This site is dedicated to the memory of Dr. Alan William Smolowe who gave birth to the creation of this database.
Throughout history there has never been an evitable war. The greatest danger of war always lies in the widespread acceptance of its inevitability.
H. G. Wells, fully Herbert George Wells
Human history is, in essence, a history of ideas.
The history of Christendom would have been far happier if we all had remembered one rule of intelligence - not to believe a thing more strongly at the end of a bitter argument than at the beginning, not to believe it with the energy of the opposition rather than one's own.
Argument | Beginning | Energy | History | Intelligence | Opposition | Rule | Wisdom |
Happy are those whose life is today and only today. Sad are the prophets and those others whose eyes are open to the past. Blessed are they who neither see their painful yesterdays nor their tomorrows filled with despair: they rest in peace.
Despair | Happy | Life | Life | Past | Peace | Rest | Blessed |
Alain-Fournier, Pseudonym of Henri Alban-Fournier NULL
There is so much good in the worst of us and so much bad in the best of us, that it's rather hard to tell which of us ought to reform the rest of us.
The whole history of civilization is strewn with creeds and institutions which were invaluable at first, and deadly afterward.
Civilization | History |
The whole history of civilization is strewn with creeds and institutions which were invaluable at first and deadly afterwards.
Civilization | History |
James Baldwin, fully James Arthur Baldwin
People are trapped in history and history is trapped in them.
E. O. Wilson, fully Edward Osborne "E.O." Wilson
Nothing comes harder than original thought. Even the most gifted scientist spends only a tiny fraction of his waking hours doing it, probably less than one tenth of one percent. the rest of the time his mind hugs the coast of the known, reworking old information, adding lesser data, giving reluctant attention to the ideas of others (what use can I make of them?), warming lazily to the memory of successful experiments, and looking for a problem - always looking for a problem, something that can be accomplished, that will lead somewhere, anywhere.
Attention | Giving | Ideas | Memory | Mind | Nothing | Rest | Thought | Time | Will | Wisdom | Old |
If we fight a war and win it with H-bombs, what history will remember is not the ideals we were fighting for but the methods we used to accomplish them. These methods will be compared to the warfare of Genghis Khan who ruthlessly killed every last inhabitant of Persia.
No morality can be founded on authority, even if the authority were divine.