This site is dedicated to the memory of Dr. Alan William Smolowe who gave birth to the creation of this database.
"Wilson said that America’s doughboys fought for the Fourteen Points. Roosevelt said the GI was fighting for the Four Freedoms. Johnson and Humphrey sent men out to die for the planting of dams in Vietnam. Nixon preaches a war of generosity. Each time we have fought in this century, our leaders have denied that we did it for ourselves." - Garry Wills
"Watch lest prosperity destroy generosity." - Henry Ward Beecher
"Generosity during life is a very different thing from generosity in the hour of death; one proceeds from genuine liberality and benevolence, the other from pride or fear." - Horace Mann
"Logic and cold reason are poor weapons to fight fear and distrust. Only faith and generosity can overcome them." - Jawaharlal Nehru
"The poor don't know their function in life is to exercise our generosity." - Jean-Paul Sartre
"Four things are required to develop generosity of spirit: (1) The intention to serve God in all our affairs. (2) The belief that if that intention is honored, the Universe will provide all that is required materially and spiritually for our success. (3) The understanding that we receive as we give, and that our own creativity is enhanced through mentoring others. (4) Practical groundedness. God can’t deliver the lottery jackpot unless we buy a ticket!" - Joan Borysenko
"Generosity is giving more than you can; pride is taking less than you need." - Kahlil Gibran
"The kindness of the people is but an empty shell containing no gem or precious pearl. With two hearts do people live; a small one of deep softness, the other of steel. And kindness is too often a shield, and generosity too often a sword." - Kahlil Gibran
"A successful marriage requires falling in love many times, always with the same person." - Mignon McLaughlin
"There is overwhelming evidence that the higher the level of self-esteem, the more likely one will be to treat others with respect, kindness, and generosity." - Nathaniel Branden
"Generosity is the flower of justice." - Nathaniel Hawthorne
"Noblesse oblige: or, superior advantages bind you to larger generosity." - Ralph Waldo Emerson
"Lavishness is not Generosity." - Thomas Fuller
"The modest man has everything to gain, and the arrogant man has everything to lose; for modesty has always to deal with generosity, and arrogance with envy." - Antoine de Rivarol, also known as Comte de Rivarol
"No one has yet realized the wealth of sympathy, the kindness and generosity hidden in the soul of a child. The effort of every true education should be to unlock that treasure. " - Emma Goldman
"I believe that there is one story in the world, and only one. . . . Humans are caught—in their lives, in their thoughts, in their hungers and ambitions, in their avarice and cruelty, and in their kindness and generosity too—in a net of good and evil. . . . There is no other story. A man, after he has brushed off the dust and chips of his life, will have left only the hard, clean questions: Was it good or was it evil? Have I done well—or ill?" - John Steinbeck, fully John Ernst Steinbeck
"The presumption of innocence is not just a legal concept. In commonplace terms, it rests on that generosity of spirit which assumes the best, not the worst, of the stranger." - Kingman Brewster, Jr.
"A great many people do many things that seem to be inspired more by a spirit of ostentation than by heartfelt kindness… Such a pose is nearer akin to hypocrisy than to generosity or moral goodness. " - Cicero, fully Marcus Tullius Cicero, anglicized as Tully NULL
"Envy we must overcome by generosity and nobleness of soul." - Miguel de Cervantes, fully Miguel de Cervantes Saaversa
"Gentleness, self-sacrifice and generosity are the exclusive possession of no one race or religion." - Mahatma Gandhi, fully Mohandas Karamchand Gandhi, aka Bapu
"A really great man is known by three signs - generosity in the design, humanity in the execution, moderation in success." - Otto von Bismarck, Otto Eduard Leopold, Prince of Bismarck, Duke of Lauenburg
"The three signs of great men are generosity in the design, humanity in the execution, moderation in success." - Otto von Bismarck, Otto Eduard Leopold, Prince of Bismarck, Duke of Lauenburg
"Let us forget with generosity those who cannot love us." - Pablo Neruda, pen name for Neftalí Ricardo Reyes Basoalto
"The fact that certain members of the oppressor class join the oppressed in their struggle for liberation, thus moving from one pole of the contradiction to the other... Theirs is a fundamental role, and has been throughout the history of this struggle. It happens, however, that as they cease to be exploiters or indifferent spectators or simply the heirs of exploitation and move to the side of the exploited, they almost always bring with them the marks of their origin: their prejudices and their deformations, which include a lack of confidence in the people's ability to think, to want, and to know. Accordingly, these adherents to the people's cause constantly run the risk of falling into a type of generosity as malefic as that of the oppressors. The generosity of the oppressors is nourished by an unjust order, which must be maintained in order to justify that generosity. Our converts, on the other hand, truly desire to transform the unjust order; but because of their background they believe that they must be the executors of the transformation. They talk about the people, but they do not trust them; and trusting the people is the indispensable precondition for revolutionary change. A real humanist can be identified more by his trust in the people, which engages him in their struggle, than by a thousand actions in their favor without that trust. " - Paulo Freire
"True generosity consists precisely in fighting to destroy the causes which nourish false charity. False charity constrains the fearful and subdued, the rejects of life, to extend their trembling hands. True generosity lies in striving so that these hands--whether of individuals or entire peoples--need be extended less and less in supplication, so that more and more they become human hands which work and, working, transform the world. " - Paulo Freire
