This site is dedicated to the memory of Dr. Alan William Smolowe who gave birth to the creation of this database.
Niccolò Machiavelli, formally Niccolò di Bernardo dei Machiavelli
When evening comes, I return home and go into my study. On the threshold I strip off my muddy, sweaty, workday clothes, and put on the robes of court and palace, and in this graver dress I enter the antique courts of the ancients and am welcomed by them, and there I taste the food that alone is mine, and for which I was born. And there I make bold to speak to them and ask the motives of their actions, and they, in their humanity, reply to me. And for the space of four hours I forget the world, remember no vexation, fear poverty no more, tremble no more at death: I pass indeed into their world.
Neil Gaiman, fully Neil Richard Gaiman
You can't run away from home without destroying somebody's world.
Nelson Mandela, fully Nelson Rolihlahla Mandela
I hate racial discrimination most intensely and all its manifestations. I have fought all my life; I fight now, and will do so until the end of my days. Even although I now happen to be tried by one, whose opinion I hold in high esteem, I detest most violently the set-up that surrounds me here. It makes me feel that I am a Black man in a White man's court. This should not be. I should feel perfectly at ease and at home with the assurance that I am being tried by a fellow South African, who does not regard me as an inferior, entitled to a special type of justice.
The economic transmission of power without wires is of all-surpassing importance to man. By its means he will gain complete mastery of the air, the sea and the desert. It will enable him to dispense with the necessity of mining, pumping, transporting and burning fuel, and so do away with innumerable causes of sinful waste. By its means, he will obtain at any place and in any desired amount, the energy of remote waterfalls — to drive his machinery, to construct his canals, tunnels and highways, to manufacture the materials of his want, his clothing and food, to heat and light his home — year in, year out, ever and ever, by day and by night. It will make the living glorious sun his obedient, toiling slave. It will bring peace and harmony on earth.
Day | Energy | Harmony | Light | Means | Necessity | Peace | Power | Will |
I have been told by the third grade teacher that my daughter Poppet is reading at middle school level. Yet if I leave Poppet a note in block letters telling her to feed the dogs I will come home to find the dogs have been ... given a swim in the above-ground pool, dressed in tutus, provided with hair weaves. What I will not find is that the dogs have been fed. 'I thought you wanted me to free the dogs,' says Poppet whose school district is not spending quite what D.C.'s is, thanks to voter rejection of the last school bond referendum.
Paramahansa Yogananda, born Mukunda Lal Ghosh
Most of the world is like a mental hospital. Some persons are sick with jealousy, others with anger, hatred, passion. They are victims of their habits and emotions. But you can make your home a place of peace.
World |
Paramahansa Yogananda, born Mukunda Lal Ghosh
The treasure of friendship is your richest possession, because it goes with you beyond this life. All the true friends you have made you will meet again in the home of the Father, for real love is never lost.
Love | Will | Friendship | Friends |
To the warriors of light, there is no such thing as impossible love. They don’t allow themselves to be intimidated by silence, or by rejection. They know that – behind the icy mask people wear – there is a heart of fire. That is why the warriors risk more than others. They tirelessly seek love – even if this means hearing, many times over, the word ‘no’, returning home defeated, feeling rejected in body and soul. Warriors don’t allow themselves to be discouraged. Without love, live has no meaning… Waiting is painful. Forgetting is painful. But not knowing which to do is the worst kind of suffering.
Body | Heart | Knowing | Love | Means | People | Risk | Waiting |
Thy wisdom speaks in me, and bids me dare Beacon the rocks on which high hearts are wreckt. I never was attached to that great sect, Whose doctrine is, that each one should select Out of the crowd a mistress or a friend, And all the rest, though fair and wise, commend To cold oblivion, though it is in the code Of modern morals, and the beaten road Which those poor slaves with weary footsteps tread, Who travel to their home among the dead By the broad highway of the world, and so With one chained friend, — perhaps a jealous foe, The dreariest and the longest journey go.
It is obvious that man dwells in a splendid universe, a magnificent expanse of earth and sky and heaven, which manifestly is built on a majestic plan, maintains some mighty design, though man himself cannot grasp it. Yet for him it is not a pleasant or satisfying world. In his few moments of respite from labor or from his enemies, he dreams that this very universe might indeed be perfect, its laws operating just as now they seem to do, and yet he and it somehow be in full accord. The very ease with which he can frame this image to himself makes the reality all the more mocking. ... It is only too clear that man is not at home in this universe, and yet he is not good enough to deserve a better.
