This site is dedicated to the memory of Dr. Alan William Smolowe who gave birth to the creation of this database.
When performing a good deed and other people are present, imagine you are standing in a forest surrounded only by trees and flowers. In the long run there is no difference between the two situations. Just as the trees have no awareness of what you are doing, so too in the long run it does not make a difference what those people thought about you for the few seconds they saw you.
Awareness | Character | Good | People | Present | Thought | Awareness | Thought |
Freedom springs from within, whether in a man or in a people. To remove disabilities and confer the franchise is not enough. Men must be enabled to grow if they are to exercise their rights with dignity and effect. For this reason the widening of the franchise in democratic countries has always been accompanied or followed by the development of popular education.
Character | Dignity | Education | Enough | Freedom | Man | Men | People | Reason | Rights | Wisdom |
Brooks Atkinson, fully Justin Brooks Atkinson
We tolerate differences of opinion in people who are familiar to us. But differences of opinion in people we do not know sounds like heresy or plots.
The absolute demonstration of man’s mastery of fate and command of all condition - the victory of man - all men in this racial man, this elder brother of mankind in his triumph over sin, fear and death! But one thing had remained in my mind as necessary to prove to the mass of men to-day man’s absolute supremacy over death in all its forms as an attribute of his oneness with God, with Eternal Life, Perfect Love, Perfect Justice, Omniscience and Omnipotence.
Absolute | Character | Day | Death | Eternal | Fate | Fear | God | Justice | Life | Life | Love | Man | Mankind | Men | Mind | Omnipotence | Omniscience | Oneness | Sin | Fate |
Spiro T. Agnew, fully Spiro Theodore Agnew
Intellectual and spiritual leaders hailed the cause of civil rights and gave little thought to where the civil disobedience road might end. But defiance of the law, even for the best reasons, opens a tiny hole in the dike and soon a trickle becomes a flood... And while no thinking person denies that social injustice exits, no thinking person can condone any group, for any reason, taking justice into his own hands. Once this is permitted, democracy dies; for democracy is sustained through one great premise: the premise that civil rights are balanced by civil responsibilities.
Cause | Civil disobedience | Defiance | Democracy | Disobedience | Injustice | Injustice | Justice | Law | Little | Reason | Rights | Thinking | Thought | Wisdom | Thought |
Walt Whitman, fully Walter "Walt" Whitman
Some people are so much sunshine to the square inch.
You are the greatest investment. The more you store in that mind of yours, the more you enrich your experience, the more people you meet, the more books you read, and the more places you visit, the greater is that investment in all that you are. Everything that you add to your peace of mind, and to your outlook upon life, is added capital that no one but yourself can dissipate.
Books | Experience | Life | Life | Mind | Peace | People | Wisdom |
If we work upon marble, it will perish; if we work upon bronze, time will efface it; if we build temples, they will crumble into dust; but if we work upon immortal souls, if we imbue them with just principles of action, with fear of wrong and love of right, we engrave on those tables something which no time can obliterate, and which will brighten and brighten through all eternity.
Action | Character | Eternity | Fear | Love | Principles | Right | Time | Will | Work | Wrong |
The same suffering is much harder to bear for a high motive than for a base one. The people who stood motionless, from one to eight in the morning, for the sake of having an egg, would have found it very difficult to do in order to save a human life.
Henry Wotton, fully Sir Henry Wotton
How happy is he born or taught, That serveth not another’s will; Whose armor is his honest thought And simple truth his utmost skill! Lord of himself, though not of lands; And having nothing, yet hath all. You meaner beauties of the night, That poorly satisfy our eyes More by your number than your light; You common people of the skies,— What are you when the moon shall rise? An itch of disputing will prove the scab of churches. I am but a gatherer and disposer of other men’s stuff. Idle time not idly spent. Now all nature seemed in love, and birds had drawn their valentines.
Character | Happy | Nature | People | Skill | Thought | Time | Truth | Will |
Poetry is not concerned with telling people what to do, but with extending our knowledge of good and evil, perhaps making the necessity for action more urgent and its nature more clear, but only leading us to the point where it is possible for us to make a rational and moral choice.
Action | Choice | Evil | Good | Knowledge | Nature | Necessity | People | Poetry | Wisdom |
Four men climbed a mountain to see the view. The first wore new and expensive shoes which did not fit, and he complained constantly of his feet. The second had a greedy eye and kept wishing for this house or that farm. The third saw clouds and worried for fear it might rain. But the fourth really saw the marvelous view. His mountain top experience was looking away from the valley out of which he had just climbed to higher things.
Experience | Fear | Men | Wisdom |
It is by universal misunderstanding that all agree. For it, by ill luck, people understood each other, they would never agree.