This site is dedicated to the memory of Dr. Alan William Smolowe who gave birth to the creation of this database.
"Politics has got so expensive that it takes lots of money to even get beat with." - Will Rogers, fully William Penn Adair "Will" Rogers
"A work-room should be like an old shoe; no matter how shabby, it's better than a new one." - Willa Cather, fully Willa Sibert Cather
"We need to be saying, 'Listen folks, capitalism is inherently destructive.' How do we get from where we are to where we need to be... We have got to get rid of capitalism." - Wes Jackson
"A man practices the art of adventure when he heroically faces up to life; When he has the daring to open doors to new experiences and to step boldly forth to explore strange horizons. When he is unafraid of new ideas, new theories and new philosophies. When he has the curiosity to experiment--to test and try new ways of living and thinking. When he has the flexibility to adjust and adapt himself to the changing patterns of life. When he refuses to seek safe places and easy tasks and has, instead, the courage to wrestle with the toughest problems. When he has the moral stamina to be steadfast in the support of those men in whom he has faith and those causes in which he believes. When he breaks the chain of routine and renews his life through reading new books, traveling to new places, making new friends, taking up new hobbies and adopting new viewpoints. When he has the nerve to move out of life's shallows and venture forth into the deep. When he keeps his heart young, his expectations high and never allows his dreams to die. When he concludes that a rut is only another name for the grave and that the only way to stay out of the ruts is by living adventurously and staying vitally alive every day of his life." - Wilferd Peterson, fully Wilferd Arlan Peterson
"So long as war is the main business of nations, temporary despotism - despotism during the campaign - is indispensable." - Walter Bagehot
"Ages when custom is unsettled are necessarily ages of prophecy. The moralist cannot teach what is revealed; he must reveal what can be taught. He has to seek insight rather than to preach." - Walter Lippmann
"Once you touch the biographies of human beings, the notion that political beliefs are logically determined collapses like a pricked balloon." - Walter Lippmann
"Thought is nested in speech, not in texts, all of which have their meanings through reference of the visible symbol to the world of sound. What the reader is seeing on this page are not real words but coded symbols whereby a properly informed human being can evoke in his or her consciousness real words, in actual or imagined sound." - Walter J. Ong, fully Walter Jackson Ong
"Putting $1,000 in the pockets of 310,000 families with urgent needs is going to provide far more stimulus to the economy than putting the same $310 million in my pockets," - Warren Buffett, fully Warren Edward Buffett, aka Oracle of Omaha
"We've used up a lot of bullets. And we talk about stimulus. But the truth is, we're running a federal deficit that's 9 percent of GDP. That is stimulative as all get out. It's more stimulative than any policy we've followed since World War II." - Warren Buffett, fully Warren Edward Buffett, aka Oracle of Omaha
"In one of his traditional sermons transmitted by his disciples, is the following apologue on the subject of charity: When God created the earth it shook and trembled, until he put mountains upon it, to make it firm. Then the angels asked, ' O God, is there anything of thy creation stronger than these mountains? ' And God replied, ' Iron is stronger than the mountains; for it breaks them.' 'And is there anything of thy creation stronger than iron ? ' 'Yes ; fire is stronger than iron, for it melts it.' 'Is there anything of thy creation stronger than fire?' 'Yes; water, for it quenches fire.' 'O Lord, is there anything of thy creation stronger than water ? ' ' Yes, wind; for it overcomes water and puts it in motion.' 'O, our Sustainer! is there anything of thy creation stronger than wind ? ' ' Yes, a good man giving alms ; if he give with his right hand and conceal it from his left, he overcomes all things.'" - Washington Irving
"Radiate an energy of serenity and peace so that you have an uplifting effect on those you come into contact with." - Wayne Dyer, fully Wayne Walter Dyer
"Healing is impossible in loneliness; it is the opposite of loneliness. Conviviality is healing. To be healed we must come with all the other creatures to the feast of Creation." - Wendell Berry
"People use drugs, legal and illegal, because their lives are intolerably painful or dull. They hate their work and find no rest in their leisure. They are estranged from their families and their neighbors. It should tell us something that in healthy societies drug use is celebrative, convivial, and occasional, whereas among us it is lonely, shameful, and addictive. We need drugs, apparently, because we have lost each other." - Wendell Berry
"Christmas and Easter can be subjects for poetry, but Good Friday, like Auschwitz, cannot. The reality is so horrible it is not surprising that people should have found it a stumbling block to faith." - W. H. Auden, fully Wystan Hugh Auden
"May I suggest that the deepest experience in vulnerability is to completely accept its Suchness as the ego/Ego coming into fuller relationship with the Divine. Thought forms of past, present, and future are simply too ego indulgent in the later stages of life. Variations on this theme are Masochism/Sadism and Pleasers/InyourFaceers. They are legitimate paths unless arrested by the ego too frightened to see what actually lurks under the drive to power." - W. Brugh Joy, fully William Brugh Joy