"While both humanization and dehumanization are real alternatives [today], only the first is man’s vocation. This vocation is constantly negated, yet it is affirmed by that very negation. It is thwarted by injustice, exploitation, oppression and the violence of the oppressors; it is affirmed by the yearning of the oppressed for freedom and justice, and by their struggle to recover their lost humanity... This, then, is the great humanistic and historical task of the oppressed: to liberate themselves and their oppressors as well. The oppressors, who oppress, exploit, and rape by virtue of their power, cannot find in this power the strength to liberate either the oppressed or themselves. Only power that springs from the weakness of the oppressed will be sufficiently strong to free both. Any attempt to “soften” the power of the oppressor in deference to the weakness of the oppressed almost always manifests itself in the form of false generosity; indeed, the attempt never goes beyond this. In order to have the continued opportunity to express their “generosity,” the oppressors must perpetuate injustice as well. An unjust social order is the permanent fount of this “generosity,” which is nourished by death, despair, and poverty. This is why the dispensers of false generosity become desperate at the slightest threat to its source." - Paulo Freire
"Let us try to teach generosity and altruism, because we are born selfish. Let us understand what our own selfish genes are up to, because we may then at least have the chance to upset their designs, something that no other species has ever aspired to do." - Richard Dawkins
"The kinds of spiritual practices we can undertake are limitless. However, ultimately the form is less important than these factors: the commitment to practice, the ability to keep returning to the intention, the attitude one brings to the uncontrollable and the ability to transfer the benefits of the practice into how we live our lives, how we relate to ourselves and others, how free we become to embody the values and ideals we embrace in our minds, how we deal with temptations of all sorts. In other words we practice to live with the wisdom and compassion, which we already possess. We practice to actualize the pure soul, which God has planted with us." - Sheila Peltz Weinberg
"Since Love has made ruins of my heart the sun must come and illumine them. Such generosity has broken me with shame." - Rumi, fully Jalāl ad-Dīn Muḥammad Rumi NULL
"The heart has its own language. The heart knows a hundred thousand ways to speak." - Rumi, fully Jalāl ad-Dīn Muḥammad Rumi NULL
"I do not know whether anyone has ever succeeded in not enjoying praise. And, if he enjoys it, he naturally wants to receive it. And if he wants to receive it, he cannot help but being distraught at losing it. Those who are in love with applause have their spirits starved not only when they are blamed off-hand, but even when they fail to be constantly praised." - John Chrysostom, fully Saint John Chrysostom
"God speaks to souls through words uttered by pious people, by sermons or good books, and in many other such ways. Sometimes he calls souls by means of sickness or troubles, or by some truth He teaches them during prayer, for tepid as they may be in seeking Him, yet God holds them very dear." - Saint Teresa of Ávila, aka Saint Teresa of Jesus, baptized as Teresa Sánchez de Cepeda y Ahumada NULL
"A general dissolution of the principles and manners will more surely overthrow the liberties of America than the whole force of the common enemy.... While the people are virtuous they cannot be subdued; but once they lose their virtue, they will be ready to surrender their liberties to the first external or internal invader.... If virtue and knowledge are diffused among the people, they will never be enslaved. This will be their great security." - Samuel Adams
"Defending the truth is not something one does out of a sense of duty or to allay guilt complexes, but is a reward in itself." - Simone de Beauvoir, fully Simone-Ernestine-Lucie-Marie Bertrand de Beauvoir
"My hat's in the ring. The fight is one and I'm stripped to the buff." - Theodore “Teddy” Roosevelt
"We ought not to schismatize on either men or measures. Principles alone can justify that." - Thomas Jefferson
"I would love to see Mr. (Henry) Ford in there, really. I don't know who started the idea that a President must be a Politician instead of a Business man. A Politician can't run any other kind of business. So there is no reason why he can run the U.S. That's the biggest single business in the World." - Will Rogers, fully William Penn Adair "Will" Rogers
"People don't change under governments. Governments change. People remain the same." - Will Rogers, fully William Penn Adair "Will" Rogers
"The atmosphere is not a perfume, it has no taste of the distillation, it is odorless, it is for my mouth forever, I am in love with it, I will go to the bank by the wood and become undisguised and naked, I am mad for it to be in contact with me." - Walt Whitman, fully Walter "Walt" Whitman
"If we do not live where we work and when we work we are wasting our lives and our work too." - Wendell Berry
"In a sense, all poetry is positional: to try to express one's position in regard to the universe embraced by consciousness, is an immemorial urge. The arms of consciousness reach out and grope, and the longer they are the better. Tentacles, not wings, are Apollo's natural members." - Vladimir Nabokov, fully Vladimir Vladimirovich Nabokov
"Sleep is the most moronic fraternity in the world, with the heaviest dues and the crudest rituals. It is a mental torture I find debasing... I simply cannot get used to the nightly betrayal of reason, humanity, genius." - Vladimir Nabokov, fully Vladimir Vladimirovich Nabokov
"But our hatred is almost indistinguishable from our love." - Virginia Woolf, nee Stephen, fully Adeline Virginia Woolf
"The great vanity of those who do not realize, is only sensible to believe." - Vauvenargues, Luc de Clapiers, Marquis de Vauvenargues NULL
"Simon Stimson: ...That's what it was to be alive. To move about in a cloud of ignorance; to go up and down trampling on the feelings of those about you. To spend and waste time as though you had a million years. To be always at the mercy of one self-centered passion, or another." - Thornton Wilder, fully Thornton Niven Wilder
"An Athenian citizen does not neglect the state because he takes care of his own household; and even those of us who are engaged in business have a very fair idea of politics. We alone regard a man who takes no interest in public affairs, not as a harmless, but as a useless character, and if few of us are originators, we are all sound judges of a policy." - Thucydides NULL
"What is commonly called friendship is no more than a partnership; a reciprocal regard for one another's interests, and an exchange of good offices; in a word, a mere traffic, wherein self-love always proposes to be a gainer." - François de La Rochefoucauld, François VI, Duc de La Rochefoucauld, Prince de Marcillac, Francois A. F. Rochefoucauld-Liancourt