This site is dedicated to the memory of Dr. Alan William Smolowe who gave birth to the creation of this database.
If divorce has increased by one thousand percent, don’t blame the women’s movement. Blame the obsolete sex roles on which our marriages were based.
If you divorce capital from labor, capital is hoarded, and labor starves.
Carolyn Gold Heilbrun, pen name Amanda Cross
Only a marriage with partners strong enough to risk divorce is strong enough to avoid it.
In the so-called Western secular democracy… a divorce has been effected between politics and religion, and as a result of this secularization, the society and particularly its politically active elements have ceased to attach much or any importance to morality or ethics.
Democracy | Ethics | Morality | Politics | Religion | Society | Society |
Fred Rogers, "Mister Rogers," born Frederick McFeely Rogers
There are many things children accept as “grown-up things” over which they have no control and for which they have no responsibility – for instance, weddings, having babies, buying houses, and driving cars. Parents who are separating really need to help their children put divorce on that grown-up list, so that children do not see themselves as the cause of their parents’ decision to live apart.
Cause | Children | Control | Decision | Need | Parents | Responsibility |
The contemporary divorce between faith and reason is not the result of a contest for power or for intellectual monopoly, but of a progressive estrangement without hostility or drama, and therefore all the more deadly.
The divorce of the practical and relative world of daily living from the astronomical sense of the high religions is surely one of the ultimate causes of the breakdown that has been going on so fast in our own generation.
Margaret Atwood, fully Margaret Eleanor Atwood
A divorce is like an amputation; you survive, but there’s less of you.
Pope John Paul II, born Karol Józef Wojtyła, aka Saint John Paul the Great NULL
It is not strange at all that the spread of divorce in a society is accompanied by a diminishing of public morality in all sectors… True love does not exist if it is not faithful. And it cannot exist if it is not honest. Neither can it be in the concrete vocation of matrimony if there is no full promise that lasts until death. Only indissoluble matrimony will be firm and lasting support for the familial community.
Death | Love | Matrimony | Morality | Promise | Public | Society | Will | Society |
Evolving our consciousness is not something we do only for ourselves - it is something we also do for others...for all others, and for the earth. Because we open up and let our body and mind feel the ties with others and with nature, we change ourselves, and change others around us. When a sufficient number of people pray or meditate together, or find another path to evolve their consciousness, other people are affected as well. More sick people heal, divorce and suicide rates drop, crime and violence diminish. When many people open up, a powerful force develops - a leap of consciousness takes place.
Body | Change | Consciousness | Crime | Force | Mind | People | Suicide |
Jimmy Carter, fully James Earl "Jimmy" Carter, Jr.
You can not divorce religious belief and public service. I've never detected any conflict between God's will and my political duty. If you violate one, you violate the other.
Each generation wants new symbols, new people, new names. They want to divorce themselves from their predecessors.
Wants |
The image of the cosmos must change with the development of the mind and knowledge; otherwise, the mythic statement is lost, and man becomes dissociated from the very basis of his own religious experience. Doubt comes in, and so forth. You must remember: all of the great traditions, and little traditions, in their own time were scientifically correct. That is to say, they were correct in terms of the scientific image of that age. So there must be a scientifically validated image. Now you know what has happened: our scientific field has separated itself from the religious field, or vice-versa. … This divorce this is a fatal thing, and a very unfortunate thing, and a totally unnecessary thing.
Lou Holtz, fully Louis Leo "Lou" Holtz
There are only three things you can do when you have a problem with somebody. Change him, accept him, or divorce yourself from him.
Change |
Rosamunde Pilcher, also pen name Jane Fraser
Marriage isn't a love affair. It isn't even a honeymoon. It's a job. A long hard job, at which both partners have to work, harder than they've worked at anything in their lives before. If it's a good marriage, it changes, it evolves, but it does on getting better. I've seen it with my own mother and father. But a bad marriage can dissolve in a welter of resentment and acrimony. I've seen that, too, in my own miserable and disastrous attempt at making another person happy. And it's never one person's fault. It's the sum total of a thousand little irritations, disagreements, idiotic details that in a sound alliance would simply be disregarded, or forgotten in the healing act of making love. Divorce isn't a cure; it's a surgical operation, even if there are no children to consider.
Children | Good | Little | Love | Marriage | Mother | Resentment | Sound |
Robert Altman, fully Robert Bernard Altman
Happy endings are absolutely ludicrous, they're not true at all. We see the guy carry the girl across the threshold and everybody lives happily ever after -- that's bullshit. Three weeks later he's beating her up and she's suing for divorce and he's got cancer.
Robert Benchley, fully Robert Charles Benchley
Consider the number of young people all over the world who are getting married, day in and day out, for no other reason than that someone of the opposite sex looks well in a green jersey or sings baritone, and then tell me that divorce has reached menacing proportions. The surface of divorce has not even been scratched yet.
Poetry which has decided to do without music, to divorce itself from song, has thrown away much of its reason for being...
Reason |
Love, like a chicken salad or restaurant hash, must be taken with blind faith or it loses its flavor.
Marriage |