This site is dedicated to the memory of Dr. Alan William Smolowe who gave birth to the creation of this database.
Of what consequence to you, reader, is my obscure individuality? I live, like you, in a century in which reason submits only to fact and to evidence. My name, like yours, is truth-seeker. My mission is written in these words of the law: Speak without hatred and without fear; tell that which thou knowest! The work of our race is to build the temple of science, and this science includes man and Nature. Now, truth reveals itself to all; to-day to Newton and Pascal, tomorrow to the herdsman in the valley and the journeyman in the shop. Each one contributes his stone to the edifice; and, his task accomplished, disappears. Eternity precedes us, eternity follows us: between two infinites, of what account is one poor mortal that the century should inquire about him?
Eternity | Man | Mission | Mortal | Race | Reason | Science | Tomorrow | Truth | Words | Work |
Thus, communism violates the sovereignty of the conscience, and equality: the first, by restricting spontaneity of mind and heart, and freedom of thought and action; the second, by placing labor and laziness, skill and stupidity, and even vice and virtue on an equality in point of comfort. For the rest, if property is impossible on account of the desire to accumulate, communism would soon become so through the desire to shirk.
Desire | Equality | Freedom of thought | Freedom | Labor | Mind | Property | Skill | Thought | Virtue | Virtue | Thought | Vice |
Pope John Paul II, born Karol Józef Wojtyła, aka Saint John Paul the Great NULL
His calling is a declaration of love. Your response is commitment, friendship, and love manifested in the gift of your own life as a definitive following and as a permanent sharing in his mission and in his consecrations. To make up your mind is to love him with all of your soul and all of your heart in such a way that this love becomes the standard and motive of all your actions.
Heart | Life | Life | Love | Mind | Mission | Soul | Following |
Pope Pius XII, born Eugenio Marìa Giuseppe Giovanni Pacelli NULL
What a wonderful vision, which makes us contemplate the human race in the unity of its origin in God in the unity of its nature, composed equally in all men of a material body and a spiritual soul; in the unity of its immediate end and its mission in the world; in the unity of its dwelling, the earth, whose benefits all men, by right of nature, may use to sustain and develop life; in the unity of the redemption.
Body | God | Human race | Men | Mission | Race | Right | Unity | God |
Tacitus, fully Publius (or Gaius) Cornelius Tacitus NULL
There will be vice as long as there are men.
Pythagoras, aka Pythagoras of Samos or Pythagoras the Samian NULL
A conversation should be conducted so that your conversational partners transform themselves from your enemies into your friends and not vice versa.
Conversation | Friends | Vice |
He had his virtues. This old year was impartial. No discrimination knew he between classes or conditions. He meted the same number of hours to the man in the hovel and the man on the throne. The hour-glass be turned the same number of times for him whose garments were plain and coarse and him who wore garments of costliest fabric. Like God who sent him, this old year was no respecter of persons. He showed constant vigilance. No laggard, no loiterer, he. Having been sent to fill a space in time's calendar, he filled it to the full. Sent to mark off so many hours on time's dial, his hand was never slack; he slept not for a single swing of the pendulum. May we keep our vigils as faithfully! He fulfilled his mission. God's plans are deep, and we know little, perhaps, as the mission of any of these passing years, decades, centuries, and cycles; yet we know that each fulfills a purpose in the betterment of humanity; and the closing year has served well his embassy in bringing the race nearer its final goal. A prize, peerless and bright, awaits each of us if we are as true to our mission as the old year has been to his.
God | Man | Mission | Purpose | Purpose | Race | Space | God | Old |
Richard Cumberland, Bishop of Peterborough
What is so hateful to a poor man as the purse-proud arrogance of a rich one? Let fortune shift the scene, and make the poor man rich, he runs at once into the vice that he declaimed against so feelingly; these are strange contradictions in the human character.
This country is run by a war criminal and his vice president, an even bigger war criminal.
Inasmuch as often in this life greater rewards are offered for vice than for virtue, few people would prefer the right to the useful, were they restrained neither by the fear of God nor the expectation of another life.
Expectation | Fear | God | Life | Life | People | Right | God | Expectation | Vice |
Robert Anderson, fully Robert Woodruff Anderson
The mission of the playwright is to look in his heart and write, to write whatever concerns him at the moment; to write with passion and conviction. Of course the measure of the man will be the measure of the play.
Such biological ideas as the 'survival of the fittest,' whatever their doubtful value in natural science, are utterly useless in attempting to understand society... The life of a man in society, while it is incidentally a biological fact, has characteristics that are not reducible to biology and must be explained in the distinctive terms of a cultural analysis... the physical well-being of men is a result of their social organization and not vice versa ... Social improvement is a product of advances in technology and social organization, not of breeding or selective elimination... Judgments as to the value of competition between men or enterprises or nations must be based upon social and not allegedly biological consequences; and ... there is nothing in nature or a naturalistic philosophy of life to make impossible the acceptance of moral sanctions that can be employed for the common good.
Acceptance | Competition | Ideas | Improvement | Life | Life | Man | Men | Nations | Nature | Nothing | Organization | Philosophy | Technology | Understand | Value | Vice |
Richard Feynman, fully Richard Phillips Feynman
You can't say A is made of B or vice versa. All mass is interaction.
Vice |
Richard Nixon, fully Richard Milhous Nixon
Once one determines that he or she has a mission in life, that's it's not going to be accomplished without a great deal of pain, and that the rewards in the end may not outweigh the pain --if you recognize historically that always happens, then when it comes, you survive it.
Robert Byrd, fully Robert Carlyle Byrd
The mission in Iraq, as laid out by President Bush and Vice President Cheney, has failed.
Robert Byrd, fully Robert Carlyle Byrd
Mission accomplished? The mission in Iraq, as laid out by President Bush and Vice President Cheney, has failed.