This site is dedicated to the memory of Dr. Alan William Smolowe who gave birth to the creation of this database.
"A race preserves its vigor so long as it harbors a real contrast between what has been and what may be, and so long as it is nerved by the vigor to adventure beyond the safeties of the past. Without adventure, civilization is in full decay." - Alfred North Whitehead
"The scholar is not The Intellectual. He is Man Thinking. Man Thinking is not the member of a race apart. He is the citizen performing the function appointed for all citizens in a civilized state, a function without which there would be no civilized state. He is Everyman purposefully apprehending the meaning of things." - Alfred Whitney Griswold
"Neither race nor environment, taken by itself, can be the positive factor which, within the last six thousand years, has shaken humanity out of its static repose on the level of primitive society and started it on the hazardous quest of civilization." - Arnold J. Toynbee, fully Arnold Joseph Toynbee
"Religion, after all, is the serious business of the human race." - Arnold J. Toynbee, fully Arnold Joseph Toynbee
"The human race’s prospects of survival were considerably better when we were defenseless against tigers than they are today when we have become defenseless against ourselves." - Arnold J. Toynbee, fully Arnold Joseph Toynbee
"There is going to be a race between mass self-education and mass self-destruction." - Arnold J. Toynbee, fully Arnold Joseph Toynbee
"We are in the first age since the dawn of civilization in which people have dared to think it practicable to make the benefits of civilization available to the whole human race." - Arnold J. Toynbee, fully Arnold Joseph Toynbee
"The human race is faced with a cruel choice: Work or daytime television." - Author Unknown NULL
"Tolerance is bigger than race, greater than creed, mightier than color. It is not a breaking down of all barriers between ourselves and the other fellow; it is the realization, that, in reality, there are no barriers to break down." - Author Unknown NULL
"Belief in a Divine mission is one of the many forms of certainty that have afflicted the human race." - Bertrand Russell, fully Bertrand Arthur William Russell, 3rd Earl Russell
"It makes a great deal of difference in the life of a race, as it does in the life of an individual, whether the world expects much or little of that individual or of that race." - Booker T. Washington, fully Booker Taliaferro Washington
"No race can prosper till it learns there is as much dignity in tilling a field as in writing a poem." - Booker T. Washington, fully Booker Taliaferro Washington
"Nothing in the world can take the place of persistence. Talent will not; nothing is more common than unsuccessful men with talent. Genius will not; unrewarded genius is almost a proverb. Education will not; the world is full of educated derelicts. Persistence and determination alone are omnipotent. The slogan “Press On” has solved and always will solve the problems of the human race." -
"Nothing in this world can take the place of persistence. Talent will not; nothing is more common than unsuccessful people with talent. Genius will not; unrewarded genius is almost a proverb. Education will not; the world is full of educated derelicts. Persistence and determination alone are omnipotent. The slogan "press on" has solved and always will solve the problems of the human race." -
"Nothing in the world can take the place of persistence. Talent will not; nothing is more common than unsuccessful men with talent. Genius will not; unrewarded genius is almost a proverb. Education will not; the world is full of educated derelicts. Persistence and determination are omnipotent. The slogan 'press on' has solved and always will solve the problems of the human race." -
"The nuclear arms race is like two sworn enemies standing waist deep in gasoline, one with three matches, the other with five." - Carl Sagan
"The human race is in the best condition when it has the greatest degree of liberty." - Dante, full name Durante degli Alighieri, aka Dante Alighieri NULL
"Amidst the calm and tranquillity of peace the human race accomplishes most freely and easily its’ given work… Whence it is manifest that universal peace is the best of those things that are ordained for our beatitude." - Dante, full name Durante degli Alighieri, aka Dante Alighieri NULL
"Supposing a man-hater had desired to render the human race as unhappy as possible, what could he have invented for the purpose better than belief in an incomprehensible being about whom men could never be able to agree?" - Denis Diderot
"Just being a Negro doesn't qualify you to understand the race situation any more than being sick makes you an expert on medicine." - Dick Gregory
"The new religion will teach the dignity of human nature and its infinite possibilities for development. It will teach the solidarity of the race and that all must rise and fall as one. Its creed will be justice, liberty, equality for all the children of earth." - Elizabeth Cady Stanton
"There is a tendency to judge a race, a nation or any distinct group by its least worthy members." - Eric Hoffer
"All the crimes on earth do not destroy so much of the human race, nor alienate so much property as drunkenness." - Francis Bacon
"We are a nation of many nationalities, many races, many religions - bound together by a single unity, the unity of freedom and equality. Whoever seeks to set one race against another seeks to enslave all races. Whoever seeks to set one religion against another seeks to destroy all religion." - Franklin D. Roosevelt, fully Franklin Delano Roosevelt, aka FDR
