This site is dedicated to the memory of Dr. Alan William Smolowe who gave birth to the creation of this database.
"Character matters; leadership descends from character." - Rush Limbaugh
"As is well that ends well. (If the final result is good, previous failures are forgotten and there is no need to complain, since the end result is the most importance thing)" - Russian Proverbs
"Bad peace is better than a good quarrel." - Russian Proverbs
"I think I overcame every single one of my personal shortcomings by the sheer passion I brought to my work. I don't know if you're born with this kind of passion, or if you can learn it. But I do know you need it." - Sam Walton, fully Samuel Moore "Sam" Walton
"It is not religion but revolution which is the opium of the people." - Simone Weil
"If self-denial be the greatest part of godliness, the great letter in the alphabet of religion, self-love is the great letter in the alphabet of practical atheism. Self is the great antichrist and anti-God in the world, that sets up itself above all that is called God; self-love is the captain of that black band: it sits in the temple of God, and would be adored as God. Self-love begins; but denying the power of godliness, which is the same with denying the ruling power of God, ends the list." - Stephen Charnock
"For what’s a play without a woman in it?" - Thomas Kyd
"A monk is a man who has given up everything in order to possess everything. He is one who has abandoned desire in order to achieve the highest fulfillment of all desire. He has renounced his liberty in order to become free. He goes to war because he has found a kind of war that is peace." - Thomas Merton
"It is a kind of pride to insist that none of our prayers should ever be petitions for our own needs: for this is only another subtle way of trying to put ourselves on the same plane as God – acting as if we had no needs, as if we were not creatures, not dependent on Him and dependent, by His will, on material things, too." - Thomas Merton
"Has not heaven an ear? Is all the lightning wasted?" - Thomas Middleton
"He is not affected by the reality of distress touching his heart, but by the showy resemblance of it striking his imagination. He pities the plumage, but forgets the dying bird." - Thomas Paine
"Song of an Old General - When he was a youth of fifteen or twenty, He chased a wild horse, he caught him and rode him, He shot the white-browed mountain tiger, He defied the yellow-bristled Horseman of Ye. Fighting single- handed for a thousand miles, With his naked dagger he could hold a multitude. ...Granted that the troops of China were as swift as heaven's thunder And that Tartar soldiers perished in pitfalls fanged with iron, General Wei Qing's victory was only a thing of chance. And General Li Guang's thwarted effort was his fate, not his fault. Since this man's retirement he is looking old and worn: Experience of the world has hastened his white hairs. Though once his quick dart never missed the right eye of a bird, Now knotted veins and tendons make his left arm like an osier. He is sometimes at the road-side selling melons from his garden, He is sometimes planting willows round his hermitage. His lonely lane is shut away by a dense grove, His vacant window looks upon the far cold mountains But, if he prayed, the waters would come gushing for his men And never would he wanton his cause away with wine. ...War-clouds are spreading, under the Helan Range; Back and forth, day and night, go feathered messages; In the three River Provinces, the governors call young men -- And five imperial edicts have summoned the old general. So he dusts his iron coat and shines it like snow- Waves his dagger from its jade hilt in a dance of starry steel. He is ready with his strong northern bow to smite the Tartar chieftain -- That never a foreign war-dress may affront the Emperor. ...There once was an aged Prefect, forgotten and far away, Who still could manage triumph with a single stroke." - Wang Wei, aka Wang Youcheng
"He finds his fellow guilty of a skin not color'd like his own, and having pow'r t' enforce the wrong, for such a worthy cause dooms and devotes him as his lawful prey." - William Cowper
"There is no argument in the world carries the hatred that a religious belief one does. The more learned a man is the less consideration he has for another man’s belief." - Will Rogers, fully William Penn Adair "Will" Rogers