"Making every allowance for the errors of the most extreme fallibility, the history of Catholicism would on this hypothesis represent an amount of imposture probably unequaled in the annals of the human race." - W. E. H. Lecky, fully William Edward Hartpole Lecky
"We may not lay much stress on such isolated instances of depravity as that of Pope John XXII, who was condemned, among many other crimes, for incest and adultery; or the abbot-elect of St Augustine, at Canterbury, who in 1171 was found, on investigation, to have seventeen illegitimate children in a single village; or an abbot of St Pelayo, in Spain, who in 1130 was proved to have kept no less than seventy concubines; or Henry III, bishop of Liege, who was deposed in 1274 for having sixty-five illegitimate children; but it is impossible to resist the evidence of a long chain of Councils and ecclesiastical writers, who conspire in depicting far greater evils than simple concubinage.... The writers of the middle ages are full of accounts of nunneries that were like brothels, of the vast multitude of infanticides within their walls, and of that inveterate prevalence of incest among the clergy, which rendered it necessary again and again to issue the most stringent enactments that priests should not be permitted to live with their mothers or sisters." - W. E. H. Lecky, fully William Edward Hartpole Lecky
"All official and liberal science defends wage-slavery, whereas Marxism has declared relentless war on that slavery." - Vladimir Lenin, fully Vladimir Ilyich Lenin
"But every little difference may become a big one if it is insisted on." - Vladimir Lenin, fully Vladimir Ilyich Lenin
"The dictatorship of the proletariat, i.e., the organization of the vanguard of the oppressed as the ruling class for the purpose of suppressing the oppressors, cannot result merely in an expansion of democracy. Simultaneously with an immense expansion of democracy, which for the first time becomes democracy for the poor, democracy for the people, and not democracy for the money-bags, the dictatorship of the proletariat imposes a series of restrictions on the freedom of the oppressors, the exploiters, the capitalists." - Vladimir Lenin, fully Vladimir Ilyich Lenin
"As to the past, I would not mind retrieving from various corners of space-time certain lost comforts, such as baggy trousers and long, deep bathtubs." - Vladimir Nabokov, fully Vladimir Vladimirovich Nabokov
"In every author let us distinguish the man from his works." - Voltaire, pen name of François-Marie Arouet NULL
"It is not sufficient that a few in society penetrate to the depths of living and offer fascinating accounts about the oneness of all beings. What is necessary in these critical times is that all sensitive and caring people make a personal discovery of the fact of oneness and allow compassion to flow in their lives. When compassion and realization of oneness becomes the dynamic of human relationship, then humankind will evolve." - Vimala Thakar
"Meditation is meeting eternity in the present moment. It is resolving every problem as it comes. It is resolving every tension as it creeps in. It is facing the challenges of life in a non-fearful way." - Vimala Thakar
"Be clearly aware of the stars and infinity on high. Then life seems almost enchanted after all." - Vincent van Gogh, fully Vincent Willem van Gogh
"He was not afraid. At every moment Nature signified by some laughing hint like that gold spot which went round the wall--there, there, there--her determination to show, by brandishing her plumes, shaking her tresses, flinging her mantle this way and that, beautifully, always beautifully, and standing close up to breathe through her hollowed hands Shakespeare's words, her meaning." - Virginia Woolf, nee Stephen, fully Adeline Virginia Woolf
"In the 18th century we knew how everything was done, but here I rise through the air, I listen to voices in America, I see men flying- but how is it done? I can't even begin to wonder. So my belief in magic returns." - Virginia Woolf, nee Stephen, fully Adeline Virginia Woolf
"In front of me a man stumbled and those following him fell on top of him. The guard rushed over and used his whip on them all. Thus my thoughts were interrupted for a few minutes. But soon my soul found its way back from the prisoners existence to another world, and I resumed talk with my loved one: I asked her questions, and she answered; she questioned me in return, and I answered..." - Viktor Frankl, fully Viktor Emil Frankl
"There is, of course, provision for consultation of the record by the usual scheme of indexing. If the user wishes to consult a certain book, he taps its code on the keyboard, and the title page of the book promptly appears before him, projected onto one of his viewing positions." - Vannevar Bush
"Some authors regard morality in the same light as we regard modern architecture. Convenience is the first thing to be looked for." - Vauvenargues, Luc de Clapiers, Marquis de Vauvenargues NULL
"The slanderer and the assassin differ only in the weapon they use; with the one it is the dagger, with the other the tongue. The former is worse that the latter, for the last only kills the body, while the other murders the reputation." - Tryon Edwards
"The secret I learned early on from my father was to run scared and never think I had it made. I never felt I was completely adequate to the job and always ran scared. The fundamental for our success was running scared." - Thomas J. Watson, Jr., fully Thomas John Watson, Jr.
