This site is dedicated to the memory of Dr. Alan William Smolowe who gave birth to the creation of this database.
"Two kinds of people: ... those who think and those who don't; the difference comes almost entirely from education." - Jean-Jacques Rousseau
"Were there a people of gods, their government would be democratic. So perfect a government is not for men." - Jean-Jacques Rousseau
"More people laugh at us that with us, however it may appear at the moment." - Giovani Ruffini
"Be generous, and pleasant-tempered, and forgiving; even as God scatters favors over thee, do thou scatter over the people." - Sa'di (or Saadi), pen name of Abū-Muḥammad Muṣliḥ al-Dīn bin Abdallāh Shīrāzī, born Muslih-uddin NULL
"Thought engenders thought. Place one idea upon paper, another will follow it, and still another, until you have written a page. You cannot fathom your mind. It is a well of thought which has no bottom. The more you draw from it, the more clear and fruitful will it be. If you neglect to think yourself, and use other people's thoughts, giving them utterance only, you will never know what you are capable of. At first your ideas may come out in lumps, homely and shapeless; but no matter; time and perseverance will arrange and polish them. Learn to think, and you will learn to write; the more you think, the better you will express your ideas." - George Augustus Sala, fully George Augustus Henry Sala
"More people praise the Bible than read it, more read it than understand it, and more understand it than follow it." - Samuel Sandmel
"Of all actions of a man's life, his marriage does least concern other people, yet of all actions of our life, 'tis most meddled with by other people." - John Selden
"If we do not watch, we lose our opportunities; if we do not make haste, we are left behind; our best hours escape us, the worst are come. The purest part of our life runs first, and leaves only the dregs at the bottom; and that time which is good for nothing else we dedicate to virtue, and only propose to begin to live at an age that very few people arrive at." -
"The greatest deficit in academic medicine is that it has generally failed to approach the problem of preventing disease or health promotion.... we are too busy taking care of people with disease to be bothered with preventing it." - Norm Shealy, fully Dr. C. Norman Shealy
"The lowest people are generally the first to find fault with show or equipage; especially that of a person lately emerged from his obscurity. They never once consider that he is breaking the ice for themselves." - William Shenstone
"There must be some supreme, universal design. Each of us comes to life and stays in the world for predestined period. Some leave forever, sometimes without a trace; others stay for a long time, both in life and in memory. We remain longest - we make a difference - when we manage to act not for ourselves but for others. It is possible to create good and evil. The greatest and most important thing a person can do is to understand that where good exists, evil also resides; what’s more, one must strive to stay on the side of righteousness, doing one’s best to promote good in the world. Only you can make this choice. You alone will be held responsible - by other people, by your progeny and by history." - Eduard Shevardnadze
"High theory and mere mind-stimulation are secondary; living itself - in the real world, among people - is the essence... I hereby promise to attempt to be a mensh, a decent, caring human being. Neutrality, noncommitment, indifference have no place in life. To be fully human, we are committed to being caring, sensitive, aggressively compassionate people. Our lives are defined by how we act. We are alive because we perform just and righteous deeds, deeds of gentle loving kindness." - Danny Siegel
"Proposed four consumption criteria for simple living. (1) Does what I own or buy promote activity, self-reliance, and involvement, or does it induce passivity and dependence? (2) Are my consumption patterns basically satisfying, or do I buy much that serves no real need? (3) How tied is my present job and lifestyle to installment payments, maintenance and repair costs, and the expectations of others? (4) Do I consider the impact of my consumption patterns on other people and on the Earth?" - Duane Elgin and Arnold Mitchell (1918-1985)
"When Leo Tolstoy was an old man he was planting little apple trees. His neighbor laughed at him and called him a silly old man, because when the apples finally grew he wouldn’t be around to eat them. Tolstoy told him, “Yes, but other people will eat them and they will think of me.” It think that’s what we’re supposed to do: leave more than we’ve found, give more than we’ve received, love more than we’ve been loved." - Yakov Smirnoff, born Yakov Naumovich Pokhis
"Don't let young people confide in you their aspirations; when they drop them, they will drop you." - Logan Pearsall Smith
"How awful to reflect that what people say of us is true!" - Logan Pearsall Smith
"Two weeks before his death, a friend asked him half-jokingly if he had discovered any meaning in life. 'Yes,' he replied, ' there is a meaning, at least for me, there is one thing that matters - to set a chime of words tinkling in the minds of a few fastidious people.'" - Logan Pearsall Smith
"No enjoyment, however inconsiderable, is confined to the present moment. A man is the happier for life from having made once an agreeable tour, or lived for any length of time with pleasant people, or enjoyed any considerable interval of innocent pleasure." - Sydney Smith
"The only valid censorship of ideas is the right of people not to listen." - Tommy Smothers
"The more people have studied different methods of bringing up children and the more they have come to the conclusion that what good mothers and fathers instinctively feel like doing for their babies is the best after all." - Benjamin Spock, fully Benjamin McLane Spock
