This site is dedicated to the memory of Dr. Alan William Smolowe who gave birth to the creation of this database.
"No, I'm just a man committed to great ideas." - Ronald Reagan, fully Ronald Wilson Reagan
"The vote on the Peacekeeper is also a vote on Geneva. Rejecting the Peacekeeper will knock the legs out from under the negotiating table. (On importance of the MX missile)" - Ronald Reagan, fully Ronald Wilson Reagan
"We think there is a parallel between the Federal involvement in education and the decline in quality over recent years." - Ronald Reagan, fully Ronald Wilson Reagan
"We will always remember. We will always be proud. We will always be prepared, so we will always be free." - Ronald Reagan, fully Ronald Wilson Reagan
"Plato was right in calling atheism a disease.—The human intellect in its healthy action, holds it for certain that there is a Great Being over us, invisible, infinite, ineffable, but of real, solid personality, who made and governs us, and who made and governs all things." - Roswell Dwight Hitchcock
"No matter what you do, do it to your utmost. I always attribute my success to always requiring myself to do my level best, if only in driving a tack in straight." - Russell H. Conwell, fully Russell Herman Conwell
"The great inventors are simply great men; the greater the man the more simple the man; and the more simple a machine, the more valuable it is." - Russell H. Conwell, fully Russell Herman Conwell
"Coming in, I was denounced as a fraud by all the extreme men of the opposing party, and as an ingrate and a traitor by the same class of men in my own party. Going out, I have the good will, blessings, and approval of the best people of all parties and sections." - Rutherford B. Hayes, fully Rutherford Birchard Hayes
"General education is the best preventive of the evils now most dreaded. In the civilized countries of the world, the question is how to distribute most generally and equally the property of the world. As a rule, where education is most general the distribution of property is most general.... As knowledge spreads, wealth spreads. To diffuse knowledge is to diffuse wealth. To give all an equal chance to acquire knowledge is the best and surest way to give all an equal chance to acquire property." - Rutherford B. Hayes, fully Rutherford Birchard Hayes
"The independence of all political and other bother is a happiness." - Rutherford B. Hayes, fully Rutherford Birchard Hayes
"Ever since I was a teenager delivering newspapers (for seven straight years), I have tried not to lose a single customer. I treated each one like the most important person in the world and delivered each paper as if I were delivering it to the front door of the Governor’s mansion. The key to succeeding with a paper route and the restaurant business, I would later learn, is to take care of the customer. Whether on the paper route or in my restaurants, I have found that the most effective way of promoting my business didn’t cost me anything but a little kindness to my customers." - S. Truett Cathy
"I wasn’t all that bright. I had difficulty keeping up in class and I had always carried with me a bit of an inferiority complex regarding socializing at school and I never felt confident about dating girls. But I enjoyed my work and I enjoyed the rewards of working. As I read Mr. Hill’s book, I realized I could do anything if I wanted it badly enough. His words motivated me and showed me that I live in a do-it-yourself world." - S. Truett Cathy
"Why do we close on Sunday? Well, it started back in 1946 when I opened my first restaurant, a 24-hour coffee shop called The Dwarf Grill. After the first week, I determined that if it took seven days a week to make a living, I should be in some other business. Too, it was my conscience that I had to live with; I just never could come to the idea of dealing with money on the Lord’s Day. I became a Christian at age 12; that’s not to say that everything I’ve done since that time is becoming to a Christian, but I believe the Lord had blessed us because we recognize Him on this special day we call Sunday." - S. Truett Cathy
"Worldly glory is a reef in the sea covered by water; for as this lies unknown to the sailor until his vessel strikes it, cracks up, is filled with water and sinks, so vain glory does to a man until it drowns and destroys him." - Saint Isaac of Nineveh, also Isaac the Syrian, Isaac of Qatar and Isaac Syrus NULL
"Happiness is secured through virtue; it is a good attained by man's own will." - Saint Thomas Aquinas, aka Thomas of Aquin or Aquino, Doctor Angelicus, Doctor Communis or Doctor Universalis
"There are some days when I think I'm going to die from an overdose of satisfaction." - Salvador Dalí, fully Salvador Domingo Felipe Jacinto Dalí i Domènech
"The one thing you don't want is that stale sound when you've done a line so much you can't find a fresh approach to it. Drop it." - Sammy Davis, Jr., born Samuel George "Sammy" Davis Jr.