Dreams | Earth | Enough | Good | Labor | Man | Reality | Universe |
Philip Larkin, fully Philip Arthur Larkin
Love again: wanking at ten past three (Surely he's taken her home by now?), The bedroom hot as a bakery, The drink gone dead, without showing how To meet tomorrow, and afterwards, And the usual pain, like dysentery. Someone else feeling her breasts and cunt, Someone else drowned in that lash-wide stare, And me supposed to be ignorant, Or find it funny, or not to care, Even ... but why put it into words? Isolate rather this element That spreads through other lives like a tree And sways them on in a sort of sense And say why it never worked for me. Something to do with violence A long way back, and wrong rewards, And arrogant eternity.
Phyllis Diller, born Phyllis Ada Driver
I was born at home on newspapers... I still have a story on my butt, although now the print is much larger.
Story |
Phyllis Schlafly, fully Phyllis McAlpin Stewart Schlafly
What I am defending is the real rights of women. A woman should have the right to be in the home as a wife and mother… When will American men learn how to stand up to the nagging by the intolerant, uncivil feminists whose sport is to humiliate men?
Pitirim A. Sorokin, fully Pitirim Alexandrovich (Alexander) Sorokin
The boundary between true and false, and beautiful and ugly, will erode. Conscience will disappear in favor of special interest groups. Force and fraud will become the norm; might will become right, and brutality rampant. It will be a bellum omnium contra omnes, and the family will disintegrate as well. “The home will become a mere overnight parking place.”
The 4th Amendment and the personal rights it secures have a long history. At the very core stands the right of a man to retreat into his own home and there be free from unreasonable governmental intrusion.
Today's electronic village has certainly complicated the challenge of parenting. When It Takes a Village was published, the Internet was largely the province of scientists; no one owned an iPod; and cell phones weighed as much as bricks. Innovations are now coming at an exponentially faster pace, and media saturates our kids' lives as never before. Many of these changes are for the good: when I was in college, a phone call home was rare and a flight home, a once-a-year luxury. Now I know parents who see and speak to their kids every day by computer and video hookups, and I think how much Bill would have loved that when he was campaigning. But knowing that one third of kids under six have TVs in their rooms, that the fashion industry is marketing its latest styles to preteen girls, and that predators stalk our children through the World Wide Web makes me thankful to have raised Chelsea in a less media-saturated time.
Challenge | Children | Computer | Day | Industry | Internet | Knowing | Parents | World | Think |
The African proverb It takes a village to raise a child summed up for me the commonplace conclusion that, like it or not, we are living in an interdependent world where what our children hear, see, feel, and learn will affect how they grow up and who they turn out to be. The five years since 9/11 have reinforced one of my main points: How children are raised anywhere can impact our lives and our children's futures. In this book and my autobiography, Living History, I wrote about my own mother's difficult childhood. Abandoned by her teenage parents, mistreated by her grandparents, she was forced to go work as a mother's helper when she was thirteen. Caring for another family's younger children while attending high school may sound harsh, but the experience of living in a strong, loving family gave my mother the tools she would need later when caring for her own home and children.
Children | Experience | Family | Interdependent | Mother | Need | Sound | Will | Work | World | Child | Learn |
As we learn more about the kind of intensive child care that gives our kids the best start, parents worry that their kids' care doesn't measure up. Our tax policies do not reflect the cost of raising children, which is why we should expand the child tax credit for the first year of a child's life to help parents stay home and give lower-income parents who receive government support for child care the option to sue the subsidies to cover the costs of staying home and caring for their own children. I want to see the Family and Medical Leave Act expanded so that all families who need it can use it without losing their jobs. It is past time for our national politics to do more than just talk about family values. We need to value families by helping them raise resilient, productive children.
Care | Cost | Credit | Family | Government | Life | Life | Need | Parents | Past | Politics | Receive | Time | Worry | Government | Child | Learn | Value |
I have spent much of the past 25 years working to improve the lives of children. My work has taught me that they need more of our time, energy, and resources. But no experience brought home the lesson as vividly as becoming a mother myself. When Chelsea Victoria Clinton lay in my arms for the first time, I was overwhelmed by the love and responsibility I felt for her. Despite all the books I had read, all the children I had studied and advocated for, nothing had prepared me for the sheer miracle of her being.
Books | Children | Experience | Lesson | Love | Mother | Need | Nothing | Past | Responsibility | Work |
To me it's a failure every time we keep a child in foster care for that child's entire life. You know, there should be a decision made to either re-unite a child by helping a family get back on its feet and take care of its children or we should remove the child and try to find a good loving home with the foster care system but much more importantly, trying to find a permanent home.
Care | Children | Decision | Failure | Family | Good | System | Time | Failure | Child |