This site is dedicated to the memory of Dr. Alan William Smolowe who gave birth to the creation of this database.
"The whole history of civilization is strewn with creeds and institutions which were invaluable at first and deadly afterwards." - Walter Bagehot
"The whole history of civilization is strewn with creeds and institutions which were invaluable at first, and deadly afterward." - Walter Bagehot
"People are trapped in history and history is trapped in them." - James Baldwin, fully James Arthur Baldwin
"History is a graveyard of classes which have preferred caste privileges to leadership." - E. Digby Baltzell, fully Edward Digby Baltzell
"History tells us that the pendulum of time is sweeping to extremes of subjectivism, to cults of selfishness and savage irresponsibility. We must bring it back to balance by taking up the burdens of mankind as our own, with an entirely new vision and confidence. And we must do this perhaps as a condition for continued existence itself." - Philip Berrigan
"If we fight a war and win it with H-bombs, what history will remember is not the ideals we were fighting for but the methods we used to accomplish them. These methods will be compared to the warfare of Genghis Khan who ruthlessly killed every last inhabitant of Persia." - Hans Albrecht Bethe
"Life goes at such a terrific pace--a few years full of youth and grace and then you fall flat on your face before world history." - Wolf Biermann, fully Karl Wolf Biermann
"History is the record of what one age finds worthy of note in another." - Jacob Burckhardt, fully Carl Jacob (or Jakob) Christoph Burckhardt
"In the kind of world that I see in history there is one sin that locks people up in all their other sins… the sin of self-righteousness." - Herbert Butterfield, fully Sir Herbert Butterfield
"Progress in history is achieved through the interdependence and interaction of facts and values. The objective historian is the historian who penetrates most deeply into this reciprocal process." - Edward Hallet "Ted" Carr
"The history of life on earth has been a history of interaction between living things and their surroundings. To a large extent, the physical form and the habits of the earth’s vegetation and its animal life have been molded by the environment. Considering the whole span of earthly time, the opposite effect, in which life actually modifies its surroundings, has been relatively slight. Only within the moment of time represented by the present century has one species – acquired significant power to alter nature of his world." - Rachel Carson, fully Rachel Louise Carson
"We are fully responsible for who it is that we become. In the final analysis, there is no one else to blame. It is totally our own doing. We are always already free to remake our present and future by disencumbering ourselves of unwanted and unhelpful aspects of our past history. Freedom, choice, and responsibility are the ethical watchwords of existentialism." - Robert E. Carter, fully Robert Edgar Carter
"Almost the whole of history is nothing but a series of horrors." - Nicolas Chamfort,fully Sébastien-Roch Nicolas De Chamfort, also spelled Nicholas
"The whole history of the world is summed up in the fact that, when nations are strong, they are not always just, and when they wish to be just, they are no longer strong." - Winston Churchill, fully Sir Winston Leonard Spencer-Churchill
"If people could learn from history, what lessons it might teach us! But passion and party blind our eyes, and the light which experience gives is a lantern on the stern, which shines only on the waves behind us!" - Samuel Taylor Coleridge
"The history of all the world tells us that immoral means will ever intercept good ends." - Samuel Taylor Coleridge
"Is there a spiritual reality, inconceivable to us today, which corresponds in history to the physical reality which Einstein discovered and which led to the atomic bomb? Einstein discovered a law of physical change: the way to convert a single particle of matter into enormous physical energy. Might there not also be, as Gandhi suggested, an equally incredible and [as yet] undiscovered law of spiritual change, whereby a single person or small community of persons could be converted into an enormous spiritual energy capable of transforming a society and a world?" - James W. Douglass
"A grand meta-narrative is a story of the development and purpose of human history in which we as individual can find a place and play a role. Four basic meta-narratives: (1) Platonic Christian is the idea of life as a journey to another unchanging realm. (2) Hegel’s view that history is the unfolding of the consciousness of God. (3) Marx’s notion of another revolution ushering in a new era. (4) Nietzsche’s idea that there is no “beyond” and that the only meaning comes through creative activities through which we shape a life for ourselves." - Stephen A. Erickson
