This site is dedicated to the memory of Dr. Alan William Smolowe who gave birth to the creation of this database.
Walt Whitman, fully Walter "Walt" Whitman
Produce great men, the rest follows.
Nicolas Chamfort,fully Sébastien-Roch Nicolas De Chamfort, also spelled Nicholas
Almost the whole of history is nothing but a series of horrors.
Rachel Carson, fully Rachel Louise Carson
The history of life on earth has been a history of interaction between living things and their surroundings. To a large extent, the physical form and the habits of the earth’s vegetation and its animal life have been molded by the environment. Considering the whole span of earthly time, the opposite effect, in which life actually modifies its surroundings, has been relatively slight. Only within the moment of time represented by the present century has one species – acquired significant power to alter nature of his world.
Earth | History | Life | Life | Nature | Power | Present | Time | World |
No prophet ever sees things under the aspect of eternity. It is always partisan theology, always for the moment, always for the concrete community, satisfied to see only a piece of it all and to speak out that at the risk of contradicting the rest of it.
Herbert Butterfield, fully Sir Herbert Butterfield
In the kind of world that I see in history there is one sin that locks people up in all their other sins… the sin of self-righteousness.
History | People | Righteousness | Self | Self-righteousness | Sin | World |
Progress in history is achieved through the interdependence and interaction of facts and values. The objective historian is the historian who penetrates most deeply into this reciprocal process.
Willa Cather, fully Willa Sibert Cather
The Miracles of the Church seem to me to rest not so much upon faces or voices or healing power coming suddenly near to us from afar off, but upon our perceptions being made finer, so that for a moment our eyes can see and our ears can hear what is there about us always.
Winston Churchill, fully Sir Winston Leonard Spencer-Churchill
The whole history of the world is summed up in the fact that, when nations are strong, they are not always just, and when they wish to be just, they are no longer strong.
Is there a spiritual reality, inconceivable to us today, which corresponds in history to the physical reality which Einstein discovered and which led to the atomic bomb? Einstein discovered a law of physical change: the way to convert a single particle of matter into enormous physical energy. Might there not also be, as Gandhi suggested, an equally incredible and [as yet] undiscovered law of spiritual change, whereby a single person or small community of persons could be converted into an enormous spiritual energy capable of transforming a society and a world?
Atomic bomb | Change | Energy | History | Law | Reality | Society | World | Society |
The distinctions separating the social classes are false; in the last analysis they rest on force.
Every time you give a bit of yourself and you plant a little seed of Future Happiness. All the rest of your life these seeds will keep springing up unexpectedly along your path. When you need a friend to give you a lift in some situation, likely as not along will come a person for whom you did something thoughtful when you were a youngster. Taking up giving-away as a hobby while you are young, and you will live a happy life. What is more, because you do so many wonderful thoughtful things on impulse, you will develop a lively and interesting personality - gracious, friendly, likable.
Friend | Future | Giving | Happy | Impulse | Life | Life | Little | Need | Personality | Rest | Time | Will |
If you rest in the stillness like a broken gong, you have already reached heaven, for anger has left you.
H.A.L. Fisher, fully Herbert Albert Laurens Fisher
Men wiser and more learned than I have discerned in history a plot, a rhythm, a predetermined pattern. These harmonies are concealed from me. I can see only one emergency following upon another as wave follows upon wave, only one great fact with respect to which, since it is unique, there can be no generalizations, only one safe rule for the historian: that they should recognize in the development of human destinies the play of the contingent and the unforeseen.
History | Men | Play | Respect | Rule | Safe | Unique | Following | Respect |
A grand meta-narrative is a story of the development and purpose of human history in which we as individual can find a place and play a role. Four basic meta-narratives: (1) Platonic Christian is the idea of life as a journey to another unchanging realm. (2) Hegel’s view that history is the unfolding of the consciousness of God. (3) Marx’s notion of another revolution ushering in a new era. (4) Nietzsche’s idea that there is no “beyond” and that the only meaning comes through creative activities through which we shape a life for ourselves.
Consciousness | Era | God | History | Individual | Journey | Life | Life | Meaning | Play | Purpose | Purpose | Revolution | Story |