This site is dedicated to the memory of Dr. Alan William Smolowe who gave birth to the creation of this database.
Calvin Coolidge, fully John Calvin Coolidge, Jr.
Press on. Nothing in the world can take the place of persistence. Talent will not; nothing is more common than unsuccessful men with talent. Genius will not; unrewarded genius is almost a proverb. Education will not; the world is full of educated derelicts. Persistence and determination alone are omnipotent. The slogan "Press on" has solved and always will solve the problems of the human race
Determination | Education | Genius | Human race | Men | Nothing | Persistence | Problems | Race | Will | Wisdom | World | Talent |
There is no human reason why a child should not admire and emulate his teacher's ability to do sums, rather than the village bum's ability to whittle sticks and smoke cigarettes. The reason why the child does not is plain enough - the bum has put himself on an equality with him and the teacher has not.
Ability | Enough | Equality | Reason | Wisdom | Child | Teacher |
The doctrine that the world is made up of objects whose existence is independent of human consciousness turns out to be in conflict with quantum mechanics and the facts established by experiment.
Consciousness | Doctrine | Existence | Experiment | Wisdom | World |
Free inquiry, if restrained within due bounds, and applied to proper subjects, is a most important privilege of the human mind; and if well conducted, is one of the greatest friends to truth. But when reason knows neither its office nor its limits, and when employed on subjects foreign to its jurisdiction, it then becomes a privilege dangerous to be exercised.
Important | Inquiry | Mind | Office | Reason | Truth | Wisdom | Friends | Privilege |
G. K. Chesterton, fully Gilbert Keith Chesterton
Truth must necessarily be stranger than fiction; for fiction is the creation of the human mind and therefore congenial to it.
Declaration of American Women NULL
Man-made barriers, laws, social customs and prejudices continue to keep a majority of women in an inferior position without full control of our lives and bodies. From infancy throughout life, in personal and public relations, in the family, in the schools, in every occupation and profession, too often we find our individuality, our capabilities, our earning powers diminished by discriminatory practices and outmoded ideas of what a woman is, what a woman can do, and what a woman must be... We lack effective political and economic power We have only minor and insignificant roles in making, interpreting and enforcing our laws, in running our political parties, businesses, unions, schools and institutions, in directing the media, in governing our country, in deciding issues of war or peace. We do not seek special privileges, but we demand as a human right a full voice and role for women in determining the destiny of our world, our nation, our families and our individual lives.
Control | Destiny | Family | Ideas | Individual | Individuality | Infancy | Life | Life | Majority | Man | Occupation | Peace | Position | Power | Public | Right | War | Wisdom | Woman | World |
Numa Denis Fustel de Coulanges
History studies not just facts and institutions, its real subject is the human spirit.
John Cudahy, fully John Clarence Cudahy
If these distracted times prove anything, they prove that the greatest illusion is reliance upon the security and permanence of material possessions. We must search for some other coin. And we will discover that the treasure-house of education has stood intact and unshaken in the storm. The man of cultivated life has founded his house upon a rock. You can never take away the magnificent mansion of his mind.
Education | Illusion | Life | Life | Man | Mind | Possessions | Search | Security | Will | Wisdom |
W. Macneile Dixon, fully William Macneile Dixon
To strip the human being, for example, of all his attributes save his logical or calculating powers is an unwarrantable mutilation. Nature made him what he is. You cannot pick and choose. Nature is asserting herself in him, and you must take account not of one or two, but of all her assertions.
Isak Dinesen, pen name of Baroness Karen Blixen
Truth, like time, is an idea arising from, and dependent upon human intercourse.
George Douglas Brown, pseud. Kennedy King
Immortality! We bow before the very term. Immortality! Before its reason staggers, calculation reclines her tired head, and imagination folds her weary pinions. Immortality! It throws open the portals of the vast forever; it puts the crown of deathless destiny upon every human brow; it cries to every uncrowned king of men, “Live forever, crowned for the empire of a deathless destiny!”
Destiny | Imagination | Immortality | Men | Reason | Wisdom |
Émile Durkheim, fully David Émile Durkheim
The most barbarous and the most fantastic rites and the strangest myths translate some human need, some aspect of life, either individual or social... In reality, then, there are no religions which are false. All are true in their own fashion; all answer, though in different ways, to the given conditions of human existence.
Existence | Individual | Life | Life | Need | Reality | Rites | Wisdom |
It is characteristic of the military mentality that non-human factors... are held essential, while the human being, his desires and thoughts - in short, the psychological factors - are considered as unimportant and secondary.
Wisdom |