"Men wiser and more learned than I have discerned in history a plot, a rhythm, a predetermined pattern. These harmonies are concealed from me. I can see only one emergency following upon another as wave follows upon wave, only one great fact with respect to which, since it is unique, there can be no generalizations, only one safe rule for the historian: that they should recognize in the development of human destinies the play of the contingent and the unforeseen." - H.A.L. Fisher, fully Herbert Albert Laurens Fisher
"Three claims: (1) Consciousness exists. There exist conscious mental states, events, and processes that have the property of being conscious. (2) Consciousness has depth, hidden structure, hidden and possibly multiple functions, and hidden natural and cultural history. Conscious mental states supervene on brain states. (3) Conscious mental states, processes, events – possibly conscious supervisory faculties, if there are any – are heterogeneous in phenomenal world. A theory of consciousness will in the end be part of a unified theory of the mind." - Owen Flanagan
"History is more or less bunk. It's tradition. We don't want tradition. We want to live in the present and the only history that is worth a tinker's damn is the history we make today." - Henry Ford
"If you try to see the Presence of God everywhere. If you realize that fundamentally you have nothing to deal with but your own thoughts. If, in short, you understand that you are in a mental universe, that things are thoughts, and that one’s life history is fundamentally the expression of his belief about God." - Emmet Fox
"Does not the history of the world show that there would have been no romance in life if there had been no risks?" - Mahatma Gandhi, fully Mohandas Karamchand Gandhi, aka Bapu
"The history of mankind is crowded with evidences proving that physical coercion is not adapted to moral regeneration; that the sinful dispositions of men can be subdued only by love; that evil can be exterminated from the earth only by goodness… that there is great security in being gentle, harmless, long-suffering, and abundant in mercy; that it is only the meek who shall inherit the earth, for the violent, who resort to the sword, are destined to perish with the sword." - William Lloyd Garrison
"The deepest, the only theme of human history, compared to which all others are of subordinate importance, is the conflict of skepticism with faith." - Johann Wolfgang von Goethe
"The only thing worse than a liar is a liar that's also a hypocrite! There are only two great currents in the history of mankind: the baseness which makes conservatives and the envy which makes revolutionaries." - Jules de Goncourt, fully Jules Huot de Goncourt
"The spiritual history of man, as seen by God, is not one of progress but of recover, or redemption." - Aelred Graham
"Too much to live with, too little to live for… In our own day this question of life purpose is more urgent than ever. Three factors have converged to fuel a search for significance without precedent in human history. First, the search for the purpose of life is one of the deepest issues of our experiences as human beings. Second, the expectation that we can all live purposeful lives has been given a gigantic boost by modern society’s offer of the maximum opportunity for choice and change in all we do. Third, our fulfillment is thwarted by this stunning fact: Out of more than a score of great civilizations in human history, modern Western civilization is the very first to have a no agreed-on answer to the question of the purpose of life… Most of us in the midst of material plenty, have spiritual poverty." - Os Guiness
"Throughout history, the really fundamental changes in societies have come about not from dictates of government and the results of battles but through vast numbers of people changing their minds--sometimes only a little bit." - Willis Harman
"Persecution always acts as a gel for members of cults; it proves to them, in the absence of history, liturgy, tradition, and doctrine that they are God’s chosen." - Barbara Grizzuti Harrison
"The history of mankind is the history of thought – of the gradual ascendancy of mind over matter." - B. H. Liddell Hart, fully Captain B. H. Liddell
"In the midst of our applauding the feats of civilization, the Bible flings itself like a knife slashing our complacency; remind us that God, too, has a voice in history." - Abraham Joshua Heschel
"It is as if a divine cunning operated in human history, using our instincts as pretexts for the attainment of goals which are universally valid, a scheme to harness man’s lower forces in the service of higher ends." - Abraham Joshua Heschel
"The darkness of history… conceals alight. Beyond the mystery is meaning. And the meaning is destined to be disclosed." - Abraham Joshua Heschel
