This site is dedicated to the memory of Dr. Alan William Smolowe who gave birth to the creation of this database.
Thomas L. Friedman, fully Thomas Lauren Friedman
When you study history and look at every civilization that has grown up and died off, they all leave one remnant: a major sports coliseum at the heart of their capital. Our fate can be different; but only if we start doing things differently.
Woodrow Wilson, fully Thomas Woodrow Wilson
Conservatism is the policy of making no changes and consulting your grandmother when in doubt.
Public |
Woodrow Wilson, fully Thomas Woodrow Wilson
I am going to teach the South American republics to elect good men.
Credit | Government | Growth | Opinion | System | Government |
Thomas Malthus, fully Thomas Robert Malthus
The great question is whether man shall start forwards with accelerated velocity towards illimitable, and hitherto unconceived improvement, or be condemned to a perpetual oscillation between happiness and misery.
Woodrow Wilson, fully Thomas Woodrow Wilson
A man is the part he plays among his fellows. He is not isolated; he cannot be. His life is made up of the relations he bears to others - is made or marred by those relations, guided by them, judged by them, expressed in them. There is nothing else upon which he can spend his spirit - nothing else that we can see. It is by these he gets his spiritual growth; it is by these we see his character revealed, his purpose, his gifts. A few (men) act as those who have mastered the secrets of a serious art, with deliberate subordination of themselves to the great end and motive of the play. These have "found themselves," and have all the ease of a perfect adjustment.
Government | Little | Opinion | Government |
Woodrow Wilson, fully Thomas Woodrow Wilson
A great nation is not led by a man who simply repeats the talk of the street-corners or the opinions of the newspapers. A nation is led by a man who hears more than those things; or who, rather, hearing those things, understands them better, unites them, puts them into a common meaning; speaks, not the rumors of the street, but a new principle for a new age; a man in whose ears the voices of the nation do not sound like the accidental and discordant notes that come from the voice of a mob, but concurrent and concordant like the united voices of a chorus, whose many meanings, spoken by melodious tongues, unite in his understanding in a single meaning and reveal to him a single vision, so that he can speak what no man else knows, the common meaning of the common voice. Such is the man who leads a great, free, democratic nation.
Action | Credit | Destroy | Determination | Future | Growth | Men | Money | Public | Question | Reason | System |
Our form of government does not enter into rivalry with the institutions of others. We do not copy our neighbors, but are an example to them. It is true that we are called a democracy, for the administration is in the hands of the many and not of the few. But while the law secures equal justice to all alike in their private disputes, the claim of excellence is also recognized; and when a citizen is in any way distinguished, he is preferred to the public service, not as a matter of privilege, but as the reward of merit. Neither is poverty a bar, but a man may benefit his country whatever be the obscurity of his condition.
Control | Excellence | Justice | Opinion | Play | Public | Reason | Restraint | Spirit | Excellence | Talent |
Woodrow Wilson, fully Thomas Woodrow Wilson
We are citizens of the world. The tragedy of our times is that we do not know this.
Government | Man | Opinion | World | Parting | Government |
Thornton Wilder, fully Thornton Niven Wilder
One of the dangers of the American artist is that he finds himself almost exclusively thrown in with persons more or less in the arts. He lives among them, eats among them, quarrels with them, marries them.
Woodrow Wilson, fully Thomas Woodrow Wilson
Whate'er my doom; it cannot be unhappy: God hath given me the boon of resignation.
Opinion |
Woodrow Wilson, fully Thomas Woodrow Wilson
You have laid upon me this double obligation: "we are relying upon you, Mr. President, to keep us out of war, but we are relying upon you, Mr. President, to keep the honor of the nation unstained."
Convictions | Opinion |
Thornton Wilder, fully Thornton Niven Wilder
The test of an adventure is that when you're in the middle of it, you say to yourself, 'Oh, now I've got myself into an awful mess; I wish I were sitting quietly at home.' And the sign that something's wrong with you is when you sit quietly at home wishing you were out having lots of adventure.
Public |
We hope that you, instead of thinking to influence us by saying that you did not join the Lacedaemonians, although their colonists, or that you have done us no wrong, will aim at what is feasible, holding in view the real sentiments of us both; since you know as well as we do that right, as the world goes, is only in question between equals in power, while the strong do what they can and the weak suffer what they must.
Woodrow Wilson, fully Thomas Woodrow Wilson
The great voice of America does not come from the seats of learning, but in a murmur from the hills and the woods and the farms and the factories and the mills, rolling on and gaining volume until it comes to us the voice from the homes of the common men. Do these murmurs come into the corridors of the university? I have not heard them.
God | Life | Life | Men | Observation | Public | God | Afraid |
Peace is an armistice in a war that is continuously going on.
Administration | Example | Excellence | Government | Justice | Law | Man | Obscurity | Obscurity | Poverty | Public | Reward | Rivalry | Excellence | Government |