This site is dedicated to the memory of Dr. Alan William Smolowe who gave birth to the creation of this database.
"We admit with all sincerity that our first duty is within our own household; that we must not merely talk, but act, in favor of cleanliness and decency and righteousness, in all political, social, and civic matters. No prosperity and no glory can save a nation that is rotten at heart. We must ever keep the core of our national being sound, and see to it that not only our citizens in private life, but, above all, our statesmen in public life, practice the old commonplace virtues which from time immemorial have lain at the root of all true national wellbeing." - Theodore “Teddy” Roosevelt
"How can one, who eats the flesh of others to swell his flesh, show compassion?" - Thiruvalluvar NULL
"There are but two families in the world, and to one of the two every man and woman belongs. One is satan's family, the other God's." - Thomas Boston
"And yet without labor there were no ease, no rest, so much as conceivable." - Thomas Carlyle
"Foolish men mistake transitory semblances for eternal fact, and go astray more and more." - Thomas Carlyle
"Great men are the inspired (speaking and acting) texts of that divine Book of Revelations, wherof a chapter is completed from epoch to epoch, and by some named History." - Thomas Carlyle
"It is one of the illusions, that the present hour is not the critical, decisive hour.-Write it on your heart that every day is the best day in the year.-No man has learned anything rightly until he knows and feels that every day is doomsday." - Thomas Carlyle
"The civil authority, or that part of it which remained faithful to their trust and true to the ends of the covenant, did, in answer to their consciences, turn out a tyrant, in a way which the Christians in aftertimes will mention with honor, and all tyrants in the world look at with fear." - Thomas Carlyle
"When words leave off, music begins." - Thomas Carlyle
"Why may we not say, that all Automata (Engines that move themselves by springs and wheeles as doth a watch) have an artificiall life? For what is the Heart, but a Spring; and the Nerves, but so many Strings; and the Joynts, but so many Wheeles, giving motion to the whole Body, such as was intended by the Artificer? Art goes yet further, imitating the rationall and most excellent worke of Nature, Man. For by Art is created the great LEVIATHAN called a COMMON-WEALTH, or STATE, (in latine CIVITAS) which is but an Artificiall Man; though of greater stature and strength than the Naturall, for whose protection and defence it was intended; and in which, the Soveraignty is an Artificiall Soul, as giving life and motion to the whole body." - Thomas Hobbes
"It is necessary to give as well as take in a government like ours." - Thomas Jefferson
"The democracy will cease to exist when you take away from those who are willing to work and give to those who would not." - Thomas Jefferson
"Conquer tyranny is not easy, but little consolation that the more the conflict cruelty ... the more glorious victory." - Thomas Paine
"What we may obtain too cheap, we esteem too lightly: 't is dearness only that gives every thing its value. Heaven knows how to put a proper price on its goods." - Thomas Paine
"Indeed, modern Jewish history in the Western countries is the recasting of the Jewish legacy in a Western matrix. The predicaments and attritions of the modern Jewish community and its civilization stem from the deluded quest of “Westernizing” Judaism. To be sure, Western versions of Judaism have been promulgated and millions of Jews in this country, as elsewhere in the Western world, are integrated as individuals into the Western culture and its way of life. But the stagnation of Jewish creativeness in the Western world and the Jewish loss by the total assimilation of complete alienation is the other side of the coveted coin of “being fully integrated into the Western world.”" - Trude Weiss-Rosmarin
"I find the religious diversity of the world almost bewilderingly complex. The more I study, the more variegated I find the religious scene to be. I have no reason to urge a thesis of unity among 'the religions of the world'. As a matter of fact, I do not find unity even within one so-called 'religion', let alone among all.... It is not the case that all religions are the same. The historian notes that not even one religion is the same, century after century, or from one country to another, or from village to city.... I repeat: it is not the case that all religions are the same. Moreover, if a philosopher asks (anhistorically) what they all have in common, he or she either finds the answer to be 'nothing', or finds that they all have in common something so much less than each has separately as to distort or to evacuate the individual richness and depth and sometimes grotesqueness of actual religious life." - Wilfred Cantwell Smith