"In making the great experiment of governing people by consent rather than by coercion, it is not sufficient that the party in power should have a majority. It is just as necessary that the party in power should never outrage the minority." - Walter Lippmann
"The genius of a good leader is to leave behind him a situation which common sense, without the grace of genius, can deal with successfully." - Walter Lippmann
"The newspaper is in all its literalness the bible of democracy, the book out of which a people determines its conduct." - Walter Lippmann
"Over the years, Charlie [Munger, Berkshire Hathaway Vice Chairman] and I have observed many accounting-based frauds of staggering size. Few of the perpetrators have been punished; many have not even been censured. It has been far safer to steal large sums with pen than small sums with a gun." - Warren Buffett, fully Warren Edward Buffett, aka Oracle of Omaha
"Badly will the devil keep his servant." - Welsh Proverbs
"The old feel the blows suffered when young." - Welsh Proverbs
"I... made brash, dashing interpretive photographs which were overly clever and with too much technique… with great depth of field, very little depth of feeling, and with considerable 'success'." - W. Eugene Smith, fully William Eugene Smith
"Ever since the days when such formidable mediocrities as Galsworthy, Dreiser, Tagore, Maxim Gorky, Romain Rolland and Thomas Mann were being accepted as geniuses, I have been perplexed and amused by fabricated notions about so-called great books. That, for instance, Mann's asinine Death in Venice, or Pasternak's melodramatic, vilely written Dr. Zhivago, or Faulkner's corn-cobby chronicles can be considered masterpieces or at least what journalists term great books, is to me the sort of absurd delusion as when a hypnotized person makes love to a chair. My greatest masterpieces of twentieth century prose are, in this order: Joyce's Ulysses; Kafka's Transformation; Bely's St. Petersburg, and the first half of Proust's fairy tale, In Search of Lost Time." - Vladimir Nabokov, fully Vladimir Vladimirovich Nabokov
"Governments need to have both shepherds and butchers." - Voltaire, pen name of François-Marie Arouet NULL
"When you were hanged, dissected, stunned with blows and made to row in the galleys, did you always think that everything was for the best in this world?" - Voltaire, pen name of François-Marie Arouet NULL
"I can sit and analyze everything and beat myself up and say you don't quite sing as good as you used to, you're writing better songs maybe than you used to, but to me it's just the journey." - Vince Gill
"Each was rewarded according to his efforts: Washington brings a nation to independence; a justice at peace, he falls asleep beneath his own roof in the midst of his compatriots’ grief and the veneration of nations." - François-René de Chateaubriand, fully François-René, vicomte de Chateaubriand
"It did not really matter what we expected from life, but rather what life expected from us. We needed to stop asking about the meaning of life, and instead to think of ourselves as those who were being questioned by life—daily and hourly. Our answer must consist, not in talk and meditation, but in right action and in right conduct. Life ultimately means taking the responsibility to find the right answer to its problems and to fulfill the tasks which it constantly sets for each individual." - Viktor Frankl, fully Viktor Emil Frankl
"We should abstain from miserliness, cruelty, gambling and misconduct while doing business." - Atharva Veda, or Atharvaveda
"The priests of all these cults, the singers, shouters, prayers and exhorters of Bootstrap-lifting have as their distinguishing characteristic that they do very little lifting at their own bootstraps, and less at any other man's. Now and then you may see one bend and give a delicate tug, of a purely symbolical character: as when the Supreme Pontiff of the Roman Bootstrap-lifters comes once a year to wash the feet of the poor; or when the Sunday-school Superintendent of the Baptist Bootstrap-lifters shakes the hand of one of his Colorado mine-slaves. But for the most part the priests and preachers of Bootstrap-lifting walk haughtily erect, many of them being so swollen with prosperity that they could not reach their bootstraps if they wanted to. Their role in life is to exhort other men to more vigorous efforts at self-elevation, that the agents of the Wholesale Pickpockets' Association may ply their immemorial role with less chance of interference." - Upton Sinclair, fully Upton Beall Sinclair, Jr.
