This site is dedicated to the memory of Dr. Alan William Smolowe who gave birth to the creation of this database.
"Whenever we take away the liberties of those whom we hate we are opening the way to loss of liberty for those we love." - Wendell Lewis Willkie
"Experience had taught me that innocence seldom utters outraged shrieks. Guilt does. Innocence is a mighty shield, and the man or woman covered by it, is much more likely to answer calmly: “My life is blameless. Look into it, if you like, for you will find nothing.” That is the tone of innocence." - Whittaker Chambers, born Jay Vivian Chambers, aka Jay David Whittaker Chambers
"For in this century, within the next decades, will be decided for generations whether all mankind is to become Communist, whether the whole world is to become free, or whether, in the struggle, civilization as we know it is to be completely destroyed or completely changed." - Whittaker Chambers, born Jay Vivian Chambers, aka Jay David Whittaker Chambers
"Reinhold Niebuhr's new orthodoxy is the old-time religion put through the intellectual wringer. It is a re-examination of orthodoxy for an age dominated by such trends as rationalism, liberalism, Marxism, fascism, idealism and the idea of progress." - Whittaker Chambers, born Jay Vivian Chambers, aka Jay David Whittaker Chambers
"What I had been fell from me like dirty rags. The rags that fell from me were not only Communism. What fell was the whole web of the materialist modern mind—the luminous shroud which it has spun about the spirit of man, paralyzing in the name of rationalism the instinct of his soul for God, denying in the name of knowledge the reality of the soul and its birthright in that mystery on which mere knowledge falters and shatters at every step." - Whittaker Chambers, born Jay Vivian Chambers, aka Jay David Whittaker Chambers
"While there is life there is hope, has deeper meaning in reverse. While there is hope there is life. Hope comes first, life follows. Hope gives power to life. Hope rouses life to continue to expand, to grow, to reach out, to go on. Hope sees a light where there isn't any. Hope lights candles in millions of despairing hearts. Where would I be without hope?" - Wilferd Peterson, fully Wilferd Arlan Peterson
"Follow the voice of your heart, even if it leads you off the path of timid souls. Do not become hard and embittered, even if life tortures you at times. There is only one thing that counts: to live one’s life well and happily." - Wilhelm Reich
"Full sexual consciousness and a natural regulation of sexual life mean the end of mystical feelings of any kind, that, in other words, natural sexuality is the deadly enemy of mystical religion. The church, by making the fight over sexuality the center of its dogmas and of its influence over the masses, confirms this concept." - Wilhelm Reich
"If you live in a dark cellar too long, you will hate the sunshine. You may even have lost the power of the eye to tolerate light. From this comes hatred toward sunlight." - Wilhelm Reich
"It is high time for the living to get tough, for toughness is indispensable in the struggle to safeguard and develop the life-force; this will not detract from their goodness, as long as they stand courageously by the truth. There is ground for hope in the fact that among millions of decent, hard-working people there are only a few plague-ridden individuals, who do untold harm by appealing to the dark, dangerous drives of the armored average man and mobilizing him for political murder. There is but one antidote to the average man's predisposition to plague: his own feelings for true life. The life force does not seek power but demands only to play its full and acknowledged part in human affairs. It manifests itself through love, work and knowledge." - Wilhelm Reich
"Mistaking insolence for freedom has always been the hallmark of the slave." - Wilhelm Reich
"Most intellectual people do not believe in God, but they fear him just the same." - Wilhelm Reich
"Saw a film on cancer yesterday, shown by the English delegation. No doubt about it. I'm right. Migratory cancer cells are amoebic formations. They are produced from disintegrating tissue and thus demonstrate the law of tension and charge in its purest form - as does the orgastic convulsion. Now money is a must - cancer the main issue - in every respect, even political. It was a staggering experience. My intuition is good. I depend on it. Was absolutely driven to buy a microscope. The sight of the cancer cells was exactly as I had previously imagined it, had almost physically felt it would be. Cancer is an autoinfection of the body, of an organ. And researchers have no idea of what, hor, or where!!" - Wilhelm Reich
"The discovery of orgone energy was made through consistent, thorough study of energy functions, first in the realm of the psyche, and later in the realm of biological functioning." - Wilhelm Reich
"You differ from a great man in only one respect: the great man was once a very little man, but he developed one important quality: he recognized the smallness and narrowness of his thoughts and actions. Under the pressure of some task that meant a great deal to him, he learned to see how his smallness, his pettiness endangered his happiness. In other words, a great man knows when and in what way he is a little man. A little man does not know he is little and is afraid to know. He hides his pettiness and narrowness behind illusions of strength and greatness, someone else's strength and greatness. He's proud of his great generals but not of himself. He admires an idea he has not had, not one he has had. The less he understands something, the more firmly he believes in it. And the better he understands an idea, the less he believes in it." - Wilhelm Reich
