This site is dedicated to the memory of Dr. Alan William Smolowe who gave birth to the creation of this database.
"But every little difference may become a big one if it is insisted on." - Vladimir Lenin, fully Vladimir Ilyich Lenin
"Destroy the family, you destroy the country." - Vladimir Lenin, fully Vladimir Ilyich Lenin
"The government is tottering. We must deal it the death blow at any cost. To delay action is the same as death." - Vladimir Lenin, fully Vladimir Ilyich Lenin
"Although I could never get used to the constant state of anxiety in which the guilty, the great, and the tenderhearted live, I felt I was doing my best in the way of mimicry." - Vladimir Nabokov, fully Vladimir Vladimirovich Nabokov
"Observe that noses were made to wear spectacles; and so we have spectacles. Legs were visibly instituted to be breeched, and we have breeches. Stones were formed to be quarried and to build castles; and My Lord has a very noble castle; the greatest Baron in the province should have the best house; and as pigs were made to be eaten, we eat pork all year round; consequently, those who have asserted all is well talk nonsense; they ought to have said that all is for the best." - Voltaire, pen name of François-Marie Arouet NULL
"Nothing in life is trivial. Life is whole wherever and whenever we touch it, and one moment or event is not less sacred than another." - Vimala Thakar
"Those of us who have dedicated our lives to social action have considered our personal morality and ethics, our motives and habits, to be private territory. We not only want our personal motivations and habits cut off from public view, but from our own recognition as well. But in truth, the inner life is not a private or personal thing; it’s very much a social issue. The mind is a result of collective human effort. There is not your mind and my mind; it’s a human mind. It’s a collective human mind, organized and standardized through centuries. The values, the norms, the criteria are patterns of behavior organized by collective groups. There is nothing personal or private about them. We may close the doors to our rooms and feel that nobody knows our thoughts, but what we do in so-called privacy affects the life around us. If we spend our days victimized by negative energies and negative thoughts, if we yield to depression, melancholia, and bitterness, these energies pollute the atmosphere. Where then is privacy? We need to learn, as a social responsibility, to look at the mind as something that has been created collectively and to recognize that our individual expressions are expressions of the human mind." - Vimala Thakar
"If Shakespeare had never existed, he asked, would the world have differed much from what it is today? Does the progress of civilization depend upon great men? Is the lot of the average human being better now that in the time of the Pharaohs?" - Virginia Woolf, nee Stephen, fully Adeline Virginia Woolf
"Ask not the name of him who asks you for a bed. It is especially he whose name is a burden to him, who has need of an asylum (room)." - Victor Hugo
"Close by the Rights of Man, at the least set beside them, are the Rights of the Spirit." - Victor Hugo
"For he knew how to do a little of everything--all badly." - Victor Hugo
"I wanted to see you again, touch you, know who you were, see if I would find you identical with the ideal image of you which had remained with me and perhaps shatter my dream with the aid of reality." - Victor Hugo
"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
"The three great problems of this century; the degradation of man in the proletariat, the subjection of women through hunger, the atrophy of the child by darkness." - Victor Hugo
"The crowning experience of all, for the homecoming man, is the wonderful feeling that, after all he has suffered, there is nothing he need fear anymore—except his God." - Viktor Frankl, fully Viktor Emil Frankl
"One should respect his motherland, his culture and his mother tongue because they are givers of happiness." - Rig Veda, or The Rigveda
"The greatest religious problem today is how to be both a mystic and a militant; in other words how to combine the search for an expansion of inner awareness with effective social action, and how to feel one's true identity in both." - Ursula Le Guin, fully Ursula Kroeber Le Guin
"I also appeal to those who have already done most of their work for society. I hope that the changes you awaited or worked for so long will bring joy and satisfaction into your lives. We need your experience, your wisdom and your love." - Václav Havel
"I think theatre should always be somewhat suspect" - Václav Havel
"The hope of the world lies in the rehabilitation of the living human being, not just the body but also the soul." - Václav Havel
"No policy is sustainable without a public that broadly understands why it's necessary and sees the world the way you do..." - Thomas L. Friedman, fully Thomas Lauren Friedman
"Friends help you move. Real friends help you move dead bodies." - Woodrow Wilson, fully Thomas Woodrow Wilson
"The awakening of the people of China to the possibilities under free government is the most significant, if not the most momentous, event of our generation." - Woodrow Wilson, fully Thomas Woodrow Wilson
"The line of red are lines of blood, nobly and unselfishly shed by men who loved the liberty of their fellowmen more than they loved their fellowmen more than they lover their own lives and fortunes. God forbid that we would have to use the blood of America to freshen the color of the flag. But if it should ever be necessary, that flag will be colored once more, and in being colored will be glorified and purified." - Woodrow Wilson, fully Thomas Woodrow Wilson
"If you give way, you will instantly have to meet some greater demand, as having been frightened into obedience in the first instance; while a firm refusal will make them clearly understand that they must treat you more as equals." - Thucydides NULL
"It is a historic step toward eliminating the shameful practice of racial discrimination in the selection of juries." - Thurgood Marshall
"It sprang without sowing, it grew without heeding, ye knew not its name and ye knew not its measure, ye noted it not mid your hope and your pleasure; there was pain in its blossom, despair in its seeding, but daylong your bosom now nurseth its treasure." - William Morris