"It is always dangerous to the liberties of the people to have an army stationed among them, over which they have no control ... The Militia is composed of free Citizens. There is therefore no danger of their making use of their Power to the destruction of their own Rights, or suffering others to invade them." - Samuel Adams
"I think the workers understand much better than anyone else the cost of industrial war. They pay the full price.... Labor will cease to engage in contests with employers as soon as labor finds it possible to induce employers to conduct the affairs of industry on a higher plane. Labor is ever eager to substitute negotiation for contest." - Samuel Gompers
"My opinion is that we require no more Commissions, no more Sage investigators. What we want is action, and we want it immediately. We want a Department of Labor established, with a Secretary at its head, who shall have a seat in the President's cabinet, and that man to be a man who knows what Labor is, not only from a theoretical standpoint, but from the practical standpoint. . . . I hope you will do your utmost to see that such a Department is established, and let us get away from the puny vacillating system of unnecessary excuses by referring matters to irresponsible Commissions, from which no permanent and beneficial results ensue." - Samuel Gompers
"You know me well enough that I am not one to generally encourage strikes. I have done my share and will continue to do my part in the effort to prevent them, but there comes a time when if a strike is avoided it means the demoralization of the men, taking the heart and spirit out of them, and they go to work under worse conditions and in a greater degree of bondage than theretofore." - Samuel Gompers
"All of this is more important, and more fun, than you think. Don't do a hula on Wall Street. It's been done. Think up your own stunt." - Sam Walton, fully Samuel Moore "Sam" Walton
"Among those whom I never could persuade to rank themselves with idlers, and who speak with indignation of my morning sleeps and nocturnal rambles, one passes the day in catching spiders, that he may count their eyes with a microscope; another exhibits the dust of of a marigold separated from the flower with a dexterity worthy of Leuwenhoeck himself. Some turn the wheel of electricity; some suspend rings to a loadstone, and find that what they did yesterday, they can do again today. - Some register the changes of the wind, and die fully convinced that the wind is changeable. - There are men yet more profound, who have heard that two colorless liquors may produce a color by union, and that two cold bodies will grow hot if they are mingled: they mingle them, and produce the effect expected, say it is strange, and mingle them again." - Samuel Johnson, aka Doctor Johnson
"Life cannot subsist in society but by reciprocal concessions." - Samuel Johnson, aka Doctor Johnson
"Genius, without work, is certainly a dumb oracle, and it is unquestionably true that the men of the highest genius have invariably been found to be amongst the most plodding, hard-working, and intent men -- their chief characteristic apparently consisting simply in their power of laboring more intensely and effectively than others." - Samuel Smiles
"Knowledge conquered by labor becomes a possession - a property entirely our own." - Samuel Smiles
"The apprenticeship of difficulty is one which the greatest of men have had to serve." - Samuel Smiles
"All animals except man know that the ultimate point of life is to enjoy it." - Samuel Ullman
"The motivation for all personal behavior is to produce a sense of FEEL GOOD, a sense of inner peace and well-being. To expect a person to go against his desire to feel good or as good as he can feel under any momentary condition is illogical and irrational. In the observation of human behavior, one will notice every human act is a response to a personal need. This is true whether one signs a million dollar contract, scratches one's nose, rolls over in bed, or just day dreams his life away. People will do things which seem contrary to this concept, but the bottom line is they perceive some kind of payoff which will make them feel good. And the payoff is almost always emotional. When you ask people why they want to be financially independent, they might say that they could buy things without having to worry about where the money will come from. And when they worry, they don't FEEL GOOD. A drug addict, a compulsive eater, an alcoholic and anyone with a compulsive habit will continue with their habits because at the moment of action they believe and feel it will make them feel good. That is why breaking compulsive habits are so difficult." - Sidney Madwed
"An idealist believes the short run doesn’t count. A cynic believes the long run doesn’t matter. A realist believes that what is done or left undone in the short run determines the long run." - Sydney J. Harris
"The art of living consists in knowing which impulses to obey and which must be made to obey." - Sydney J. Harris
"A man's heterosexuality will not put up with any homosexuality, and vice versa." - Sigmund Freud, born Sigismund Schlomo Freud
"If one attempts to assign to religion its place in man's evolution, it seems not so much to be a lasting acquisition, as a parallel to the neurosis which the civilized individual must pass through on his way from childhood to maturity." - Sigmund Freud, born Sigismund Schlomo Freud
"It is impossible to overlook the extent to which civilization is built upon a renunciation of instinct." - Sigmund Freud, born Sigismund Schlomo Freud
"Rome is the Great Beast of atheism and materialism, adoring nothing but itself. Israel is the Great Beast of religion. Neither one nor the other is likable. The Great Beast is always repulsive ." - Simone Weil
"There are few who would need advisers, if they were only accustomed to appeal to themselves in their calmest, holiest moments. If, when embarrassed with doubt as to any course of action, they would turn aside from the immediate tumult of the world, and from the vain speaking of those who darken counsel by words without knowledge; and would then commune with their hearts alone, at night, the heavens their silent counselors, they would act not always in accordance with the wise men of this world, but with that wisdom which bringeth peace." - Arthur Helps, fully Sir Arthur Helps
