This site is dedicated to the memory of Dr. Alan William Smolowe who gave birth to the creation of this database.
"Security is a feeling that there is a larger and more enduring life surrounding, appreciating, upholding the individual, and guaranteeing that his efforts and sacrifice will not be in vain." - Charles Horton Cooley
"The determined scholar and the man of virtue will not seek to live at the expense of injuring their virtue. They will even sacrifice their lives to preserve their virtue." - Confucius, aka Kong Qiu, Zhongni, K'ung Fu-tzu or Kong Fuzi NULL
"Forgiveness breaks the chain of causality because he who ‘forgives’ you - out of love - takes upon himself the consequences of what you have done. Forgiveness, therefore, always entails a sacrifice. The price you must pay for your own liberation through another’s sacrifice, is that you in turn must be willing to liberate in the same way, irrespective of the consequences yourself." - Dag Hammarskjöld
"Our love becomes impoverished if we lack the courage to sacrifice its object." - Dag Hammarskjöld
"The ‘great’ commitment is so much easier than the ordinary everyday one - and can all too easily shut our hearts to the latter. A willingness to make the ultimate sacrifice can be associated with, and even produce, a great hardness of heart." - Dag Hammarskjöld
"Forgiveness breaks the chain of causality because he who forgives you -- out of love--takes upon himself the consequences of what you have done. Forgiveness, therefore, always entails a sacrifice." - Dag Hammarskjöld
"[During dire days under the Nazis] Who stands fast? Only the man whose final standard is not his reason, his principles, his conscience, his freedom, or his virtue, but who is ready to sacrifice all this when he’s called to obedient and responsible action in faith and in exclusive allegiance to God – the responsible man, who tries to make his whole life an answer to the question and call of God." - Dietrich Bonhoeffer
"In spite of the publicity given to disorders, riots, and criminal violence, the vast majority of our people are law-abiding and proud of their country and ready to sacrifice on her behalf." - Dwight Eisenhower, fully Dwight David "Ike" Eisenhower
"When bad men combine, the good must associate; else they will fall one by one, an unpitied sacrifice in a contemptible struggle." - Edmund Burke
"When bad men combine, the good must associate, else they will fall, one by one, an unpitied sacrifice in a contemptible struggle." - Edmund Burke
"The remarkable thing is that we really love our neighbor as ourselves: we do unto others as we do unto ourselves. We hate others when we hate ourselves. We are tolerant toward others when we tolerate ourselves. We forgive others when we forgive ourselves. We are prone to sacrifice others when we are ready to sacrifice ourselves." - Eric Hoffer
"If the higher companionship which love should be does not make men and women nobler, more generous, more ready to sacrifice even their beautiful life for a lofty purpose, there is a suspicion that their love is not love but a combination of egoisms." - Ernest Dimnet
"Self-sacrifice enables us to sacrifice other people without blushing." - George Bernard Shaw
"The two things that worthless people sacrifice everything for are happiness and freedom, and their punishment is that they get both only to find that they have no capacity for the happiness and no use for the freedom." - George Bernard Shaw
"It is not by reason, but most often in spite of it, that area created those sentiments that are the mainsprings of all civilization – sentiments such as honor, self-sacrifice, religious faith, patriotism, and the love of glory." - Gustave Le Bon
"The secret heart is devotion's temple; there the saint lights the flame of purest sacrifice, which burns unseen but not unaccepted." - Hannah More
"Marriage is like a war. There are moments of chivalry and gallantry that attend the victorious advances and strategic retreats, the birth or death of children, the momentary conquest of loneliness, the sacrifice that ennobles him who makes it. But mostly there are the long dull sieges, the waiting, the terror and boredom. Women understand this better than men; they are better able to survive attrition." - Helen Hayes
"To be hopeful in bad times is not just foolishly romantic. It is based on the fact that human history is a history of not only cruelty, but also of compassion, sacrifice, courage, and kindness…The future is an infinite succession of "presents," and to live now as we think that human beings should live, in defiance of all that is bad around us, is itself a marvelous victory." - Howard Zinn
"With the sharpest self-examination we can find nothing beside the moral principle of duty which could have been powerful enough to move us to this or that action and to so great a sacrifice; yet we cannot from this infer with certainty; that it was not really some secret impulse of self-love, under the false appearance of duty, that was the actual determining cause of the will. We like them to flatter ourselves by falsely taking credit for a more noble motive; whereas in fact we can never, even with the strictest examination, get completely behind the secret springs of action." - Immanuel Kant
"Blessings we enjoy daily; and for most of them, because they be so common, most men forget to pay their praises; but let not us, because it is a sacrifice so pleasing to Him that made the sun and us, and still protects us, and gives us flowers and showers and meat and content." - Izaak Walton
"I love to believe that no heroic sacrifice is ever lost; that the characters of men are molded and inspired by what their fathers have done." - James A. Garfield
"Self-denial is often the sacrifice of one sort of self-love for another." - James Bryant Conant
"Faith is the flame that lifts the sacrifice to heaven." - James Montgomery
"The world will never have lasting peace so long as men reserve for war the finest human qualities. Peace, no less than war, requires idealism and self-sacrifice and a righteous and dynamic faith." - John Foster Dulles
"If wealth is to be valued because it gives leisure, clearly it would be a mistake to sacrifice leisure in the struggle for wealth." - John Lubbock, 1st Baron Avebury, 4th Baronet, Sir John Lubbock
"It is far more difficult to be simple than to be complicated; far more difficult to sacrifice skill and cease exertion in the proper place, than to expend both indiscriminately." - John Ruskin
