This site is dedicated to the memory of Dr. Alan William Smolowe who gave birth to the creation of this database.
"Most bad government has grown out of too much government." - Thomas Jefferson
"The elective franchise, if guarded as the ark of our safety, will peaceably dissipate all combinations to subvert a Constitution, dictated by the wisdom, and resting on the will of the people." - Thomas Jefferson
"Truth is great and will prevail if left to herself, that she is the proper and sufficient antagonist to error, and has nothing to fear from the conflict, unless by human interposition disarmed of her natural weapons, free argument and debate; errors ceasing to be dangerous when it is permitted freely to contradict them." - Thomas Jefferson
"Blessings on the hand of women! Angels guard its strength and grace, in the palace, cottage, hovel, oh, no matter where the place. " - William Ross Wallace
"Then, shifting his side (as a lawyer knows how)." - William Cowper
"The actions of human beings are not invariably governed by the laws of pure reason." - Wilkie Collins, fully William Wilkie Collins
"No man-made law ever, no matter whether derived from the past or projected onto a distant, unforeseeable future, can or should ever be empowered to claim that it is greater than the Natural Law from which it stems and to which it must inevitably return in the eternal rhythm of creation and decline of all things natural. This is valid, no matter whether we speak in terms such as “God,” “Natural Law,” “Cosmic Primordial Force,” “Ether” or “Cosmic Orgone Energy.”" - Wilhelm Reich
"The vital energies regulate themselves naturally without compulsive duty or compulsive morality — both of which are sure signs of existing antisocial impulses." - Wilhelm Reich
"They call you "Little Man", "Common Man"; they say a new era has begun, the "Era of the Common Man". It isn't you who says so, Little Man. It is they, the Vice Presidents of great nations, promoted labor leaders, repentant sons of bourgeois families, statesman and philosophers. They give you your future but don't ask about your past." - Wilhelm Reich
"The way to get started is to quit talking and begin doing" - Walt Disney, fully Walter Elias "Walt" Disney
"Under the rule of the free market ideology, we have gone through two decades of an energy crisis without an effective energy policy. Because of an easy and thoughtless reliance on imported oil, we have no adequate policy for the conservation of gasoline and other petroleum products. We have no adequate policy for the development or use of other, less harmful forms of energy. We have no adequate system of public transportation." - Wendell Berry
"There's scarce a point whereon mankind agree - So well as in their boast of killing me; I boast of nothing, but when I've a mind - I think I can be even with mankind" - Voltaire, pen name of François-Marie Arouet NULL
"Through observation thoughts subside, hence the strain and pressure they cause on the neurological and chemical systems is also lifted. It is this tension that brings about anti-social behaviour." - Vimala Thakar
"When asked by an anthropologist what the Indians called America before the white men came, an Indian said simply "Ours." - Vine Deloria, fully Vine Victor Deloria, Jr.
"Initiative is doing the right thing without being told." - Victor Hugo
"There are certain emotions which can find expression only in silence.)" - Victor Hugo
"Move ahead. Give proper Nourishment to the body. May your hands,legs and body not be destroyed by death." - Atharva Veda, or Atharvaveda
"If you can see a thing whole, he said, it seems that it's always beautiful. Planets, lives. . . . But close up, a world's all dirt and rocks. And day to day, life's a hard job, you get tired, you loose the pattern. You need distance, interval. The way to see how beautiful earth is, is to see it from the moon. The way to see how beautiful life is, is from the vantage point of death. That's all right for Urras. Let it stay off there and be the moon-I don't want it! But I am not going to stand up on a gravestone and look down on life and say, 'O lovely!' I want to see it whole right in the middle of it, here, now. I don't give a hoot for eternity. It's nothing to do with eternity, said Shevek, grinning, a thin shaggy man of silver and shadow. All you have to do to see life as a whole is to see it as mortal. I'll die, you'll die; how could we love each other otherwise? The sun's going to burn out, what else keeps it shining? Ah! your talk, your damned philosophy! Talk? It's not talk. It's not reason. It's hand's touch. I touch the wholeness, I hold it. Which is moonlight, which is Takver? How shall I fear death? When I hold it, when I hold in my hands the light-Don't be propertarian, Takver muttered. Dear heart, don't cry. I'm not crying. You are. Those are your tears. I'm cold. The moonlight's cold. Lie down. A great shiver went through his body as she took him in her arms. I'm afraid, Takver, he whispered." - Ursula Le Guin, fully Ursula Kroeber Le Guin
"What I am about to say may sound provocative, but I feel more and more strongly that even these ideas are not enough, that we must go farther and deeper." - Václav Havel
"Sometimes a lengthened period of prosperity melts away in a moment; just as the heat of summer flies before a day of tempest." - Vauvenargues, Luc de Clapiers, Marquis de Vauvenargues NULL
"Always be honest and open in your speech and actions. Don't be sneaky or evasive with anyone. A straight mind is the Bodhimanda." - Hsuan Hua, aka An Tzu and Tu Lun
"Nature and revelation are alike God's books; each may have mysteries, but in each there are plain practical lessons for everyday duty." - Tryon Edwards