"I believe that there is no such thing as a monotheism. No religion in existence lacks any non-divine or demonic entities other than the central or highest deity. If the saints and angels and demons of modern Catholicism or any other flavor of Christianity were represented in Greek mythology, we’d call them gods…The reason why no religion is monotheistic, not even Islam (djinn, remember, and angels), is that we have a disposition towards dramatic narratives, and a god with no peers is largely going to be boring." - John Wilkins
"We have here a clew as to religion’s reluctance to have too much to do with modern necromancy. Religion does not challenge the findings of psychical research, it questions the initial attitude. For psychical research the reference is from other worlds to this world. For religion the reference as between the living and the dead, is from this world to the unseen world. Psychical research hopes and believes that our dead may return to us, in response to our seance. Religion says of the spirits of just men made perfect, “They shall not return to us, but we shall go to them.” So it is with the final reference of life, its reference to God. There are those who hold quite soberly, both in theory and in practice, that we human beings have or may acquire a coercive power over the Wisdom and Spirit of the Universe, and that we can compel this spirit to do what we personally desire. This is an attitude which appears in all primitive attempts to define the relationship of man to God, and which persists in highly refined forms even in the most mature thought. It bears in the history and literature of this subject the name of magic. All who practice its arts, whether white or black, are magicians. Magic is an unbounded and egoistic confidence in our power to make the universe serve our wills." - Willard L. Sperry, fully Willard Learoyd Sperry
"The biological clock is responsive to light at certain times... Bright light in the morning will tend to advance the clock. In other words, alertness will occur earlier and sleep will occur earlier." - William Dement, fully William Charles Dement
"But say what you will, 'tis better to be left than never to have been loved. To pass our youth in dull indifference, to refuse the sweets of life because they once must leave us, is as preposterous as to wish to have been born old, because we one day must be old." - William Congreve
"So manifold, all pleasing in their kind, all healthful, are the employs of rural life, reiterated as the wheel of time, runs round; still ending, and beginning still." - William Cowper
"Destroy it. There may be a redistribution of the land, but the natural inequality of men soon re-creates an inequality of possessions and privileges, and raises to power a new minority with essentially the same instincts as the old." - Will Durant, fully William James "Will" Durant
"The most interesting thing in the world is another human being who wonders, suffers, and raises the questions that have bothered him to the last day of his life, knowing he will never get the answers." - Will Durant, fully William James "Will" Durant
"Take the diplomacy out of war and the thing would fall flat in a week." - Will Rogers, fully William Penn Adair "Will" Rogers
"There is one thing about Englishmen, they won't fix anything till it's just about totally ruined. You couldn't get the English to fix anything at the start. No! They like to sit and watch it grow worse. Then, when it just looks like the whole thing has gone up Salt Creek, why, the English jump in and rescue it." - Will Rogers, fully William Penn Adair "Will" Rogers
"They used to take your horse and if they were caught they got hung for it. Now they take your car and if they are caught it's a miracle." - Will Rogers, fully William Penn Adair "Will" Rogers
"When Marmontel was regretting the excesses of the period, Chamfort asked: “Do you think that revolutions are made with rose-water?”" - Wendell Phillips
"Full sexual consciousness and a natural regulation of sexual life mean the end of mystical feelings of any kind, that, in other words, natural sexuality is the deadly enemy of mystical religion. The church, by making the fight over sexuality the center of its dogmas and of its influence over the masses, confirms this concept." - Wilhelm Reich
"Nature and culture, instinct and morality, sexuality and achievement become incompatible as a result of the split in the human structure. The unity and congruity of culture and nature, work and love, morality and sexuality, longed for from time immemorial, will remain a dream as long as man continues to condemn the biological demand for natural (orgastic) sexual gratification." - Wilhelm Reich
"The Past -- the dark unfathomed retrospect! The teeming gulf --the sleepers and the shadows! The past! the infinite greatness of the past! For what is the present after all but a growth out of the past?" - Walt Whitman, fully Walter "Walt" Whitman
"Football strategy does not originate in a scrimmage it is useless to expect solutions in a political campaign." - Walter Lippmann
"Franklin D. Roosevelt is no crusader. He is no tribune of the people. He is no enemy of entrenched privilege. He is a pleasant man who, without any important qualifications for the office, would very much like to be President." - Walter Lippmann
