This site is dedicated to the memory of Dr. Alan William Smolowe who gave birth to the creation of this database.
There are but two roads that lead to an important goal and to the doing of great things: strength and perseverance. Strength is the lot of but a few privileged men; but austere perseverance, harsh and continuous, may be employed by the smallest of us and rarely fails of its purpose, for its silent power grows irresistibly greater with time.
Character | Important | Men | Perseverance | Power | Purpose | Purpose | Strength | Time |
Robert A. Heinlein, fully Robert Anson Heinlein, pen name for Anson MacDonald
Do not handicap your children by making their lives easy.
Julius Charles Hare (1795-1855) and his brother Augustus William Hare
A mother should give her children a superabundance of enthusiasm; that after they have lost all they are sure to lose on mixing with the world, enough may still remain to prompt and support them through great actions.
Character | Children | Enough | Enthusiasm | Mother | World |
Lyndon Johnson, fully Lyndon Baines Johnson, aka LBJ
In this age when there can be no losers in peace and no victors in war, we must recognize the obligation to match national strength with national restraint.
Age | Character | Obligation | Peace | Restraint | Strength | War |
Beware of prejudices. They are like rats, and men's minds are like traps; prejudices get in easily, but it is doubtful if they ever get out... There is nothing respecting which a man must so long unconscious, as of the extent and strength of his prejudices... Opinions grounded [founded] on prejudice are always sustained with the greatest violence.
Garrison Keillor, fully Gary Edward "Garrison" Keillor
Life is either a daring adventure or nothing. To keep our faces toward change and behave like free spirits in the presence of fate is strength undefeatable.
Adventure | Change | Character | Daring | Fate | Life | Life | Nothing | Strength | Fate |
It may well be that the greatest tragedy of this period of social transition is not the glaring noisiness of the so-called bad people, but the appalling silence of the so-called good people. It may be that our generation will have to repent not only for the diabolical actions and vitriolic words of the children of darkness, but also for the crippling fears and tragic apathy of the children of light.
Apathy | Character | Children | Darkness | Good | Light | People | Silence | Tragedy | Will | Words |
Garrison Keillor, fully Gary Edward "Garrison" Keillor
Security is mostly a superstition. It does not exist in nature, nor do the children of men as a whole experience it. Avoiding danger is no safer in the long run than outright exposure. The fearful are caught as often as the bold. Faith alone defends.
Character | Children | Danger | Experience | Faith | Men | Nature | Security | Superstition | Danger |
Niccolò Machiavelli, formally Niccolò di Bernardo dei Machiavelli
It is a true observation of ancient writers, that as men are apt to be cast down by adversity, so they are easily satiated with prosperity, and that joy and grief produce the same effects. For whenever men are not obliged by necessity to fight they fight from ambition, which is so powerful a passion in the human breast that however high we reach we are never satisfied.
Adversity | Ambition | Character | Grief | Joy | Men | Necessity | Observation | Passion | Prosperity |
What is the elevation of the soul? A prompt, delicate, certain feeling for all that is beautiful, all that is grand; a quick resolution to do the greatest good by the smallest means; a great benevolence joined to a great strength and great humility.
Benevolence | Character | Good | Humility | Means | Resolution | Soul | Strength |
We are not asking our children to do their own best but to be the best. Education is in danger of becoming a religion based on fear; its doctrine is to compete. The majority of our children are being led to believe that they are doomed to failure in a world which has room only for those at the top.
Character | Children | Danger | Doctrine | Education | Failure | Fear | Majority | Religion | World | Danger | Failure |
Man is in his actions and practice, as well as in his fictions, essentially a story-telling animal. He is not essentially, but becomes through is history, a teller of stories that aspire to truth. But the key question for men is not about their own authorship; I can only answer the question ‘What am I to do?’ if I can answer the prior question, ‘Of what story or stories do I find myself a part?’ We enter human society, that is, with one or more imputed characters - roles into which we have been drafted - and we have to learn what they are in order to be able to understand how others respond to us and how our responses to them are a part to be construed... Deprive children of stories and you leave them unscripted, anxious strutters in their actions as in their words. Hence there is no way to give us an understanding of any society, including our own, except through the stock of stories which constitute its initial dramatic resource. Mythology, in its original sense, is at the heart of things. Vico was right and so was Joyce. And so too of course is that moral tradition fro heroic society to its medieval heirs according to which the telling of stories has a key part in educating us into the virtues.
Character | Children | Heart | History | Man | Men | Order | Practice | Question | Right | Sense | Society | Story | Tradition | Truth | Understanding | Words | Society | Learn | Understand |