This site is dedicated to the memory of Dr. Alan William Smolowe who gave birth to the creation of this database.
From the nature of things, every society must at all times possess within itself the sovereign powers of legislation.
Circumstances | Death | Question | Reputation | Society | Time | Society |
I say, the earth belongs to each of these generations during its course, fully and in its own right. The second generation receives it clear of the debts and incumbrances of the first, the third of the second, and so on. For if the first could charge it with a debt, then the earth would belong to the dead and not to the living generation. Then, no generation can contract debts greater than may be paid during the course of its own existence.
Enough | Experience | Man | Reputation | Will |
No man will labor for himself who can make another labor for him.
Man | Nothing | Reputation | Will | Loss |
No man will ever bring out of the Presidency the reputation which carries him into it...To myself, personally, it brings nothing but increasing drudgery and daily loss of friends.
Ecstasy | Man | Office | Reputation | Will |
A man will pass better through the world with a thousand open errors upon his back than in being detected in one sly falsehood. When one is detected, a thousand are suspected.
Man | Reputation |
I bid you farewell, sincerely wishing, that as men and Christians, ye may always fully and uninterruptedly enjoy every civil and religious right.
Man | Reputation |
Will Durant, fully William James "Will" Durant
A great civilization is not conquered from without until it has destroyed itself within. The essential cause of Rome's decline lay in her people, her morals, her class struggle, her failing trade, her bureaucratic despotism, her stifling taxes, her consuming wars.
Willard Gibbs, fully Josiah Willard Gibbs
Just now I am trying to get ready for publication something on thermodynamics from the a priori point of view, or rather on 'statistical mechanics' . . . I do not know that I shall have anything particularly new in substance, but shall be contented if I can so choose my standpoint (as seems to me possible) as to get a simpler view of the subject.
Caution | Distrust | Hope | Love | Modesty | Qualities | Reputation |
Wayne Dyer, fully Wayne Walter Dyer
Your soul - that inner quiet space - is yours to consult. It will always guide you in the right direction.
Control | Reputation |
W. H. Auden, fully Wystan Hugh Auden
How should we like it were stars to burn with a passion for us we could not return? If equal affection cannot be, Let the more loving one be me.
Happy | Reputation |
W. H. Auden, fully Wystan Hugh Auden
How happy the lot of the mathematician. He is judged solely by his peers, and the standard is so high that no colleague or rival can ever win a reputation he does not deserve.
Good | Happy | Mathematics | Reputation | Waste | Old |
W. E. H. Lecky, fully William Edward Hartpole Lecky
Making every allowance for the errors of the most extreme fallibility, the history of Catholicism would on this hypothesis represent an amount of imposture probably unequaled in the annals of the human race.
Attention | Contradiction | Dignity | Discovery | Habit | Innovation | Knowledge | Lord | Man | Mind | Reputation | Science | Society | Study | System | Terror | Theology | Thought | Time | Society | Discovery | Thought |
Voltaire, pen name of François-Marie Arouet NULL
I am ignorant of how I was formed and how I was born. Through a quarter of my lifetime I was absolutely ignorant of the reasons for everything I saw and heard and felt, and was merely a parrot prompted by other parrots... When I sought to advance along that infinite course, I could neither find one single footpath or fully discover one single object, and from the upward leap I made to contemplate eternity I fell back into the abyss of my ignorance.
Important | Journey | Reputation | Science | Learn |
Upton Sinclair, fully Upton Beall Sinclair, Jr.
When the first savage saw his hut destroyed by a bolt of lightning, he fell down upon his face in terror. He had no conception of natural forces, of laws of electricity ; he saw this event as the act of an individual intelligence. To-day we read about fairies and demons, dryads and fauns and satyrs, Wotan and Thor and Vulcan, Freie and Flora and Ceres, and we think of all these as pretty fancies, play-products of the mind; losing sight of the fact that they were originally meant with entire seriousness—that not merely did ancient man believe in them, but was forced to believe in them, because the mind must have an explanation of things that happen, and an individual intelligence was the only explanation available. The story of the hero who slays the devouring dragon was not merely a symbol of day and night, of summer and winter; it was a literal explanation of the phenomena, it was the science of early times.
Possessions | Reputation | Space |
One should not let one’s mind to be overcome by melancholy. Melancholy or moroseness is a very bad thing. It kills (destroys) a man just as an angered serpent kills a child.
Action | Fame | Reputation | Will |
You may be sure that we are as well aware as you of the difficulty of contending against your power and fortune, unless the terms be equal. But we trust that the gods may grant us fortune as good as yours, since we are just men fighting against unjust, and that what we want in power will be made up by the alliance of the Lacedaemonians, who are bound, if only for very shame, to come to the aid of their kindred. Our confidence, therefore, after all is not so utterly irrational.
Good | Honor | Hope | Mistake | Present | Reputation | Success |
A soldier's a man, o, man's life's but a span, why then, let a soldier drink. Othello, Act ii, Scene 3
And simple truth miscalled simplicity, and captive good attending captain ill.