"I should like to persuade religious people that some of us who reject their faith, nevertheless do have an experience which is at least very much like their essential religious experience. We feel, sometimes with remarkable intensity and clarity, our ‘at-oneness’ with something which might be the fundamental reality behind appearances." - Olaf Stapledon, fully William Olaf Stapledon
"Spiritual power is a force which history clearly teaches has been the greatest force in the development of men... Some day people will learn that material things do not bring happiness, and are of little use in making people creative and powerful. Then the scientists of the world will turn their laboratories over to the study of spiritual forces which have hardly been scratched." - Charles P. Steinmetz, fully Charles Proteus Steinmetz, born Karl August Rudolf Steinmetz
"Funerals are always occasions for pious lying. A deep vein of superstition and a sudden touch of kindness always lead people to give the departed credit for more virtues than he possessed." - I. F. Stone, fully Isidor Feinstein Stone, born Isidor Feinstein
"The trouble with music appreciation in general is that people are taught to have too much respect for music; they should be taught to love it instead." - Igor Feodorovitch Stravinsky, or Fyodorovich
"Teach the young people [a child] how to think, not what to think." - Sidney Sugarman
"Constitutions are checks upon the hasty action of the majority. They are the self-imposed restraints of a whole people upon a majority of them to secure sober action and a respect for the rights of the minority." - William Howard Taft
"Too many people do not card what happens as long as it does not happen to them." - William Howard Taft
"Children are living beings - more living than grown-up people who have built shells of habit around themselves. Therefore it is absolutely necessary for their mental health and development that they should not have mere schools for their lessons, but a world whose guiding spirit is personal love." -
"Arguments only confirm people in their own opinions." - Booth Tarkington, born Newton Booth Tarkington
"The devil does not tempt people whom he finds suitably employed." - Jeremy Taylor
"Please stop using the word “Negro”... We are the only human beings in the world with fifty-seven varieties of complexions who are classed together as a single racial unit. Therefore, we are really colored people, and that is the only name in the English language which accurately describes us." - Mary Church Terrell
"Amongst democratic nations, each new generation is a new people." - Alexis de Tocqueville, fully Alexis-Charles-Henri Clérel de Tocqueville
"Eager and apprehensive men of small property constitute the class that is constantly increased by the equality of conditions. Hence in democratic communities the majority of the people do not clearly see what they have to gain by a revolution, but they continually and in a thousand ways feel that they might lose by one." - Alexis de Tocqueville, fully Alexis-Charles-Henri Clérel de Tocqueville
"I have always thought it rather interesting to follow the involuntary movements of fear in clever people. Fools coarsely display their cowardice in all its nakedness, but the others are able to cover it with a veil so delicate, so daintily woven with small plausible lies, that there is some pleasure to be found in contemplating this ingenious work of the human intelligence." - Alexis de Tocqueville, fully Alexis-Charles-Henri Clérel de Tocqueville
"In times of revolution, people boast almost as much about the imaginary crimes they propose to commit as, in normal times, they do of the good intentions they pretend to entertain." - Alexis de Tocqueville, fully Alexis-Charles-Henri Clérel de Tocqueville
"Laws are always unstable unless they are founded on the manners of a nation; and manners are the only durable and resisting power in a people." - Alexis de Tocqueville, fully Alexis-Charles-Henri Clérel de Tocqueville
"It required the Great Depression to open the eyes of the American people to the economic, cultural, social, political, and spiritual values inherent in a great democracy. For this I am thankful. As a distinctly finite being, man learns only through tragic experiences. Progress and Pain are Siamese twins." -
"The white man’s civilization with its inhuman economic competition and rugged individualism has produced millions of physical and mental wrecks. It has produced enough vices to fill Dante’s hell. Nine-tenths of the people who reach forty are suffering from shattered nerves." - Melvin Tolson, fully Melvin Beaunorus Tolson
"In quiet and untroubled times it seems to every administrator that it is only by his efforts that the whole population under his rule is kept going, and in this consciousness of being indispensable every administrator finds the chief reward of his labor and efforts. While the sea of history remains calm the ruler-administrator in his frail bark, holding on with a boat hook to the ship of the people and himself moving, naturally imagines that his efforts move the ship he is holding on to. But as soon as a storm arises and the sea begins to heave and the ship to move, such a delusion is no longer possible. The ship moves independently with its own enormous motion, the boat hook no longer reaches the moving vessel, and suddenly the administrator, instead of appearing a ruler and a source of power, becomes an insignificant, useless, feeble man." -
"Life is a place of service, and in that service one has to suffer a great deal that is hard to bear, but more often to experience a great deal of joy. But that joy can be real only if people look upon their life as a service, and have a definite object in life outside themselves and their personal happiness." -