This site is dedicated to the memory of Dr. Alan William Smolowe who gave birth to the creation of this database.
Bertrand Russell, fully Bertrand Arthur William Russell, 3rd Earl Russell
The desire to understand the world and the desire to reform it are the two great engines of progress, without which human society would stand still or retrogress.
Desire | Progress | Reform | Society | World | Society | Understand |
Confucius, aka Kong Qiu, Zhongni, K'ung Fu-tzu or Kong Fuzi NULL
To have faults and not reform them - that may indeed be called having faults.
Reform |
The greatest challenge of the day is: how to bring about a revolution of the heart, a revolution which has to start with each one of us?
Challenge | Day | Heart | Revolution |
To bring about a revolution of the heart, a revolution which has at start with each one of us. When we begin to take the lowest place, to wash the feet of others, to love our brothers and sisters with that burning love, that passion, which led to the cross, then we can truly say, ‘Now I have begun.’
Heart | Love | Passion | Revolution |
A nation without the means of reform is without the means of survival.
It is not work that kills men, it is worry. Work is healthy, you can hardly put more upon a man than he can bear. Worry is rust upon the blade. It is not the revolution that destroys the machinery, but the friction. Fear secretes acids, but love and trust are sweet juices.
Fear | Love | Man | Men | Revolution | Trust | Work | Worry |
Every reform is only a mask under cover of which a more terrible reform, which dares not yet name itself, advances.
Reform |
Conservatism stands on man's confessed limitations; reform on his indisputable infinitude; conservatism on circumstance; liberalism on power; one goes to make an adroit member of the social frame; the other to postpone all things to the man himself.
Conservatism | Man | Power | Reform |
Every revolution was first a thought in one man's mind; and when the same thought occurs to another man, it is the key to that era.
Fidel Castro, fully Fidel Alejandro Castro Ruz
A revolution is a struggle to the death between the future and the past.
Death | Future | Revolution | Struggle |
Every revolution evaporates and leaves behind only the slime of a new bureaucracy
George Orwell, pen name of Eric Arthur Blair
Power is not a means, it is an end. One does not establish a dictatorship in order to safeguard a revolution; one makes the revolution in order to establish the dictatorship.
Order | Revolution |
Giordano Bruno, born Filippo Bruno
The fools of the world have been those who have established religions, ceremonies, laws, faith, rule of life. The greatest asses of the world are those who, lacking all understanding and instruction, and void of all civil life and custom, rot in perpetual pedantry; those who by the grace of heaven would reform obscure and corrupted faith, salve the cruelties of perverted religion and remove abuse of superstitions, mending the rents in their vesture. It is not they who indulge impious curiosity or who are ever seeking the secrets of nature, and reckoning the courses of the stars. Observe whether they have been busy with the secret causes of things, or if they have condoned the destruction of kingdoms, the dispersion of peoples, fires, blood, ruin or extermination; whether they seek the destruction of the whole world that it may belong to them: in order that the poor soul may be saved, that an edifice may be raised in heaven, that treasure may be laid up in that blessed land, caring naught for fame, profit or glory in this frail and uncertain life, but only for that other most certain and eternal life.
Abuse | Curiosity | Eternal | Glory | Grace | Heaven | Life | Life | Order | Reform | Religion | Rule | Soul | Understanding | World | Blessed |