"Creative people always suffer from depression because we're so super sensitive and special?" - Elizabeth Gilbert
"I look at the Augusteum, and I think that perhaps my life has not actually been so chaotic, after all. It is merely this world that is chaotic, bringing changes to us all that nobody could have anticipated. The Augusteum warns me to not to get attached to any obsolete ideas about who I am, what I represent, whom I belong to, or what function I may once have intended to serve. Yesterday I might have been a glorious monument to somebody, true enough--but tomorrow I could be a fireworks depository. Even in the Eternal City, says the silent Augusteum, one must always be prepared for riotous and endless waves of transformation." - Elizabeth Gilbert
"The search for satisfaction to Aahdf to protection and interest Almatatin, but a generous gift to the world. Saved one of every misery, Azaha of the way. To dream an obstacle, not in front of himself, but also in front of others. Only then will be free to serve the people and enjoy Bhbhm." - Elizabeth Gilbert
"Your problem is you don't understand what that word means. People think a soul mate is your perfect fit, and that's what everyone wants. But a true soul mate is a mirror, the person who shows you everything that's holding you back, the person who brings you to your attention so you can change your life. A true soul mate is probably the most important person you'll ever meet, because they tear down your walls and smack you awake. But to live with a soul mate forever? Nah. Too painful. Soul mates, they come into your life just to reveal another layer of yourself to you, and then they leave." - Elizabeth Gilbert
"It has ever been since time began, and ever will be, till time lose breath, that love is a mood - no more - to man, and love to a woman is life or death." - Ella Wheeler Wilcox
"As they have dared, so shall I dare. Dare to tell the truth, as I have pledged to tell it, in full, since the normal channels of justice have failed to do so." - Emile Zola
"I have for me only an ideal of truth and justice. But I am quite calm; I shall conquer. I was determined that my country should not remain the victim of lies and injustice. I may be condemned here. The day will come when France will thank me for having helped to save her honor." - Emile Zola
"My nights would otherwise be haunted by the spectre of the innocent man, far away, suffering the most horrible of tortures for a crime he did not commit." - Emile Zola
"The political arena leaves one no alternative, one must either be a dunce or a rogue." - Emma Goldman
"The sense of justice and equality, the love of liberty and of human brotherhood — these fundamentals of the real regeneration of society — the Communist State suppressed to the point of extermination. Man's instinctive sense of equity was branded as weak sentimentality; human dignity and liberty became a bourgeois superstition; the sanctity of life, which is the very essence of social reconstruction, was condemned as unrevolutionary, almost counter-revolutionary. This fearful perversion of fundamental values bore within itself the seed of destruction." - Emma Goldman
"Maleness is a biological risk factor." - Estelle R. Ramey, born Stella Rosemary Rubin
"I knew that when the great guiding spirit cleaves humanity into two antagonistic halves, I would be with the people. I know this, I see it printed in the night sky that I, eclectic dissembler of doctrine and psychoanalyst of dogma, howling like one possessed, will assault the barricades or the trenches , will take my bloodstained weapon, and consumed with fury, slaughter any enemy who falls into my hands." - Che Guevara, fully Ernesto “Che” Guevara
"I know you are here to kill me. Shoot, coward, you are only going to kill a man." - Che Guevara, fully Ernesto “Che” Guevara
"Young people, the most beautiful jewels in wealth is also the most beautiful in the case of want and woe!" - Euripedes NULL
"One of the sad commentaries on the way women are viewed in our society is that we have to fit one category. I have never felt that I had to be in one category." - Faye Wattleton
"The consolations of the moral ideal are vigorous. They do not encourage idle sentiment. They recommend to the sufferer action. Our loss, indeed, will always remain loss, and no preaching or teaching can ever make it otherwise. But the question is whether it shall weaken and embitter, or strengthen and purify us, and lead us to raise to the dead we mourn a monument in our lives that shall be better than any pillared chapel or storied marble tomb. The criterion of all right relations whatsoever is that we are helped by them. And so, too, the criterion of right relations to the dead is that we are helped, not weakened and disabled, by them." - Felix Adler
"Theories of what is true have their day. They come and go, leave their deposit in the common stock of knowledge, and are supplanted by other more convincing theories. The thinkers and investigators of the world are pledged to no special theory, but feel themselves free to search for the greater truth beyond the utmost limits of present knowledge. So likewise in the field of moral truth, it is our hope, that men in proportion as they grow more enlightened, will learn to hold their theories and their creeds more loosely, and will none the less, nay, rather all the more be devoted to the supreme end of practical righteousness to which all theories and creeds must be kept subservient. There are two purposes then which we have in view: To secure in the moral and religious life perfect intellectual liberty, and at the same time to secure concert in action. There shall be no shackles upon the mind, no fetters imposed in early youth which the growing man or woman may feel prevented from shaking off, no barrier set up which daring thought may not transcend. And on the other hand there shall be unity of effort, the unity that comes of an end supremely prized and loved, the unity of earnest, morally aspiring persons, engaged in the conflict with moral evil." - Felix Adler
"None so deaf as those who will not hear." - Italian Proverbs
"What costs little is little esteemed." - Italian Proverbs
"And she looked at him and saw the grave tenderness in his eyes, and yet knew, for she was bred among men of war, that here was one whom no Rider of the Mark could outmatch in battle." - J. R. R. Tolkien, fully John Ronald Reuel Tolkien