This site is dedicated to the memory of Dr. Alan William Smolowe who gave birth to the creation of this database.
Simone de Beauvoir, fully Simone-Ernestine-Lucie-Marie Bertrand de Beauvoir
Practical reasons invoked against legal abortion have no weight, as to moral reasons, they reduce to the old Catholic argument: the fetus has a soul to heaven forbids that by removing it before the baptism. It should be noted that the church allows, occasionally, the death of grown men, in war or when it is put to death; reservation, however, to the fetus, an uncompromising humanitarianism.
Think |
Arthur Conan Doyle, fully Sir Arthur Ignatius Conan Doyle
I wanted to end the world but, I'll settle for ending yours.
Arthur Conan Doyle, fully Sir Arthur Ignatius Conan Doyle
In victory one does not understand the horror of war. It is only in the cold chill of defeat that it is brought home to you.
Jean Baptiste Lacordaire, fully Jean Baptiste Henri Lacordaire
Fulfill your ministry with all the affection of your heart.
Grave |
As scientists, we understand the dangers of nuclear weapons and their devastating effects, and we are learning how human activities and technologies are affecting climate systems in ways that may forever change life on Earth. As citizens of the world, we have a duty to alert the public to the unnecessary risks that we live with every day, and to the perils we foresee if governments and societies do not take action now to render nuclear weapons obsolete and to prevent further climate change... There’s a realization that we are changing our climate for the worse. That would have catastrophic effects. Although the threat is not as dire as that of nuclear weapons right now, in the long term we are looking at a serious threat.
Beginning | Better | Confidence | Discovery | Optimism | Search | Thought | Uncertainty | Will | Theoretical | Discovery | Govern | Thought |
On seeing the Enterprise's warp engine while visiting the set of Star Trek: The Next Generation (where he would briefly play himself in the 1993 episode Descent, Part I), Hawking smiled and said: I'm working on that.
Day | Destroy | Experiment | Famous | Fun | Future | Giving | Guests | Nothing | Past | Reason | Rule | Sound | Thinking | Thought | Time | Universe | Will | Think | Thought |
What encouragement could there be to lift up our eyes to one that were of one mind this day and of another mind to-morrow? Who would put up a petition to an earthly prince that were so mutable as to grant a petition one day and deny it another, and change his own act? But if a prince promise this or that thing upon such or such a condition, and you know his promise to be as unchangeable as the laws of the Medes and Persians, would any man reason thus? because it is unchangeable we will not seek to him, we will not perform the condition upon which the fruit of the proclamation is to be enjoyed. Who would not count such an inference ridiculous? What blessings hath not God promised upon the condition of seeking him?
Theodore Dreiser, fully Theodore Herman Albert Dreiser
The conventional mind is at best a petty piece of machinery. It is oyster-like in its functioning, or, perhaps better, clam-like. It has its little siphon of thought-processes forced up or down into the mighty ocean of fact and circumstance; but it uses so little, pumps so faintly, that the immediate contiguity of the vast is not disturbed. Nothing of the subtlety of life is perceived. No least inkling of its storms or terrors is ever discovered except through accident.
Then, warming to the work, he [the garrulous type] will remark that the men of the present day are greatly inferior to the ancients; and how cheap wheat has become in the market; and what a number of foreigners are in town; and that the sea is navigable after the Dionysia; and that, if Zeus would send more rain, the crops would be better;
Justice consists not in being neutral between right and wrong, but in finding out the right and upholding it, wherever found, against the wrong.
Control | Enough | Forbearance | Government | Individual | Justice | Nations | Principles | Respect | Rest | Wrong | Government | Respect | Trouble |
If a man had a servant that would go out and sow his seed very diligently and faithfully; but would come in, and sit down idle when it is sown, and forget to harrow it, and hide it with the earth; would the master be well pleased with him? yea, would he not be highly displeased, because the fowls would come and pick it up? So, O my soul, if thou shouldst be never so much concerned to get good seed, and never so faithful and diligent in sowing it; yet if after thou turn careless, and take not the way to cover it, by serious seeking to the Lord, that he may keep it in the hearts of people, and make it to prosper, the devil may pick it all up; and where is thy labour then; and how will the Lord be pleased with thee! Therefore pray more frequently, cry more fervently to God, when the public work is over, than thou hast done.
Better | Experience | Knowledge | Lord | Think |
We are spiritually dead without the Spirit indwelling, and spiritually asleep without the Spirit influencing....The former, praying, is like a ghost walking and talking; the latter, like a man speaking through his sleep.
Day | Duty | Good | Grace | Man | Manners | Men | Sabbath | Time | Will | Worship |
As to the crook in your lot, God has made it; and it must continue while He will have it so. Should you ply your utmost force to even it, or make it straight, your attempt will be vain: it will not change for all you can do. Only He who made it can mend it, or make it straight. This consideration, this view of the matter, is a proper means at once to silence and to satisfy men, and so bring them to a dutiful submission to their Maker and Governor, under the crook in their lot.
Men are to be guided only by their self-interests. Good government is a good balancing of these; and, except a keen eye and appetite for self-interest, requires no virtue in any quarter. To both parties it is emphatically a machine: to the discontented, a taxing-machine; to the contented, a machine for securing property. Its duties and its faults are not those of a father, but of an active parish-constable.