"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
"The simple definition of globalization is the interweaving of markets, technology, information systems, and telecommunications networks in a way that is shrinking the world from a size medium to a size small. It began decades ago, but accelerated dramatically over the past 10 years, as the price of computing power fell and the world became an ever-more densely interconnected place. People resist this shift — see, for example, the G8 protests of 2001 (one of the bloodiest uprisings in recent European history) or the recent rioting in Pittsburgh at this year’s G20 conference—because they think it primarily benefits big business elites to the detriment of everyone else. But globalization didn’t ruin the world—it just flattened it. And on balance that can benefit everyone, especially the poor. Globalization has pulled millions of people out of poverty in India and China, and multiplied the size of the global middle class. It has raised the global standard of living faster than that at any other time in the history of the world, and it is supporting astounding growth. All world economic activity was valued at $7 trillion in 1950. That’s equal to how much growth took place over just the past decade, even including the recent downturn. Whatever people’s fears of change, globalization is here to stay—and, if properly managed, it will be a good thing." - Thomas L. Friedman, fully Thomas Lauren Friedman
"Without a woman's help, a man cannot set up a tent." - Tibetan Proverbs
"Protest politics has been vibrant against Bush and the war in Iraq, but it's been intergenerational. This doesn't seem to be a resurgence of student activism." - Tom Hayden, fully Thomas Emmet "Tom" Hayden
"Funny how we think of romance as always involving two, when the romance of solitude can be ever so much more delicious and intense." - Tom Robbins, fully Thomas Eugene "Tom" Robbins
"Anon, as patient as the female dove when that her golden couplets are disclosed, his silence will sit drooping." - William Shakespeare
"Did it ever strike you that goodness is not merely a beautiful thing, but by far the most beautiful thing in the whole world? So that nothing is to be compared for value with goodness; that riches, honor, power, pleasure, learning, the whole world and all in it, are not worth having in comparison with being good; and the utterly best thing for a person is to be good, even though they were never to be rewarded for it." - Charles Kingsley
"24 hour broadcasts have to stretch limited material to fit 24 hours’ worth of space." - Drew Curtis
"Like it or not, we live in a world where people will pay more attention to what a member of a famous boy band says on a technical subject as opposed to real scientists, who in theory should know more about what the hell they are talking about." - Drew Curtis
"Media Fearmongering stories tend to always cover somewhat unlikely events. Recently I read of an initiative to require car manufacturers to install sensors that alert drivers when they leave a baby in the backseat accidentally. Along those same lines, there is an off switch for the passenger-side airbag in my car, a device that has caused only 30-40 deaths ever. By comparison, more people die every year from drinking too much water. Should Congress legislate safety shutoff valves for faucets? Should they regulate our water to keep us from drinking too much?" - Drew Curtis
"Most people treat the news media like the exercise bike they have in their basement. They're glad it's there but they never use it." - Drew Curtis
"On the Internet, news is consumed a la carte. If someone shows up on the main page of a website and doesn't see anything of interest, they leave. This negatively impacts ad revenues. The solution on the Internet is to pack news websites full of things that will draw people in, regardless of whether they are news or not." - Drew Curtis
"People don’t really want to watch or read news that does the right thing. The McNeil-Lehrer Newshour was a great example of this. Quality news, mostly information, and no one watched it. It was dry as toast in a diner at breakfast on Saturday morning. Is there any way to fix this? No." - Drew Curtis
"Personally I’m hoping to spend the last years of my life plugged into a real life." - Drew Curtis
"Readers assume information carried by Mass Media is true solely because it appears there. While Mass Media asks its audience to treat all media matters with a degree of skepticism, no one actually does. People expect Mass Media to do that for them, but it doesn’t. Whether it should is another issue entirely." - Drew Curtis
"The main problem with Headline Contradicted by Actual Article is that most people don’t read articles, they read only headlines and move on. Judging from the click-out patterns on Fark, the average person on a given visit to Fark will click on maybe three links out of around two hundred. As for the rest of the links, they read the outrageous tagline, figure they know what the rest of the article says, and move on." - Drew Curtis
"The day cuts off the promise of the night." - Egyptian Proverbs
"If there's a single message passed down from each generation of American parents to their children, it is a two-word line: Better Yourself. And if there's a temple of self-betterment in each town, it is the local school. We have worshiped there for some time." - Ellen Goodman
"I'll tell you how the sun rose—a ribbon at a time." - Emily Dickinson, fully Emily Elizabeth Dickinson
"Bad news travels fast." - English Proverbs
"No one can make you feel inferior without your consent." - English Proverbs