This site is dedicated to the memory of Dr. Alan William Smolowe who gave birth to the creation of this database.
Woodrow Wilson, fully Thomas Woodrow Wilson
It has never been natural, it has seldom been possible, in this country for learning to seek a place apart and hold aloof from affairs. It is only when society is old, long settled to its ways, confident in habit, and without self-questioning upon any vital point of conduct, that study can affect seclusion and despise the passing interests of the day.
Woodrow Wilson, fully Thomas Woodrow Wilson
One cool judgment is worth a thousand hasty councils. The thing to do is to supply light and not heat. At any rate, if it is heat it ought to be white heat and not sputter, because sputtering heat is apt to spread the fire. There ought, if there is any heat at all, to be that warmth of the heart which makes every man thrust aside his own personal feeling, his own personal interest, and take thought of the welfare and benefit of others.
Woodrow Wilson, fully Thomas Woodrow Wilson
We are glad, now that we see the facts with no veil of false pretense about them, to fight thus for the ultimate peace of the world and for the liberation of its peoples, the German peoples included; for the rights of nations great and small and the privilege of men everywhere to choose their way of life and of obedience. The world must be made safe for democracy....It is a fearful thing to lead this great peaceful people into war, into the most terrible and disastrous of all wars, civilization itself seeming to be in the balance. But the right is more precious than peace, and we shall fight for the things which we have always carried nearest our hearts.
Woodrow Wilson, fully Thomas Woodrow Wilson
I come from the South and I know what war is, for I have seen its terrible wreckage and ruin. It is easy for me as President to declare war. I do not have to fight, and neither do the gentlemen on the Hill who now clamor for it. It is some poor farmer's boy, or the son of some poor widow - who will have to do the fighting and dying.
Woodrow Wilson, fully Thomas Woodrow Wilson
The only reason I read a book is because I cannot see and converse with the man who wrote it.
Government | Opinion | People | War | Government | Old | Think |
Tom Hayden, fully Thomas Emmet "Tom" Hayden
Imagine a nineteenth-century Jane Fonda visiting the Oglala Sioux in the Black Hills before the battle at Little Big Horn. Imagine her examining Crazy Horse's arrows or climbing upon Sitting Bull's horse. Such behavior by a well-known actress no doubt would have infuriated Gen. George Armstrong Custer, but what would the rest of us feel today
Tom Hayden, fully Thomas Emmet "Tom" Hayden
There is a power to the street that's part of the democratic process when all else has failed,
Tom Hayden, fully Thomas Emmet "Tom" Hayden
Protest, even more than property, is a sacred resource of American society. It begins with radical minorities at the margins, eventually marching into the mainstream, where their views become the majority sentiment. Prophetic minorities instigated the American Revolution, ended slavery, achieved the vote for women, made trade unions possible, and saved our rivers from becoming sewers.
Tom Hayden, fully Thomas Emmet "Tom" Hayden
But there is something seriously problematic about radicals and progressives in American politics. Some say it's the two-party system that squashes third parties. Some say that it's the potentiality or expanse of the middle class that marginalizes people that want to reform the system itself. Some make a sort of psychological analysis, that the left doesn't want to win, that success means co-optation. All of those things have some merit.
But whether unripe years did want conceit, or he refused to take her figured proffer, the tender nibbler would not touch the bait, but smile and jest at every gentle offer. The Passionate Pilgrim
In my individual heart I fully believe my faith is as robust as yours. The trouble with your robust and full bodied faiths, however, is, that they begin to cut eachothers’ throats too soon, and for getting on in the world and establishing amodus vivendi these pestilential refinements and reasonablenesses and moderations have to creep in.
Appetite | Better | Glory | Kill | Life | Life | Love | Man | Men | Nations | Thought | War | Thought |
I do indeed disbelieve that we or any other mortal men can attain on a given day to absolutely incorrigible and unimprovable truth about such matters of fact as those with which religions deal. But I reject this dogmatic ideal not out of a perverse delight in intellectual instability. I am no lover of disorder and doubt as such. Rather do I fear to lose truth by this pretension to possess it already wholly.
Absurd | Cause | Motives | Nations | Peace | Refinement | Science | War | Will |
Regarding mutual tolerance: It is negative in one sense, but positive in another. It absolutely forbids us to be forward in pronouncing on the meaninglessness of forms of existence other than our own; and it commands us to tolerate, respect, and indulge those whom we see harmlessly interested and happy in their own ways, however unintelligible these may be to us. Hands off . . . .
Absolute | Day | Human nature | Nature | Present | Question | War |