This site is dedicated to the memory of Dr. Alan William Smolowe who gave birth to the creation of this database.
The chief cause of our misery is less the violence of our passions than the feebleness of our virtues.
Cause |
Leonardo da Vinci, fully Leonardo di ser Piero da Vinci
Force is only a desire for flight: it lives by violence and dies from liberty.
Louis D. Brandeis, fully Louis Dembitz Brandeis
In the field of modern business, so rich in opportunity for the exercise of man's finest and most varied mental faculties and moral qualities, mere money-making cannot be regarded as the legitimate end... since with the conduct of business human happiness or misery is inextricably interwoven.
Business | Conduct | Man | Money | Opportunity | Qualities | Business | Happiness |
Life is growth - a challenge of environment. If we cannot meet our everyday surroundings with equanimity and pleasure and grow each day in some useful direction, then this splendid balance of cosmic forces which we call life is on the road toward misfortune, misery and destruction. Therefore, health is the most precious of all things.
Balance | Challenge | Day | Equanimity | Growth | Health | Life | Life | Misfortune | Pleasure |
Noam Chomsky, fully Avram Noam Chomsky
It's true that things like violence and rotten schools are destroying the cities - but they're destroying them because of a social structure that we've got to change, from the bottom up.
Change |
Nelson Mandela, fully Nelson Rolihlahla Mandela
We speak here of the challenge of the dichotomies of war and peace, violence and non-violence, racism and human dignity, oppression and repression and liberty and human rights, poverty and freedom from want.
Challenge | Freedom | Liberty | Oppression | Poverty | Right | Time | War |
Man little knows what calamities are beyond his patience to bear till he tries them; as in ascending the heights of ambition, which look bright from below, every step we rise shows us some new and gloomy prospect of hidden disappointment; so in our descent from the summits of pleasure, though the vale of misery below may appear, at first, dark and gloomy, yet the busy mind, still attentive to its own amusement, finds, as we descend, something to flatter and to please. Still as we approach, the darkest objects appear to brighten, and the mortal eye becomes adapted to its gloomy situation.
Ambition | Little | Man | Mind | Mortal | Patience | Pleasure |
Pope John Paul II, born Karol Józef Wojtyła, aka Saint John Paul the Great NULL
Let us not accept violence as the way of peace. Let us instead begin by respecting true freedom: the resulting peace will be able to satisfy the world’s expectations, for it will be a peace built on justice, a peace founded on the incomparable dignity of the free human being.
Robert Kennedy, fully Robert Francis "Bobby" Kennedy
What we need in the United States is not division; what we need in the United States is not hatred; what we need in the United States is not violence or lawlessness, but love and wisdom, and compassion toward one another, and a feeling of justice towards those who still suffer within our country, whether they be black or they be white.
Compassion | Justice | Love | Need | Wisdom |
Thomas Henry Huxley, aka T.H. Huxley and Darwin's Bulldog
We live in a world which is full of misery and ignorance, and the plain duty of each and all of us is to try to make the little corner he can influence somewhat less miserable and somewhat less ignorant than it was before he entered it.