This site is dedicated to the memory of Dr. Alan William Smolowe who gave birth to the creation of this database.
[From the Reform Movement by Ssŭ-yü Têng] K'ang Yu-wei proposes a world government under which all national states and armies shall be abolished, while a universal language, calendar, and units of weight shall be used. The governors of the world government shall be elected by the world citizens. In the commonwealth, men and women shall be born free, equal, and independent.
Government | Men | Reform | World | Government |
Louis L'Amour, fully Louis Dearborn L'Amour
A mistake constantly made by those who should know better is to judge people of the past by our standards rather than their own. The only way men or women can be judged is against the canvas of their own time.
Lucretia Mott, fully Lucretia Coffin Mott
Learning, while at school, that the charge for the education of girls was the same as that for boys, and that, when they became teachers, women received only half as much as men for their services, the injustice of this distinction was so apparent.
Distinction | Education | Injustice | Injustice | Men |
Marriage is a lottery in which men stake their liberty and women their happiness.
Men err from selfishness, women because they are weak.
Our society is set up so that most women lose their identities when their husbands die.
Men and women approaching retirement age should be recycled for public service work, and their companies should foot the bill. We can no longer afford to scrap-pile people.
Age | Public | Retirement | Service |
Maria Von Ebner-Eschenbach, or Marie von Ebner-Eschenbachová, Marie Freifrau von Ebner-Eschenbach
Never expect women to be sincere so long as they are educated to think that their first aim in life is to please.
Mary Kay Ash, fully Mary Kathlyn Wagner Ash
Our company was begun with only one objective and that is to give women the chance to succeed; an opportunity that simply did not exist in the 60s.
Chance | Opportunity |
Mary Pipher, aka Mary Elizabeth Pipher or Mary Bray Pipher
I think anorexia is a metaphor. It is a young woman's statement that she will become what the culture asks of its women, which is that they be thin and nonthreatening. Anorexia signifies that a young woman is so delicate that, like the women of China with their tiny broken feet, she needs a man to shelter and protect her from a world she cannot handle. Anorexic women signal with their bodies "I will take up only a small amount of space. I won't get in the way." They signal "I won't be intimidating or threatening." (Who is afraid of a seventy-pound adult?)
When any relationship is characterized by difference, particularly a disparity in power, there remains a tendency to model it on the parent-child-relationship. Even protectiveness and benevolence toward the poor, toward minorities, and especially toward women have involved equating them with children.
Benevolence | Model | Relationship |
Maya Angelou, born Marguerite Annie Johnson
I don't know if I continue, even today, always liking myself. But what I learned to do many years ago was to forgive myself. It is very important for every human being to forgive herself or himself because if you live, you will make mistakes- it is inevitable. But once you do and you see the mistake, then you forgive yourself and say, 'Well, if I'd known better I'd have done better,' that's all. So you say to people who you think you may have injured, 'I'm sorry,' and then you say to yourself, 'I'm sorry.' If we all hold on to the mistake, we can't see our own glory in the mirror because we have the mistake between our faces and the mirror; we can't see what we're capable of being. You can ask forgiveness of others, but in the end the real forgiveness is in one's own self. I think that young men and women are so caught by the way they see themselves. Now mind you. When a larger society sees them as unattractive, as threats, as too black or too white or too poor or too fat or too thin or too sexual or too asexual, that's rough. But you can overcome that. The real difficulty is to overcome how you think about yourself. If we don't have that we never grow, we never learn, and sure as hell we should never teach.
Better | Difficulty | Forgiveness | Glory | Hell | Important | Men | Mind | Mistake | People | Society | Will | Forgiveness | Society | Forgive | Think |
Whatever else you do or forbear, impose upon yourself the task of happiness; and now and then abandon yourself to the joy of laughter. And however much you condemn the evil in the world, remember that the world is not all evil; that somewhere children are at play, as you yourself in the old days; that women still find joy in the stalwart hearts of men; And that men, treading with restless feet their many paths, may yet find refuge from the storms of the world in the cheerful house of love.
Publication of the "Humanist Manifesto" will, in my opinion, serve no sufficient purpose. I cannot believe with you that it will clarify the public mind, or do constructive work for the cause. A set of fifteen principles, detached from the living experience which precipitated them and lacking the life and warmth of the interests they represent, can do little to inform the mind and nothing to stir the heart. Humanism—if I understand the philosophy of it—cannot be "sold" to people. If the "Manifesto" were a rallying cry issuing with glowing conviction from a group on the march together, or if it gave promise of gripping men and women of humanistic leanings, drawing them into closer, more understanding and more active unity, it would be a desirable signal. Unfortunately, I see no such service in it. And experience has taught me to beware of deceiving myself into thinking something has really been done when all that has been done is that something has been said. It would be easier for me to write, "Sure, go ahead, put me down." If I take the harder course and do not sign the document which I know will carry the names of men I greatly admire and respect, it is because of a deep conviction that the "Manifesto" will prove to be an ineffectual gesture, and a tactical error.
Experience | Life | Life | Little | Men | Mind | Nothing | Philosophy | Promise | Public | Service | Thinking | Understanding | Will | Work | Understand |
Meridel Le Sueur, born Meridel Wharton
What happens in a strike happens not to one person alone.... It is a crisis with meaning and potency for all and prophetic of a future. The elements in crisis are the same, there is a fermentation that is identical. The elements are these: a body of men, women and children, hungry; an organization of feudal employers out to break the back of unionization; and the government Labor Board sent to "negotiate" between this hunger and this greed.
Body | Government | Hunger | Labor | Meaning | Organization | Government | Crisis |
Michael Dorris, fully Michael Anthony Dorris
Here are two facts that should not both be true: - There is sufficient food produced in the world every year to feed every human being on the planet. - Nearly 800 million people literally go hungry every day, with more than a third of the earth's population -- 2 billion men and women -- malnourished one way or another, according to the United Nations Food and Agriculture Organization.
Some women love only what they can hold in their arms; others, only what they can't.
Love |
All love is probationary, a fact which frightens women and exhilarates men.
Love |
Mikhail Bakunin, fully Mikhail Alexandrovich Bakunin
Freedom is the absolute right of all adult men and women to seek permission for their action only from their own conscience and reason, and to be determined in their actions only by their own will, and consequently to be responsible only to themselves, and then to the society to which they belong, but only insofar as they have made a free decision to belong to it.
Absolute | Action | Conscience | Decision | Men | Right | Society | Society |