"Envy is as prolific as it is hurtful; it is the root of all evil, the source of endless disorder and misery, the cause of most sins that are committed. Envy gives birth to hatred and animosity. From it avarice is begotten, for it sees with an evil eye honors and emoluments heaped upon a stranger, and thinks that such honors should have been, by right, bestowed upon himself. From envy comes contempt of God, and of the salutary precepts of our Savior." - Cyprian, aka Saint Cyprian of Carthage, fully Thascius Caecilius Cyprianus NULL
"I have received, my God, so many blessings from you." - Jean Baptiste Lacordaire, fully Jean Baptiste Henri Lacordaire
"One man writes a novel. One man writes a symphony. It is essential that one man make a film." - Stanley Kubrick
"As a nation, we are too young to have true mythic heroes, and we must press real human beings into service. Honest Abe Lincoln the legend is quite a different character from Abraham Lincoln the man. And so should they be. And so should both be treasured, as long as they are distinguished. In a complex and confusing world, the perfect clarity of sports provides a focus for legitimate, utterly unambiguous support [or] disdain. The Dodgers are evil, the Yankees good. They really are, and have been for as long as anyone in my family can remember." - Stephan Jay Gould
"Before Kuhn, most scientists followed the place-a-stone-in-the-bright-temple-of-knowledge tradition, and would have told you that they hoped, above all, to lay many of the bricks, perhaps even the keystone, of truth's temple. Now most scientists of vision hope to foment revolution. We are, therefore, awash in revolutions, most self-proclaimed." - Stephan Jay Gould
"Evolution is the conviction that organisms developed their current forms by an extended history of continual transformation, and that ties of genealogy bind all living things into one nexus. Panselectionism is a denial of history, for perfection covers the tracks of time. A perfect wing may have evolved to its current state, but it may have been created just as we find it. We simply cannot tell if perfection be our only evidence. As Darwin himself understood so well, the primary proofs of evolution are oddities and imperfections that must record pathways of historical descent—the panda's thumb and the flamingo's smile of my book titles (chosen to illustrate this paramount principle of history)." - Stephan Jay Gould
"Our discombobulated lives need to sink some anchors in numerical stability. (I still have not recovered from the rise of a pound of hamburger at the supermarket to more than a buck.)" - Stephan Jay Gould
"Punctuated equilibrium, catastrophic theories of mass extinction, hopeful monsters, and a variety of hypotheses about rapid rates of change in continuous sequences, not about unintelligible abrupt appearances, are part of scientific debate and bear no relationship to the nonscientific notion of abrupt appearance, despite pernicious and willful attempts by many creationists to distort such claims by misquote and half-quote to their alien purposes. Punctuated equilibrium, in particular, is a claim that evolutionary trends have a geometry that resembles a climb up a staircase rather than a slide up an inclined plane. It is, in other words, an alternate theory about the nature of intermediate stages in evolutionary trends not, as creationists have claimed, a denial of these stages. As a term, ‘creation science’ is an oxymoron, a self-contradictory and meaningless phrase, a whitewash for a specific, particular, and minority religious view in America—Biblical literalism." - Stephan Jay Gould
"Scientists have power by virtue of the respect commanded by the discipline... We live with poets and politicians, preachers and philosophers. All have their ways of knowing, and all are valid in their proper domain. The world is too complex and interesting for one way to hold all the answers." - Stephan Jay Gould
"As when a man comes into a palace, built according to the exactest rule of art, and with an unexceptionable conveniency for the inhabitants, he would acknowledge both the being and skill of the builder; so whosoever shall observe the disposition of all the parts of the world, their connection, comeliness, the variety of seasons, the swarms of different creatures, and the mutual offices they render to one another, cannot conclude less, than it was contrived by an infinite skill, effected by infinite power, and governed by infinite wisdom. None can imagine a ship to be orderly conducted without a pilot; nor the parts of the world to perform their several functions without a wise guide; considering the members of the body cannot perform theirs, without the active presence of the soul. The atheist, then, is a fool to deny that which every creature in his constitution asserts, and thereby renders himself unable to give a satisfactory account of that constant uniformity in the motions of the creatures." - Stephen Charnock
"The intelligent beings in these regions should therefore not be surprised if they observe that their locality in the universe satisfies the conditions that are necessary for their existence. It is a bit like a rich person living in a wealthy neighborhood not seeing any poverty." - Stephen Hawking
"He was welcome everywhere he went, and was well-aware of his inability to tolerate solitude. He felt no inclination to be alone and avoided it as far as possible; he didn't really want to become any better acquainted with himself. He knew that if he wanted to show his talents to best advantage, he needed to strike sparks off other people to fan the flames of warmth and exuberance in his heart. On his own he was frosty, no use to himself at all, like a match left lying in its box." - Stefan Zweig
"Only the misfortune of exile can provide the in-depth understanding and the overview into the realities of the world." - Stefan Zweig
"The Irish are a practical and philosophic race. Their first and strongest instinct is to make the best of a bad situation — to put a better face on evil than it will normally wear." - Theodore Dreiser, fully Theodore Herman Albert Dreiser