"A healthy society, firmly resting on its own foundation, possesses a genuine `structure' with many intermediate stages; it exhibits a necessarily `hierarchical' composition...where each individual has the good fortune of knowing his position. Whereas such a society is based on the grouping functions of genuine communities filled with the spirit of human fellowship (such as the neighbourhood, the family, the parish, the Church, the occupation), society has during the last hundred years moved further and further away from such an ideal and has disintegrated into a mass of abstract individuals who are solitary and isolated as human beings, but packed tightly like termites in their role of social functionaries." - Wilhelm Röepke
"One must further note that the economic order of a free society presupposes competition only in as far as that economy is a market economy dependent on the division of labor. Competition, therefore, is only one of the pillars on which such an order rests, while the other is self-sufficiency. We are, therefore, free to modify the competitive character of the economy in full harmony with the principles of our economic order, by enlarging the sphere of marketless self-sufficiency...This is a new and important point illustrating the inestimable importance of sustenance farming and the `rurification' of the industrial proletariat." - Wilhelm Röepke
"The market economy must find its place in a higher order of things which is not ruled by supply and demand, free prices, and competition. It must be firmly contained within an all-embracing order of society in which the imperfections and harshness of economic freedom are corrected by law and in which man is not denied conditions of life appropriate to his nature." - Wilhelm Röepke
"There is no denying it: the collectivist state is rooted in the masses (to which professors can belong as well as workers) and it can only exist under conditions which, sociologically speaking, we term spiritual collectivization, that is, conditions of society for which precisely the extreme democratic development is an excellent preparation but which is the direct opposite of the liberal as well as the conservative-aristocratic ideal." - Wilhelm Röepke
"I can never stand still. I must explore and experiment. I am never satisfied with my work. I resent the limitations of my own imagination." - Walt Disney, fully Walter Elias "Walt" Disney
"Or heritage and ideals, our code and standards - the things we live by and teach our children - are preserved or diminished by how freely we exchange ideas and feelings." - Walt Disney, fully Walter Elias "Walt" Disney
"Too many people grow up. That`s the real trouble with the world, too many people grow up. They forget. They don`t remember what it`s like to be 12 years old. They patronize, they treat children as inferiors. Well I won`t do that." - Walt Disney, fully Walter Elias "Walt" Disney
"Bearing the bandages, water and sponge, straight and swift to my wounded I go, where they lie on the ground after the battle brought in, where their priceless blood reddens the grass the ground, or to the rows of the hospital tent, or under the roof'd hospital, to the long rows of cots up and down each side I return, to each and all one after another I draw near, not one do I miss, an attendant follows holding a tray, he carries a refuse pail, soon to be fill'd with clotted rags and blood, emptied, and fill'd again." - Walt Whitman, fully Walter "Walt" Whitman
"Then dearest child mournest thou only for Jupiter? Considerest thou alone the burial of the stars?" - Walt Whitman, fully Walter "Walt" Whitman
"What is it that you express in your eyes? It seems to me more than all the words I have read in my life." - Walt Whitman, fully Walter "Walt" Whitman
"The hope filled language of prophecy in cutting through the royal despair and hopelessness is the language of amazement... the language of amazement is the ultimate energizer." - Walter Brueggemann
"The prophet speaks these words in direct contradiction to the facts on the ground. It is the work of poets to contradict the facts on the ground and to invite the listeners to embrace an alternative future." - Walter Brueggemann
"Those who are living in anxiety and fear, most especially fear of scarcity, have no time or energy for the common good. Anxiety is no adequate basis for the common good; anxiety will cause the formulation of policy and of exploitative practices that are inimical to the common good, a systemic greediness that precludes the common good." - Walter Brueggemann
"For the newspaper is in all literalness the bible of democracy, the book out of which a people determines its conduct. It is the only serious book most people read. It is the only book they read every day." - Walter Lippmann
"He who captures the symbols by which public feeling is for the moment contained, controls by that much the approaches of public policy." - Walter Lippmann
"The world is inherent in the United Nations as an oak tree is in an acorn." - Walter Lippmann
"When men can no longer be theists, they must, if they are civilized, become humanists." - Walter Lippmann
"Whereas each man claims his freedom as a matter of right, the freedom he accords to other men is a matter of toleration." - Walter Lippmann
