This site is dedicated to the memory of Dr. Alan William Smolowe who gave birth to the creation of this database.
Arianna Huffington, born Arianna Stassinopoulos
The answer to the accumulating casualties of the welfare state’s “war” on poverty is the home-grown, grass-roots, all-volunteer army of ordinary people armed with food, books, skills and a determination to make a difference. The entrepreneurial creativity that catapulted this nation to a position of global leadership can now be harnessed to do for community what it did for productivity. When we provide imaginative, entrepreneurial alternatives to the welfare state, we won’t need to confront it. It will simply wither away. And the rewards of this work are a bounty of spiritual renewal: an abundance of love, meaning and connectedness.
Abundance | Books | Creativity | Determination | Global | Love | Meaning | Need | People | Position | Poverty | War | Will | Wisdom | Work | Leadership |
John F. Kennedy, fully John Fitzgerald "Jack" Kennedy
Political sovereignty is but a mockery without the means of meeting poverty and illiteracy and disease. Self-determination is but a slogan if the future holds no hope.
Determination | Disease | Future | Hope | Means | Mockery | Poverty | Self | Self-determination | Wisdom |
John F. Kennedy, fully John Fitzgerald "Jack" Kennedy
The world is very different now. For man holds in his mortal hands the power to abolish all forms of human poverty and all forms of human life. And yet the same revolutionary beliefs for which our forebears fought are still at issue around the globe - the belief that the rights of man come not from the generosity of the state but from the hand of God.
Belief | Generosity | God | Life | Life | Man | Mortal | Poverty | Power | Rights | Wisdom | World |
No men living are more worthy to be trusted than those who toil up from poverty - none less inclined to take, or touch, ought which they have not honestly earned.
Michel de Montaigne, fully Lord Michel Eyquem de Montaigne
Poverty of goods is easily cured; poverty of mind is irreparable.
To tell the truth, however, family and poverty have done more to support me than I have to support them. They have compelled me to make exertions that I hardly thought myself capable of; and often when on the eve of despairing, they have forced me, like a coward in a corner, to fight like a hero, not for myself, but for my wife and little ones.
Family | Hero | Little | Poverty | Thought | Truth | Wife | Wisdom | Thought |
James Baldwin, fully James Arthur Baldwin
Anyone who has ever struggled with poverty knows how extremely expensive it is to be poor.
Poverty |
Samuel Johnson, aka Doctor Johnson
Resolve not to be poor, whatever you have, spend less. Poverty is a great enemy to human happiness, it certainly destroys liberty, and it makes some virtues impracticable, and others extremely difficult.
What the world needs is a sense of ultimate embarrassment. Modern man has the power and the wealth to overcome poverty and disease, but he has no wisdom to overcome suspicion. We are guilty of misunderstanding the meaning of existence; we are guilty of distorting our goals and misrepresenting our souls. We are better than our assertions, more intricate, more profound than our theories maintain.
Better | Disease | Existence | Goals | Man | Meaning | Poverty | Power | Sense | Suspicion | Theories | Wealth | Wisdom | World | Guilty |
Samuel Johnson, aka Doctor Johnson
Frugality may be termed the daughter of prudence, the sister of temperance, and the parent of liberty. Those that are extravagant will quickly become poor, and poverty will enforce dependence and invite corruption.
Corruption | Daughter | Dependence | Frugality | Liberty | Poverty | Prudence | Prudence | Will | Parent |
We have grown literally afraid to be poor. We despise anyone who elects to be poor in order to simplify and save his inner life. If he does not join the general scramble and pant with the money-making street, we deem him spiritless and lacking in ambition. We have lost the power even of imagining what the ancient idealization of poverty could have meant: the liberation from material attachments, the unbribed soul.
Ambition | Despise | Life | Life | Money | Order | Poverty | Power | Soul | Afraid |
Carl Jung, fully Carl Gustav Jung
The sense of boredom which… appears in analysis is simply an expression of the monotony and poverty of ideas, not of the unconscious… but of the analyst.