This site is dedicated to the memory of Dr. Alan William Smolowe who gave birth to the creation of this database.
The most sublime labor of poetry is to give sense and passion to insensate things; and it is characteristic of children to take inanimate things in their hands and talk to them in play as if they were living persons... in the world's childhood, men were by nature sublime poets.
Childhood | Children | Labor | Men | Nature | Passion | Play | Poetry | Sense | Wisdom | World |
Alexis de Tocqueville, fully Alexis-Charles-Henri Clérel de Tocqueville
Democratic institutions awaken and foster a passion for equality which they can never entirely satisfy.
Peter Weiss, fully Peter Ulrich Weiss
Every death even the cruelest death drowns in the total indifference of Nature. Nature herself would watch unmoved if we destroyed the entire human race.
Death | Human race | Indifference | Nature | Race | Wisdom |
Throughout history there has never been an evitable war. The greatest danger of war always lies in the widespread acceptance of its inevitability.
If ignorance and passions are foes of popular morality, it must be confessed that moral indifference is the malady of the cultivated classes.
Ignorance | Indifference | Morality |
The waves of human passion rise and fall; worldly things are as transitory as passing clouds.
Passion |
Nikolai Berdyaev, fully Nikolai Alexandrovich Berdyaev, also spelled Nichlas Berdiaev
Not from anything in the world would I be free from God; I wish to be free in God and for God. It is needful that my passion for a freedom without bounds should involve a conflict with the world, but not with God.
In war and affairs of state, many things seem to be just and reasonable at first sight; yet nothing of the kind ought to be finally decided without pondering in a hundred different lights.
Roland Barthes, fully Roland Gérard Barthes
What the public wants is the image of passion, not passion itself.
The object of government in peace and in war is not the glory of rulers or of races, but the happiness of the common man.
Glory | Government | Man | Object | Peace | War | Government | Happiness |
Chinua Achebe, formally Albert Chinụalụmọgụ Achebe
After a war life catches desperately at passing hints of normalcy like vines entwining a hollow twig.
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.
Perhaps there is no property in which men are more distinguished from each other, than in the various degrees in which they possess the faculty of observation. The great herd of mankind pass their lives in listless inattention and indifference as to what is going on around them, being perfectly content to satisfy the mere cravings of nature, while those who are destined to distinction have lynx-eyed vigilance that nothing can escape.
Distinction | Inattention | Indifference | Mankind | Men | Nature | Nothing | Observation | Property | Vigilance | Wisdom |
Without passion man is a mere latent force and possibility, like the flint which awaits the shock of the iron before it can give forth its spark.