"Whether we wish it or not we are involved in the world's problems, and all the winds of heaven blow through our land." - Walter Lippmann
"Without some form of censorship, propaganda in the strict sense of the word is impossible. In order to conduct propaganda there must be some barrier between the public and the event." - Walter Lippmann
"By giving children lots of affection, you can help fill them with love and acceptance of themselves. Then that's what they will have to give away." - Wayne Dyer, fully Wayne Walter Dyer
"We don't have the wisdom required to hear what is truly necessary to hear right action, right understanding, right livelihood. We inadvertently break things even as we try to fix them. Our busy-ness becomes a kind of violence because it destroys the root of inner wisdom that makes work fruitful. On one level, suffering comes because we inadvertently bring harm to the world that we're trying to help whether we're raising money to pay the bills, serving the homeless, or feeding the hungry. Having been in non-profit worlds for twenty-five years, I can say that the faster we go, the more we unintentionally mishandle the ones we love. They become an object of our ambition rather than the subject of our heart's attention, which requires a certain amount of time and company as well as money." - Wayne Muller
""The action of non-action," is the central paradox of Taoism and as a concept is second in importance only to the Tao itself, which incorporates it; Lao Tzu describes the action/non-action of someone who has realized the Tao as wu-wei: Thus, the wise man deals with things through wu-wei and teaches through no-words. The ten thousand things flourish without interruption. They grow by themselves, and no one possesses them." - Wei Wu Wei, pen name for Terence James Stannus Gray
"A corporation, essentially, is a pile of money to which a number of persons have sold their moral allegiance. Unlike a person, a corporation does not age. It does not arrive, as most persons finally do, at a realization of the shortness and smallness of human lives; it does not come to see the future as the lifetime of the children and grandchildren of anybody in particular." - Wendell Berry
"Can we actually suppose that we are wasting, polluting, and making ugly this beautiful land for the sake of patriotism and the love of God? Perhaps some of us would like to think so, but in fact this destruction is taking place because we have allowed ourselves to believe, and to live, a mated pair of economic lies: that nothing has a value that is not assigned to it by the market; and that the economic life of our communities can safely be handed over to the great corporations." - Wendell Berry
"If I solve my dispute with my neighbor by killing him, I have certainly solved the immediate dispute. If my neighbor was a scoundrel, then the world is no doubt better for his absence. But in killing my neighbor, though he may have been a terrible man who did not deserve to live, I have made myself a killer—and the life of my next neighbor is in greater peril than the life of the last. In making myself a killer I have destroyed the possibility of neighborhood." - Wendell Berry
"If we are looking for insurance against want and oppression, we will find it only in our neighbors' prosperity and goodwill and, beyond that, in the good health of our worldly places, our homelands. If we were sincerely looking for a place of safety, for real security and success, then we would begin to turn to our communities - and not the communities simply of our human neighbors but also of the water, earth, and air, the plants and animals, all the creatures with whom our local life is shared." - Wendell Berry
"In a time of disorder [Laertes] has returned to the care of the earth, the foundation of life and hope. And Odysseus finds him in an act emblematic of the best and most responsible kind of agriculture: an old man caring for a young tree." - Wendell Berry
"It was a country . . . that he and his people had known how to use and abuse, but not how to preserve." - Wendell Berry
"The great obstacle may be not greed but the modern hankering after glamor. A lot of our smartest, most concerned people want to come up with a big solution to a big problem. I don't think that planet-saving, if we take it seriously, can furnish employment to many such people. When I think of the kind of worker the job requires, I think of Dorothy Day (if one can think of Dorothy Day herself, separate from the publicity that came as a result of her rarity), a person willing to go down and down into the daunting, humbling, almost hopeless local presence of the problem--to face the great problem one small life at a time." - Wendell Berry
"We have forgotten that Vietnam, and Iraq resent being invaded and know the ground better than we do." - Wendell Berry
"Normally, when one passes someone on the street who is in pain, one either tries to help him, or one simply looks the other way. With a photo there's no human decision; you're not there; you can't turn away; you simply gape. It's a form of voyeurism." - W. H. Auden, fully Wystan Hugh Auden
"Madam, there's no such thing as a tough child - if you parboil them first for seven hours, they always come out tender." - W. C. Fields, stage name for William Claude Dukenfield
"But what of black women?... I most sincerely doubt if any other race of women could have brought its fineness up through so devilish a fire." - W. E. B. Du Bois, fully William Edward Burghardt Du Bois