This site is dedicated to the memory of Dr. Alan William Smolowe who gave birth to the creation of this database.
Woodrow Wilson, fully Thomas Woodrow Wilson
The history of liberty is a history of limitation of government power, not the increase of it.
Government | History | Liberty | Power | Government |
We are human because, at a very early stage in the history of the species, our ancestors discovered a way of preserving and disseminating the results of experience.
Experience | History |
C. S. Peirce, fully Charles Sanders Peirce
Everybody knows that the long continuance of a routine of habit makes us lethargic, while a succession of surprises wonderfully brightens the ideas. Where there is a motion, where history is a-making, there is the focus of mental activity, and it has been said that the arts and sciences reside within the temple of Janus, waking when that is open, but slumbering when it is closed.
Literary works cannot be taken over like factories, or literary forms of expression like industrial methods. Realist writing, of which history offers many widely varying examples, is likewise conditioned by the question of how, when and for what class it is made use of.
Places not only are they happen. (And it is because they happen that they lend themselves so well to narration, whether as history or story)
History |
Edward R. Murrow, born Egbert Roscoe Murrow
Difficulty is the excuse history never accepts.
History |
Erich Fromm, fully Erich Seligmann Fromm
Human history begins with man's act of disobedience which is at the very same time the beginning of his freedom and development of his reason.
Beginning | Disobedience | Freedom | History | Time |
In a sense, words are encyclopedias of ignorance because they freeze perceptions at one moment in history and then insist we continue to use these frozen perceptions when we should be doing better.
The world is a scene changing so rapidly that it takes every bit of intuitive ability you have, every brain cell each one of you has, to make the sensible decision about what to do next. You cannot rely upon what you have been taught. All you have learned from history is old ways of making mistakes. There is nothing that history can tell you about what we must do tomorrow. Only what we must not do.
Edward R. Murrow, born Egbert Roscoe Murrow
We must not confuse dissent with disloyalty. We must remember always that accusation is not proof and that conviction depends upon evidence and due process of law. We will not walk in fear, one of another. We will not be driven by fear into an age of unreason, if we dig deep in our history and our doctrine, and remember that we are not descended from fearful men – not from men who feared to write, to speak, to associate, and to defend causes that were, for the moment, unpopular.
Eugene O'Neill, fully Eugene Gladstone O'Neill
To hell with the truth! As the history of the world proves, the truth has no bearing on anything. It's irrelevant and immaterial, as the lawyers say. The lie of a pipe dream is what gives life to the whole misbegotten mad lot of us, drunk or sober.
Erich Fromm, fully Erich Seligmann Fromm
For the first time in history the physical survival of the human race depends on a radical change of the human heart.
One who belongs to the most vilified and persecuted minority in history is not likely to be insensible to the freedoms guaranteed by our Constitution... But as judges we are neither Jew nor Gentile, neither Catholic nor agnostic.
History |
The history of liberty has largely been the history of the observance of procedural safeguards.
The words of the Constitution ... are so unrestricted by their intrinsic meaning or by their history or by tradition or by prior decisions that they leave the individual Justice free, if indeed they do not compel him, to gather meaning not from reading the Constitution but from reading life.
History | Individual | Justice | Meaning | Reading | Tradition | Words |
The history of mankind is the instant between two strides taken by a traveler.