This site is dedicated to the memory of Dr. Alan William Smolowe who gave birth to the creation of this database.
While the law (of competition) may be sometimes hard for the individual, it is the best for the race, because it insures the survival of the fittest in every department.
Competition | Individual | Law | Race | Survival | Wisdom |
Calvin Coolidge, fully John Calvin Coolidge, Jr.
One with the law is a majority.
Thought has always worked by opposition... By dual, hierarchized oppositions... Wherever an ordering intervenes, a law organizes the thinkable by (dual, irreconcilable; or mitigable, dialectical) oppositions. And all the couples of oppositions are couples.
Law | Opposition | Thought | Wisdom |
Charles Darwin, fully Charles Robert Darwin
It is interesting to contemplate a tangled bank, clothed with many plants of many kinds, with birds singing on the bushes, with various insects flitting about, and with worms crawling through the damp earth, and to reflect that these elaborately constructed forms, so different from each other, and dependent upon each other in so complex a manner, have all been produced by laws acting around us. These laws, taken in the largest sense, being Growth with Reproduction; Inheritance which is almost implied by reproduction; Variability from the indirect and direct action of the conditions of life and from use and disuse: a Ratio of Increase so high as to lead to a Struggle for Life, and as a consequence to Natural Selection, entailing Divergence of Character and the Extinction of less-improved forms, Thus, from the war of nature, from famine and death, the most exalted object which we are capable of conceiving, namely, the production of the higher animals, directly follows. There is grandeur in this view of life, with its several powers, having been originally breathed by the Creator into a few forms or into one; and that, whilst this planet has gone cycling on according to the fixed law of gravity, from so simple a beginning endless forms most beautiful and wonderful have been, and are being evolved.
Action | Beginning | Character | Death | Earth | Growth | Inheritance | Law | Life | Life | Nature | Object | Sense | Struggle | War | Wisdom |
E. M. Forster, fully Edward Morgan Forster
The hungry and the homeless don't care about liberty any more than they care about cultural heritage. To pretend that they do care is cant.
François Fénelon, fully Francois de Salignac de la Mothe-Fénelon
Beware of fatiguing them by ill-judged exactness. If virtue offers itself to the child under a melancholy and constrained aspect, while liberty and license present themselves under an agreeable form, all is lost, and your labor is in vain.
Labor | Liberty | Melancholy | Present | Virtue | Virtue | Wisdom | Child |
Retribution is one of the grand principles in the divine administration of human affairs; a requital is imperceptible only to the willfully unobservant. There is everywhere the working of the everlasting law of requital; man always gets as he gives.
Administration | Law | Man | Principles | Wisdom |
Without freedom of thought, there can be no such thing as wisdom; and no such thing as public liberty without freedom of speech; which is the right of every man as far as by it he does not hurt or control the right of another; and this is the only check it ought to suffer and the only bounds it ought to know... Whoever would overthrow the liberty of a nation must begin by subduing the freedom of speech, a thing terrible to traitors.
Control | Freedom of speech | Freedom of thought | Freedom | Liberty | Man | Public | Right | Speech | Thought | Wisdom |