"It is not the church we want, but the sacrifice; not the emotion of admiration, but the act of adoration; not the gift, but the giving." - John Ruskin
"Superstition, in all times and among all nations, is the fear of a spirit whose passions are those of a man, whose acts are the acts of a man; who is present in some places, not in others; who makes some places holy and not others; who is kind to one person, unkind to another; who is pleased or angry according to the degree of attention you pay him, or praise you refuse him; who is hostile generally to human pleasure, but may be bribed by sacrifice of a part of that pleasure into permitting the rest. This, whatever form of faith it colors, is the essence of superstition." - John Ruskin
"The best loving partnerships demand of us not great sacrifice but great expansion." - Josh Mitteldorf
"Many a time I have made a comparison between nobility of sacrifice and happiness of rebellion to find out which one is nobler and more beautiful; but until now I have distilled only one truth out of the whole matter, and this truth is sincerity, which makes all our deeds beautiful and honorable." - Kahlil Gibran
"Sentiment and nobility and love are immortal... Tenderness and loyalty, and patience, and self-sacrifice, and devotion to duty - these are life’s natural aspirations." - Norman Vincent Peale
"The enduring value of the relationship to the land might be best measured by the extent to which it evolves beyond self-interest. All healthy relationships entail sacrifice and are never solely about what makes one person feel good, but are about what’s also good for someone else. Relationship implies a responsibility that goes beyond one’s own dreams." - Peter Forbes
"The enduring value of the relationship to the land might best be measured by the extent to which it evolves beyond self-interest. All healthy relationships entail sacrifice and are never solely about what makes one person feel good, but are about what's also good for someone else. Relationship implies a responsibility that goes beyond one's own dreams." - Peter Forbes
"A mere law to give all men equal rights is but useless, if the poor man must sacrifice those rights to their debts, and, in the very seats and sanctuaries of equality, the courts of justice, the offices of state, and the public discussions, be more than anywhere at the beck and bidding of the rich." - Plutarch, named Lucius Mestrius Plutarchus after becoming Roman citizen NULL
"Self-sacrifice is the real miracle out of which all reported miracles grow." - Ralph Waldo Emerson
"The effects of opposition are wonderful. There are men who rise refreshed on hearing of a threat; men to whom a crisis which intimidates and paralyzes the majority - demanding, not the faculties of prudence and thrift, but comprehension, immovableness, the readiness to sacrifice - comes graceful and beloved as a bride." - Ralph Waldo Emerson
"In order to live free and happily you must sacrifice boredom. It is not always an easy sacrifice." - Richard Bach, fully Richard David Bach
"You make up your mind before you start that sacrifice is part of the package to be successful." - Richard M. DeVos, Sr.
"One should forgive, under any injury. It hath been said that the continuation of the species is due to man’s being forgiving. Forgiveness is holiness; by forgiveness the universe is held together. Forgiveness is the might of the mighty; forgiveness is sacrifice; forgiveness is the might of the mighty; forgiveness is sacrifice; forgiveness is quiet of mind. Forgiveness and gentleness are the qualities of the Self-possessed. They represent eternal virtue." - Mahabharata or The Mahabharata NULL
"Fanaticism is idolatry; and it has the moral evil of idolatry in it; that is, a fanatic worships something which is the creation of his own desire, and thus even his self-devotion in support of it is only an apparent or his mind, which he least values, offer sacrifice to that which he most values." - Thomas Arnold
"Loyalty means nothing unless it has at its heart the absolute principle of self-sacrifice." - Woodrow Wilson, fully Thomas Woodrow Wilson
"It must be a peace without victory... Victory would mean peace forced upon the loser, a victor’s terms imposed upon the vanquished. It would be accepted in humiliation, under duress, at an intolerable sacrifice, and would leave a sting, a resentment, a bitter memory upon which terms of peace would rest, not permanently, but only as upon quicksand. Only a peace between equals can last. Only a peace the very principle of which is equality and common participation in a common benefit. The right state of mind, the right feeling between nations, is as necessary for a lasting peace as is the just." - Woodrow Wilson, fully Thomas Woodrow Wilson
"I believe that man will not merely endure: he will prevail. He is immortal, not because he alone among creatures has an inexhaustible voice, but because he has a soul, a spirit capable of compassion and sacrifice and endurance. The poet’s, the writer’s duty is to write about these things. It is his privilege to help man endure by lifting his heart, by reminding him of the courage and pity and sacrifice which have been the glory of his past. The poet’s voice need not merely be the record of man; it can be one of the props, the pillars to help him endure and prevail." - William Faulkner, fully William Cuthbert Faulkner
"I believe that man will not merely endure, he will prevail. He is immortal, not because he alone among creatures has an inexhaustible voice, but because he has a soul, a spirit capable of compassion and sacrifice and endurance." - William Faulkner, fully William Cuthbert Faulkner
"We would willingly and without remorse, sacrifice not only the present moment, but all the interval (no matter how long) that separates us from any favorite object." - William Hazlitt
"There is no god like one’s stomach: we must sacrifice to it every day." - Yoruba Proverbs
"The longer I live the more I am convinced that the one thing worth living for and dying for is the privilege of making someone more happy and more useful. No person who ever does anything to lift their fellows ever makes a sacrifice." - Booker T. Washington, fully Booker Taliaferro Washington
"I am convinced that the truest act of courage, the strongest act of manliness is to sacrifice ourselves for others in a totally non-violent struggle for justice." - César Chávez, fully César Estrada Chávez