This site is dedicated to the memory of Dr. Alan William Smolowe who gave birth to the creation of this database.
Grown-ups never understand anything for themselves, and it is tiresome for children to be always and forever explaining things to them.
Children | Understand |
Anything which parents have not learned from experience they can now learn from their children.
Children | Experience | Parents | Learn |
Arthur Meier Schlesinger, Jr., born Arthur Bancroft Schlesinger
The individual freedoms destroyed by the increase in national authority have been in the main the freedom to deny black Americans their elementary rights as citizens, the freedom to work little children in mills... the freedom to pay starvation wages... the freedom to... pollute the environment - all freedoms that, one supposes, a civilized country can readily do without
Authority | Children | Freedom | Individual | Little | Rights | Work |
Arnold J. Toynbee, fully Arnold Joseph Toynbee
In an age in which mankind’s collective power has suddenly been increased, for good or evil, a thousand-fold through the tapping of atomic energy, the standard of conduct demanded from ordinary human beings can be no lower than the standard attained in times past by rare saints.
Age | Conduct | Energy | Evil | Good | Mankind | Past | Power |
Arnold J. Toynbee, fully Arnold Joseph Toynbee
In an age in which mankind’s collective power has suddenly been increased, for good or evil, a thousandfold through the tapping of atomic energy, the standard of conduct demanded from ordinary human beings can be no lower than the standard in times past by rare saints.
Age | Conduct | Energy | Evil | Good | Mankind | Past | Power |
Benjamin Disraeli, 1st Earl of Beaconsfield
Circumstances are beyond the control of man; but his conduct is in his own power.
Circumstances | Conduct | Control | Man | Power |
The greatest thing to leave children is the love they have in them not the inheritance you might leave them.
Children | Inheritance | Love |
Bertrand Russell, fully Bertrand Arthur William Russell, 3rd Earl Russell
History, in every country, is so taught as to magnify that country: children learn to believe that their own country has always been in the right and almost always victorious, that it has produced almost all the great men, and that it is in all respects superior to all other countries.
If we regulate our conduct according to our own convictions, we may safely disregard the praise or censure of others.
Censure | Conduct | Convictions | Praise |
Bertrand Russell, fully Bertrand Arthur William Russell, 3rd Earl Russell
There is no excuse for deceiving children. And when, as must happen in conventional families, they find that their parents have lied, they lose confidence in them and feel justified in lying to them.
Children | Confidence | Lying | Parents |
Bertrand Russell, fully Bertrand Arthur William Russell, 3rd Earl Russell
The fundamental defect of fathers is that they want their children to be a credit to them.
Black Elk, formallly Heȟáka Sápa NULL
I was seeing in a sacred manner the shapes of all things in the spirit, and the shape of all things as they must live together, like one being. And I saw that the sacred hoop of my people was one of many hoops that made one circle, wide as daylight and as starlight, and in the center grew one mighty flowering tree to shelter all the children of one mother and one father.
Who are they that would have all mankind look backward instead of forward, and regulate their conduct by things that have been done? Those who are most ignorant as to all things that are doing. Bacon said, time is the greatest of innovators; he might also have said the greatest of improvers.
It is more easy to forgive the weak who have injured us, than the powerful whom we have injured. The conduct will be continued by our fears which commenced in our resentment.
Conduct | Resentment | Will | Forgive |
In death, there are no rulers above and no subjects below. The course of the four seasons is unknown; our life is eternal. Even a king among men can experience no greater happiness than is ours… If I could restore your body to you, renew your bones and your flesh and take you back to your parents, your wife, and children and old friends, would you not gladly accept my offers?… Why should I throw away a happiness greater than a king’s to once again thrust myself into the troubles and anxieties of mankind?
Body | Children | Death | Eternal | Experience | Life | Life | Mankind | Men | Parents | Troubles | Wife | Happiness | Old |