This site is dedicated to the memory of Dr. Alan William Smolowe who gave birth to the creation of this database.
Every phrase and circumstance are marked with the barbarous hand of superstitious torture, and forced into meanings it was impossible they could have. The head of every chapter, and the top of every page, are blazoned with the names of Christ and the Church, that the unwary reader might suck in the error before he began to read.
Calvinism is the belief (1) That there are three Gods (2) That good works, or the love of our neighbor are nothing (3) That faith is everything, and the more incomprehensible the proposition, the more merit in its faith (4) That reason in religion
We fight not to enslave, but to set a country free, and to make room upon the earth for honest men to live in.
Thomas Cronin, fully Thomas Edward Cronin
Great teachers give us a sense not only of who they are, but more important, of who we are, and who we might become. They unlock our energies, our imaginations, and our minds. Effective teachers pose compelling questions, explain options, teach us to reason, suggest possible directions, and urge us on. The best teachers, like the best leaders, have an uncanny ability to step outside themselves and become liberating forces in our lives.
Associates | Circumstances | Deeds | Important | Mission | Past | People | Trust | Vision | Deeds | Leader | Understand |
Wilkie Collins, fully William Wilkie Collins
People who read stories are said to have excitable brains.
Experience | Influence | Mercy | Mission | Past |
Will Rogers, fully William Penn Adair "Will" Rogers
The Ministry in all denominations are the poorest paid workers in the world. They would form a union and demand more pay, but they don’t get enough to pay dues into a union so they can’t form one.
Will Rogers, fully William Penn Adair "Will" Rogers
The platform will always be the same, promise everything, deliver nothing.
Vice |
Werner Heisenberg, fully Werner Karl Heisenberg
The most difficult problem - concerning the use of the language arises in quantum theory. Here we have at first no simple guide for correlating the mathematical symbols with concepts of ordinary language: and the only thing we know from the start is the fact that our common concepts cannot be applied o the structure of the atoms.
Vice |
Those who are truly alive are kindly and unsuspecting in their human relationships and consequently endangered under present conditions. They assume that others think and act generously, kindly and helpfully, in accordance with the laws of life. This natural attitude, fundamental to healthy children as well as primitive man, inevitably represents a great danger in the struggle for a rational way of life as long as the emotional plague subsists, because the plague-ridden impute their own manner of thinking and acting to their fellow men. A kindly man believes that all men are kindly, while one infected with the plague believes that all men lie and cheat and are hungry for power. In such a situation, the living are at an obvious disadvantage. When they give to the plague-ridden they are sucked dry, then ridiculed or betrayed.
So who is out there? Who comes with this loss, wistfulness, and hope? We come to this meeting, I submit, as emaciated persons. We have been reduced to silence, to docile speech, to non-committal chatter. We have been intimidated to speak only what is approved, what is expected, what is safe. Because of seduction and intimidation, we say much less than we know, much less than we hurt or hope, much less than we crave to say.
Warren Buffett, fully Warren Edward Buffett, aka Oracle of Omaha
Over the years, our current businesses, in aggregate, should deliver modest growth in operating earnings. But they will not in themselves produce truly satisfactory gains. We will need major acquisitions to get that job done.
Vice |
When the Gauls laid waste Rome, they found the senators clothed in their robes, and seated in stern tranquility in their curule chairs; in this manner they suffered death without resistance or supplication. Such conduct was in them applauded as noble and magnanimous; in the hapless Indians it was reviled as both obstinate and sullen. How truly are we the dupes of show and circumstances! How different is virtue, clothed in purple and enthroned in state, from virtue, naked and destitute, and perishing obscurely in a wilderness.
Conduct | God | Hope | Mission | Paradise | Resignation | Unity | Will | God | Child |
W. H. Auden, fully Wystan Hugh Auden
A writer, or at least a poet, is always being asked by people who should know better: Whom do you write for? The question is, of course, a silly one, but I can give it a silly answer. Occasionally I come across a book which I feel has been written especially for me and for me only. Like a jealous lover I don’t want anybody else to hear of it. To have a million such readers, unaware of each other’s existence, to be read with passion and never talked about, is the daydream, surely, of every author.
Virtue | Virtue | Friendship | Friends | Vice |
W. D. Ross, fully Sir William David Ross
We apprehend that conscientiousness or benevolence is good with as complete certainty, directness, and self-evidence as we ever apprehend anything.
W. E. H. Lecky, fully William Edward Hartpole Lecky
Under these circumstances, there has arisen in society a figure which is certainly the most mournful, and in some respects the most awful, upon which the eye of the moralist can dwell. That unhappy being whose very name is a shame to speak; who counterfeits with a cold heart the transports of affection, and submits herself as the passive instrument of lust; who is scorned and insulted as the vilest of her sex, and doomed, for the most part, to disease and abject wretchedness and an early death, appears in every age as the perpetual symbol of the degradation and sinfulness of man. Herself the supreme type of vice, she is ultimately the most efficient guardian of virtue. But for her, the unchallenged purity of countless happy homes would be polluted, and not a few who, in the pride of their untempted chastity, think of her with an indignant shudder, would have known the agony of remorse and of despair. On that one degraded and ignoble form are concentrated the passions that might have filled the world with shame. She remains, while creeds and civilizations rise and fall, the eternal priestess of humanity, blasted for the sins of the people.
Voltaire, pen name of François-Marie Arouet NULL
Atheist: A name given by theologians to whoever differs from them in their ideas concerning the divinity, or who refuses to believe in it in the form of which, in the emptiness of their infallible pates, they have resolved to present it to him. As a rule an Atheist is any or every man who does not believe in the God of the Priest.
Vice |