This site is dedicated to the memory of Dr. Alan William Smolowe who gave birth to the creation of this database.
M. Stanton Evans, fully Medford Stanton Evans
Great discoveries or ideas have one thing in common. Before they are achieved they are considered incredible and not worth the effort deemed necessary to make them real. After they are achieved, it is incredible that we should be without them.
Even a mistake may turn out to be the one thing necessary to a worthwhile achievement.
Achievement | Mistake | Wisdom |
All Fords are exactly alike, but no two men are just alike. Every new life is a new thing under the sun; there has never been anything just like it before, never will be again. A young man ought to get that idea about himself; he should look for the single spark of individuality that makes him different from other folks, and develop that for all he is worth. Society and schools may try to iron it out of him; their tendency is to put it all in the same mold, but I say don't let that spark be lost; it is your only real claim to importance.
Individuality | Life | Life | Man | Men | Society | Will | Wisdom | Worth | Society |
If you think you can do a thing or think you can't do a thing, you're right.
Anatole France, pen name of Jacques Anatole Francois Thibault
One thing above all gives charm to men's thoughts, and this is unrest. A mind that is not uneasy irritates and bores me.
Do not anticipate trouble, or worry about what may never happen. Keep in the sunlight.
Perle Epstein, aka Perle Besserman and Perle S. Epstein
Before an egg can grow into a chicken, it must first totally cease to be an egg. Each thing must lose its original identity before it can be something else. Therefore, before a thing is transformed into something else, it must come to a level of no-thingness.
Wisdom |
Randolph S. Foster, fully Randolph Sinks Foster
He who would do some great thing in this short life must apply himself to the work with such a concentration of his forces as, to idle spectators, who live only to amuse themselves, looks like insanity.
Anatole France, pen name of Jacques Anatole Francois Thibault
A people living under the... threat of war and invasion is very easy to govern. It demands no social reforms. It doesn't not haggle over armaments and military expenditures. It pays without discussion, it ruins itself, and that is a fine thing for the financiers and manufacturers for whom patriotic terrors are an abundant source of gain.
Discussion | People | War | Wisdom |
Truth isn’t outside power, or lacking in power: contrary to a myth whose history and functions would repay further study, truth isn’t the reward of free spirits, the child of protracted solitude, nor the privilege of those who have succeeded in liberating themselves. Truth is a thing of this world: it is produced only by virtue of multiple forms of constraint. And it induces regular effects of power. Each society has its regime of truth, its ‘general politics’ of truth: that is, the types of discourse which it accepts and makes function as true; the mechanisms and instances which enable one to distinguish true and false statements, the means by which each is sanctions; the techniques and procedures accorded value in the acquisition of truth; the status of those who are charged with saying what counts as true.
Constraint | Distinguish | History | Means | Myth | Politics | Power | Reward | Society | Solitude | Study | Truth | Virtue | Virtue | Wisdom | World | Society | Child | Privilege | Value |