"Prejudices are rarely overcome by argument; not being founded in reason they cannot be destroyed by logic." - Tryon Edwards
"God himself has no right to be a tyrant." - William Godwin
"Nor is there any reason to believe that sound conviction will be less permanent in its influence than sophistry and error." - William Godwin
"The term nature is used sometimes in a wider, sometimes in a narrower extension. When employed in its most extensive meaning, it embraces the two worlds of mind and matter. When employed in its most restricted signification, it is a synonyme for the latter only, and is then used in contradistinction to the former." - William Hamilton, fully Sir William Hamilton, 9th Baronet
"For the philosophy which is so important in each of us is not a technical matter; it is our more or less dumb sense of what life honestly and deeply means. It is only partly got from books; it is our individual way of just seeing and feeling the total push and pressure of the cosmos." - William James
"We are doomed to cling to a life even while we find it unendurable." - William James
"Sometimes ... yaralanıveririz so suddenly. But every wound will heal itself. Eventually heals, top off. Stored in the eyes. Does not want to be seen because there is no wound. As long as they advocate the wound pupils. Because if pupils are injured, you cannot look the world in the same way ever again. You start to see the bad side of everything you look at. Contaminants that have remained hidden even run away from his eyes. Did not see things that other people feel the same anymore and you do not love them anymore. Uncomfortable. They cannot look you in the same way again. This is close to you, so no one wants to see. Picture the same image, in fact, changing your eyes. If you walk out the picture, everything remains as before, not everyone is comfortable. Personally, I think it is best to go in such situations. Top go to the top. Out of spite." - Elif Safak
"Nevertheless we all feel that it is indeed very reasonable and important to ask ourselves how we should try to conduct our lives. The answer is, in my opinion: satisfaction of the desires and needs of all, as far as this can be achieved, and achievement of harmony and beauty in the human relationships. This presupposes a good deal of conscious thought and of self-education. It is undeniable that the enlightened Greeks and the old Oriental sages had achieved a higher level in this all-important field than what is alive in our schools and universities." - Albert Einstein
"What I see in Nature is a magnificent structure that we can comprehend only very imperfectly, and that must fill a thinking person with a feeling of "humility." This is a genuinely religious feeling that has nothing to do with mysticism." - Albert Einstein
"But he [Depression] just gives me that dark smile, settles into my favorite chair, puts his feet on my table and lights a cigar, filling the place with his awful smoke. Loneliness watches and sighs, then climbs into my bed and pulls the covers over himself, fully dressed, shoes and all. He's going to make me sleep with him again tonight, I just know it." - Elizabeth Gilbert
"It does pay to be honest. It pays in rewarding relationships. It pays in unblocked energy. It pays in passion. To stand tall in who you are, unafraid to reveal what you want and need, kind enough to tell the truth, and brave enough to bear the consequences, is a telling sign of spiritual development." - Elizabeth Lesser
"Every effort for progress, for enlightenment, for science, for religious, political, and economic liberty, emanates from the minority, and not from the mass." - Emma Goldman
"Free love? As if love is anything but free! Man has bought brains, but all the millions in the world have failed to buy love. Man has subdued bodies, but all the power on earth has been unable to subdue love. Man has conquered whole nations, but all his armies could not conquer love. Man has chained and fettered the spirit, but he has been utterly helpless before love. High on a throne, with all the splendor and pomp his gold can command, man is yet poor and desolate, if love passes him by. And if it stays, the poorest hovel is radiant with warmth, with life and color. Thus love has the magic power to make of a beggar a king. Yes, love is free; it can dwell in no other atmosphere. In freedom it gives itself unreservedly, abundantly, completely. All the laws on the statutes, all the courts in the universe, cannot tear it from the soil, once love has taken root." - Emma Goldman
"The custom of procuring abortions has reached such appalling proportions in America as to be beyond belief... So great is the misery of the working classes that seventeen abortions are committed in every one hundred pregnancies." - Emma Goldman
"If a man does not control his temper, it is a sad admission that he is not in control of his thoughts. He then becomes a victim of his own passions and emotions, which lead him to actions that are totally unfit for civilized behavior, let alone behavior for a priesthood holder." - Ezra Taft Benson
"With all my heart I love our great nation. I have lived and traveled abroad just enough to make me appreciate rather fully what we have in America. To me the U. S. is not just another nation. It is not just one of a family of nations. The U. S. is a nation with a great mission to perform for the benefit and blessing of liberty-loving people everywhere." - Ezra Taft Benson
"Glance is the enemy of vision." - Ezra Pound, fully Ezra Weston Loomis Pound
"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