeply any injustice committed against anyone, anywhere in the world." - Che Guevara, fully Ernesto “Che” Guevara
"So let's not mesmerize ourselves by the difficulties, but recover the common-sense view that to work is the most natural thing in the world. Only one must not be blocked by being too damn clever about itÂ…It is a fixation in the mind, that unless you can have the latest you can't do anything at all, and this is the thing that has to be overcome." - E. F. Schumacher, fully Ernst Friedrich "Fritz" Schumacher
"What you think about activates a vibration within you." - Ester and Jerry Hicks
"We live in a time when everyoneÂ’s goal is to be perpetually healthy and constantly happy. If any one of us fails to live up to the standards that are advertised as normative, we are labeled as a problem to be solved, and a host of well-intentioned people rush to try out various cures on us." - Eugene Peterson
"In writing and politicking, it's best not to think about it, just do it." - Gore Vidal, fully Eugene Luther Gore Vidal
"The average "educated" American has been made to believe that, somehow, the United States must lead the world even though hardly anyone has any information at all about those countries we are meant to lead. Worse, we have very little information about our own country and its past. That is why it is not really possible to compare a writer like Howells with any living American writer because Howells thought that it was a good thing to know as much as possible about his own country as well as other countries while our writers today, in common with the presidents and paint manufacturers, live in a present without past among signs whose meanings are uninterpretable." - Gore Vidal, fully Eugene Luther Gore Vidal
"They are continually talking about your patriotic duty. It is not their but your patriotic duty that they are concerned about. There is a decided difference. Their patriotic duty never takes them to the firing line or chucks them into the trenches. And now among other things they are urging you to "cultivate" war gardens, while at the same time a government war report just issued shows that practically 52 percent of the arable, tillable soil is held out of use by the landlords, speculators and profiteers. They themselves do not cultivate the soil. Nor do they allow others to cultivate it. They keep it idle to enrich themselves, to pocket the millions of dollars of unearned increment." - Eugene V. Debs, fully Eugene Victor Debs
"A billion here, a billion there, pretty soon, you're talking real money. [Attributed but disavowed by Dirksen]" - Everett Dirksen, fully Everett McKinley Dirksen
"Skill or fortune will efface the spots." - Italian Proverbs
"If there is one thing left that I would like to do, it's to write something really beautiful. And I could do it, you know. I could still do it." - J. B. Priestly, fully John Boynton Priestly
"Life implies constant activity, and the vital principle was accordingly regarded as something essentially active, constantly controlling and therefore interfering with physical tendencies towards disintegration of organic structure, and building up new organic structure in the process of nutrition and reproduction." - J. B. S. Haldane, fully John Burdon Sanderson Haldane
"A principal source of happiness to them was their shared love for their family...Tolkien was immensely kind and understanding as a father, never shy of kissing his sons in public even when they were grown men, and never reserved in his display of warmth and love." - J. R. R. Tolkien, fully John Ronald Reuel Tolkien
"A ruler who discerning justice refuseth to it the sanction of law, demanding abnegation of rights and self-sacrifice, will not drive his subjects to these virtues, virtuous only if free, but by unnaturally making justice unlawful, will drive them rather to rebellion against all law." - J. R. R. Tolkien, fully John Ronald Reuel Tolkien