This site is dedicated to the memory of Dr. Alan William Smolowe who gave birth to the creation of this database.
I find friendship to be like wine, raw when new, ripened with age, the true old man's milk and restorative cordial.
Force | Government | Law | Government |
I abhor war and view it as the greatest scourge of mankind.
Force | Government | History | Power | Government |
I believe that banking institutions are more dangerous to our liberties than standing armies. If the American people ever allow private banks to control the issue of their currency, first by inflation, then by deflation, the banks and corporations that will grow up around [the banks] will deprive the people of all property until their children wake-up homeless on the continent their fathers conquered. The issuing power should be taken from the banks and restored to the people, to whom it properly belongs.
One's own—what a charm there is in the words! how long it takes boy and man to find out their worth! how fast most of us hold on to them! faster and more jealously, the nearer we are to the general home into which we can take nothing, but must go naked as we came into the world. When shall we learn that he who multiplieth possessions, multiplieth troubles, and that the one single use of things which we call our own, is that they may be his who hath need of them?
By oft repeating an untruth, men come to believe it themselves.
Circumstances | Force | Government | Man | Property | Right | Government |
Believing that religion is a matter which lies solely between man and his God, that he owes account to none other for his faith or his worship, that the legislative powers of government reach actions only, and not opinions, I contemplate with sovereign reverence that act of the whole American people which declared that their Legislature should make no law respecting an establishment of religion, or prohibiting the free exercise thereof, thus building a wall of separation between Church and State.
Church | Corruption | Force | Freedom of religion | Freedom | Government | Important | People | Power | Religion | Government |
The most effectual means of preventing the perversion of power into tyranny are to illuminate, as far as practicable, the minds of the people at large, and more especially to give them knowledge of those facts which history exhibits, that possessed thereby of the experience of other ages and countries, they may be enabled to know ambition under all its shapes, and prompt to exert their natural powers to defeat its purposes.
Resolved... that it would be a dangerous delusion were a confidence in the men of our choice to silence our fears for the safety of our rights; that confidence is everywhere the parent of despotism; free government is founded in jealousy, and not in confidence; it is jealousy, and not confidence, which prescribes limited constitutions to bind down those whom we are obliged to trust with power; that our Constitution has accordingly fixed the limits to which, and no farther, our confidence may go…In questions of power, then, let no more be heard of confidence in man, but bind him down from mischief by the chains of the Constitution.
Church | Corruption | Force | Government | Power | Religion | Government |
Is it the less dishonest to do what is wrong, because not expressly prohibited by written law? Let us hope our moral principles are not yet in that stage of degeneracy.
Better | Care | Duty | Education | Excitement | Father | Feelings | Force | Ideas | Life | Life | Motives | Opposition | Receive | Right | Sentiment | Society | Will | Society | Child | Parent |
Let nothing be spared of either reason or passion to preserve the public confidence entire as the only rock of our safety.
Force | Government | Harm | Government |
Ridicule is the only weapon which can be used against unintelligible propositions. Ideas must be distinct before reason can act upon them; and no man ever had a distinct idea of the trinity. It is the mere Abracadabra of the mountebanks calling themselves the priests of Jesus.
Force |
Thomas Mann, fully Paul Thomas Mann
Love for him, for the human body, was extremely humanitarian an interest and had more educational power than the whole teaching skills of the world!
Force |
Thomas Mann, fully Paul Thomas Mann
This was love at first sight, love everlasting a feeling unknown, unhoped for, unexpected--in so far as it could be a matter of conscious awareness it took entire possession of him, and he understood, with joyous amazement, that this was for life.
Thomas Mann, fully Paul Thomas Mann
Gustav Aschenbach was the writer who spoke for all those who work on the brink of exhaustion, who labor and are heavy-laden, who are worn out already but still stand upright, all those moralists of achievement who are slight of stature and scanty of resources, but who yet, by some ecstasy of the will and by wise husbandry, manage at least for a time to force their work into a semblance of greatness.