"To be a Jew is to affirm the world without being enslaved to it; to be a part of civilization and to go beyond it; to conquer space and to sanctify time. Judaism is the art of surpassing civilization, sanctification of time, sanctification of history." - Abraham Joshua Heschel
"The nearer my approach to the end, the plainer is the sound of immortal symphonies of worlds which invite me. It is wonderful yet simple. It is a fairy tale; it is history. For half a century I have been translating my thoughts into prose and verse; history, philosophy, drama, romance, tradition, satire, ode and song; all of these I have tried. But I feel that I haven’t given utterance to the thousandth part of what lies within me. When I go to the grave I can say as others have said, “My day’s work is done.” But I cannot say, “My life is done.” My day’s work will recommence the next morning. the tomb is not a blind alley; it is a thoroughfare. It closes upon the twilight, but opens upon the dawn." - Victor Hugo
"Religion, occupying herself with personal destinies and keeping this in contact with the only absolute realities which we know, must necessarily play an eternal part in human history." - William James
"When you study the history of life, and step back to look at this long history with the perspective of several hundred million years, you see a flow and direction in it - from the simple to the complex, from lower forms to higher, and always towards greater intelligence--and you wonder: can this history of events leading to man, with its clear direction, yet be undirected?" - Robert Jastrow
"Creative love flowing freely among all persons and organizing their common life - this I take to be the meaning of God in history." - F. Ernest Johnson
"What are all the records of history, but narratives of successive villainies, of treasons and usurpations, massacres and wars?" - Samuel Johnson, aka Doctor Johnson
"History is not contained in thick books but lives in our very blood." - Carl Jung, fully Carl Gustav Jung
"If we have learned anything at all in the two thousand years of Christian history, we should have learned that few things are more dangerous than zeal without knowledge." - Charles W Kegley, Jr.
"Although the tongue of God is busy speaking through all things, yet in order to speak to the deaf ears of many among us, it is necessary for Him to speak through the lips of man. He has done this all through the history of man, every great teacher of the past having been this guiding Spirit living the life of God in human guise. In other words, their human guise consists of various coats worn by the same person, who appeared to be different in each. Shiva, Buddha, Rama, Krishna, on the other side, Abraham, Moses, Jesus, Mohammad on the other; and many more, known or unknown to history, always one and the same person." - Hazrat Pir-o-Murshid Inayat Khan
"Darwin’s and Huxley’s picture of man’s place in the universe prepared the way for the Holocaust… Darwin the scientist directly inspired Nietzsche’s superman theory and the Nazi corollary that some people were subhuman… People have to learn to stop thinking of other people as machines and learn to think of them as men and women possessed of souls… History doesn’t need another one hundred million deaths to prove that scientific atheism is a form of mental illness." - John Koster
"Immense hidden powers seem to lurk in the unconscious depths of even the most common man - indeed, of all people without exception. It is these powers, when put under pressure, that are responsible for all great creative efforts. The men who make history are those who - consciously or unconsciously - turn the switch on the inner switchboards of human character. Pour out all your fears and anxieties, malicious joy and greed and hatred, and you will be astonished at the terrific amount of power which is pent up in your unconscious mind. We can release this power and transform it from negative into positive power, only by bringing into the open, into the light of consciousness, and by accepting ourselves as we are, even though the mountains of debts seem to crush us. This is the principle of honesty. And it is clear that it can be applied only if connected with the principle of faith." - Fritz Künkel
"Prayer is likely to be undervalued by all but wise people because it is silent and so secret. We are often deceived into thinking that noise is more important than silence. War sounds far more important than the noisesless growing of a crop of what, yet the silent wheat feeds millions, while war destroys them. Nobody but God knows how often prayers have changed the course of history... The highest communion is not asking God for things for ourselves, but letting Him flow down through us, out over the world - in endless benediction." - Frank Charles Laubach