"Men are mortal, but ideas are immortal." - Walter Lippmann
"The principles of the good society call for a concern with an order of being -- which cannot be proved existentially to the sense organs -- where it matters supremely that the human person is inviolable, that reason shall regulate the will, that truth shall prevail over error." - Walter Lippmann
"A story that was passed down from Ben Graham illustrates the lemminglike behavior of the crowd: "Let me tell you the story of the oil prospector who met St. Peter at the Pearly Gates. When told his occupation, St. Peter said, “Oh, I’m really sorry. You seem to meet all the tests to get into heaven. But we’ve got a terrible problem. See that pen over there? That’s where we keep the oil prospectors waiting to get into heaven. And it’s filled—we haven’t got room for even one more.” The oil prospector thought for a minute and said, “Would you mind if I just said four words to those folks?” “I can’t see any harm in that,” said St. Pete. So the old-timer cupped his hands and yelled out, “Oil discovered in hell!” Immediately, the oil prospectors wrenched the lock off the door of the pen and out they flew, flapping their wings as hard as they could for the lower regions. “You know, that’s a pretty good trick,” St. Pete said. “Move in. The place is yours. You’ve got plenty of room.” The old fellow scratched his head and said, “No. If you don’t mind, I think I’ll go along with the rest of ’em. There may be some truth to that rumor after all."" - Warren Buffett, fully Warren Edward Buffett, aka Oracle of Omaha
"Give a man a fish, and you feed him for a day. Teach him how to arbitrage, and you feed him forever." - Warren Buffett, fully Warren Edward Buffett, aka Oracle of Omaha
"Should you find yourself in a chronically leaking boat, energy devoted to changing vessels is likely to be more productive than energy devoted to patching leaks." - Warren Buffett, fully Warren Edward Buffett, aka Oracle of Omaha
"And people who know me would tell you that away from hockey I'm really not that competitive." - Wayne Gretsky, fully Wayne Douglas Gretzky, “The Great One”
"Until modern times, we focused a great deal of the best of our thought upon rituals of return to the human condition. Seeking enlightenment or the Promised Land or the way home, a man would go or be forced to go into the wilderness, measure himself against the Creation, recognize finally his true place within it, and thus be saved both from pride and from despair. Seeing himself as a tiny member of a world he cannot comprehend or master or in any final sense possess, he cannot possibly think of himself as a god. And by the same token, since he shares in, depends upon, and is graced by all of which he is a part, neither can he become a fiend; he cannot descend into the final despair of destructiveness. Returning from the wilderness, he becomes a restorer of order, a preserver. He sees the truth, recognizes his true heir, honors his forebears and his heritage, and gives his blessing to his successors. He embodies the passing of human time, living and dying within the human limits of grief and joy." - Wendell Berry
"As readers, we remain in the nursery stage so long as we cannot distinguish between taste and judgment, so long, that is, as the only possible verdicts we can pass on a book are two: this I like; this I don't like. For an adult reader, the possible verdicts are five: I can see this is good and I like it; I can see this is good but I don't like it; I can see this is good and, though at present I don't like it, I believe that with perseverance I shall come to like it; I can see that this is trash but I like it; I can see that this is trash and I don't like it." - W. H. Auden, fully Wystan Hugh Auden
"Most people are even less original in their dreaming than in their waking life; their dreams are more monotonous than their thoughts and oddly enough, more literary." - W. H. Auden, fully Wystan Hugh Auden
"One of the most important lessons that experience teaches is that, on the whole, success depends more upon character than upon either intellect or fortune." - W. E. H. Lecky, fully William Edward Hartpole Lecky
"Destroy the family, you destroy the country." - Vladimir Lenin, fully Vladimir Ilyich Lenin
"Experience has proved that, on certain very important questions of the proletarian revolution, all countries will inevitably have to do what Russia has done." - Vladimir Lenin, fully Vladimir Ilyich Lenin
"Materialism is the recognition of "objects in themselves", or outside the mind; ideas and sensations are copies of images of those objects." - Vladimir Lenin, fully Vladimir Ilyich Lenin
"The state is a machine for the oppression layer by other machine intended to be subject to other layers layer adapted other." - Vladimir Lenin, fully Vladimir Ilyich Lenin
"We must fight against the old habit of regarding the measure of labor and the means of production from the point of view of the slave whose sole aim is to lighten the burden of labor or to obtain at least some little bit from the bourgeoisie." - Vladimir Lenin, fully Vladimir Ilyich Lenin