"I know of no rights of race superior to the rights of humanity." - Frederick Douglass, born Frederick Augustus Washington Bailey
"The happiness of the human race in this world does not consist in our being devoid of passions, but in our learning to command them." - French Proverbs
"You'll never have a quiet world till you knock the patriotism out of the human race." - George Bernard Shaw
"We have two tyrannous physical passions: concupiscence and chastity. We become mad in pursuit of sex: we become equally mad in the persecution of that pursuit. Unless we gratify our desire the race is lost; unless we restrain it we destroy ourselves." - George Bernard Shaw
"After all there is but one race - humanity." - George Moore, fully George Augustus Moore
"One's friends are the part of the human race with which one can be human." - George Santayana
"The laws of nature are just, but terrible. There is no weak mercy in them. Cause and consequence are inseparable and inevitable. The elements have no forbearance. The fire burns, the water drowns, the air consumes, the earth buries. And perhaps it would be well for our race if the punishment of crimes against the laws of man were as inevitable as the punishment of crimes against the laws of nature, were man as unerring in his judgments as nature." - Henry Wadsworth Longfellow
"Each child’s mind [should go] through a process like that which the mind of humanity at large has gone through. The truths of number, of form, of relationship in position, were all originally drawn from objects; and to present these truths to the child in the concrete is to let him learn them as the race learned them." - Herbert Spencer
"Morality knows nothing of geographical boundaries or distinctions of race." - Herbert Spencer
"The money, technology, and human energy now devoted to the military could perform miracles in cleaning up the earth we live on. But the cost of the arms race is not only the enormous waste of resources. There is a psychic cost - the creation of an atmosphere of fear all over the world." - Howard Zinn
"Yes, we have in this country, dominated by corporate wealth and military power and two antiquated political parties, what a fearful conservative characterized as “a permanent adversarial culture” challenging the present, demanding a new future. It is a race in which we can all choose to participate, or to just watch. But we should know that our choice will help determine the outcome." - Howard Zinn
"I will... venture to assume that as the human race is continually advancing in civilization and culture as its natural purpose, so it is continually making progress for the better in relation to the moral end of its existence, and that this progress although it maybe sometimes interrupted, will never be entirely broken off or stopped." - Immanuel Kant
"Imitators are a servile race." - Jean de La Fontaine
"Mortal man thinks of himself as immortal because his race is immortal: he confuses the drop in the stream with the stream itself." - Jean Paul, born Johann Paul Friedrich Richter, aka Jean Paul Richter
"Race prejudice, in its gravest and most typical form, is the passing judgment of criminality or of essential inferiority upon all the members of a racial or ethnic group, with no sufficient intellectual motive for such a judgment." - John LaFarge
"I cannot praise a fugitive and cloistered virtue, unexercised and unbreathed, that never sallies out and sees her adversary, but slinks out of the race where that immortal garland is to be run for, not without dust and heat." - John Milton
"Fly envious Time, till thou run out thy race, call on the lazy leaden-stepping hours, whose speed is but the heavy Plummets pace; and glut thy self with what thy womb devours, which is no more than what is false and vain, and merely mortal dross; so little is our loss, so little is thy gain." - John Milton
"The greatest efforts of the race have always been traceable to the love of praise, as the greatest catastrophes to the love of pleasure." - John Ruskin
"The weakest among us has a gift, however seemingly trivial, which is peculiar to him, and which worthily used, will be a gift also to his race." - John Ruskin
"In this age the man who dares to think for himself and act independently does a service to his race." - John Stuart Mill
"It is not by wearing down into uniformity all that is individual in themselves, but by cultivating it, and calling it forth, within the limits imposed by the rights and interests of others, that human beings become noble and beautiful object of contemplation; and as the works partake the character of those who do them, by the same process human life also becomes rich, diversified, and animating, furnishing more abundant aliment to high thoughts and elevating feelings, and strengthening the tie which binds every individual to the race, by making the race infinitely better worth belonging to." - John Stuart Mill
"We are obligated to respect, defend, and maintain the common bonds of union and fellowship that exist among all members of the human race." - Cicero, fully Marcus Tullius Cicero, anglicized as Tully NULL
"We must recognize that beneath the superficial classifications of sex and race the same potentialities exist, recurring generation after generation, only to perish because society has no place for them." - Margaret Mead