"Basically all the world’s computer parts come from the same supply chain that runs from Korea, down through coastal China, over to Taiwan, and down to Malaysia." - Thomas L. Friedman, fully Thomas Lauren Friedman
"The waste of plenty is the resource of scarcity." - Thomas Love Peacock
"Every endeavor should be used to weaken and destroy all those institutions relating to corporations, apprenticeships, which cause the labors of agriculture to be worse paid than the labors of trade and manufactures." - Thomas Malthus, fully Thomas Robert Malthus
"Of love return to the love that made them. Even memory is not necessary for love. There is a land of the living and a land of the dead and the bridge is love, the only survival, the only meaning." - Thornton Wilder, fully Thornton Niven Wilder
"Between levity and cheerfulness there is a wide distinction; and the mind which is most open to levity is frequently a stranger to cheerfulness. It has been remarked that transports of intemperate mirth are often no more than flashes from the dark cloud; and that in proportion to the violence of the effulgence is the succeeding gloom. Levity may be the forced production of folly or vice; cheerfulness is the natural offspring of wisdom and virtue only. The one is an occasional agitation; the other a permanent habit. The one degrades the character; the other is perfectly consistent with the dignity of reason, and the steady and manly spirit of religion. To aim at a constant succession of high and vivid sensations of pleasure is an idea of happiness perfectly chimerical. Calm and temperate enjoyment is the utmost that is allotted to man. Beyond this we struggle in vain to raise our state; and in fact depress our joys by endeavoring to heighten them. Instead of those fallacious hopes of perpetual festivity with which the world would allure us, religion confers upon us a cheerful tranquillity. Instead of dazzling us with meteors of joy which sparkle and expire, it sheds around us a calm and steady light, more solid, more equal, and more lasting." - Hugh Blair
"Already this war on gangs in California is taking money from universities to build prisons, and the universities have some clout." - Tom Hayden, fully Thomas Emmet "Tom" Hayden
"If death wants me, let him ride up on a pale mount, ashes in his mouth, ice in his testicles. Frankly, I do not like the way death does business." - Tom Robbins, fully Thomas Eugene "Tom" Robbins
"It is to erase the fixed smiles of sleeping couples that Satan trained roosters to crow at five in the morning." - Tom Robbins, fully Thomas Eugene "Tom" Robbins
"A genuine first-hand religious experience like this is bound to be a heterodoxy to its witnesses, the prophet appearing as a mere lonely madman. If his doctrine proves contagious enough to spread to any others, it becomes a definite and labeled heresy. But if it then still prove contagious enough to triumph over persecution, it becomes itself an orthodoxy; and when a religion has become an orthodoxy, its day of inwardness is over: the spring is dry; the faithful live at second hand exclusively and stone the prophets in their turn. The new church, in spite of whatever human goodness it may foster, can be henceforth counted on as a staunch ally in every attempt to stifle the spontaneous religious spirit, and to stop all later bubblings of the fountain from which in purer days it drew its own supply of inspiration." - William James
"From the Vedas we learn a practical art of surgery, medicine, music, house building under which mechanized art is included. They are encyclopedia of every aspect of life, culture, religion, science, ethics, law, cosmology and meteorology." - William James
"Give up the feeling of responsibility, let go your hold, resign the care of your destiny to higher powers, be genuinely indifferent as to what becomes of it all and you will find not only that you gain a perfect inward relief, but often also, in addition, the particular goods you sincerely thought you were renouncing." - William James
"The further limits of our being plunge, it seems to me, into an altogether other dimension of existence from the sensible and merely ''understandable'' world. Name it the mystical region, or the supernatural region, whichever you choose. So far as our ideal impulses originate in this region (and most of them do originate in it, for we find them possessing us in a way for which we cannot articulately account), we belong to it in a more intimate sense than that in which we belong to the visible world, for we belong in the most intimate sense wherever our ideals belong." - William James
"The lunatic's visions of horror are all drawn from the material of daily fact." - William James
"One was there who left all his friends behind; who going inland ever more and more, and being left quite alone, at last did find a lonely valley sheltered from the wind, wherein, amidst an ancient cypress wood, a long-deserted ruined castle stood." - William Morris
"There was no way his imagination could feel the impact of the whole Earth having gone, it was too big. He prodded his feelings by thinking that his parent and his sister had gone. No reaction. He thought of all the people he had been close to. No reaction. Then he thought of a complete stranger he had been standing behind in the queue at the supermarket two days before and felt a sudden stab: the supermarket was gone, everyone in it was gone! Nelson’s Column had gone! and there would be no outcry, because there was no one left to make an outcry! From now on Nelson’s Column only existed in his mind. England only existed in his mind. A wave of claustrophobia closed in on him. He tried again: America, he thought, has gone. He couldn’t grasp it, He decided to start smaller again. New York has gone. No reaction. He’d never seriously believed it existed anyway. The dollar, he thought, has sunk for ever. Slight tremor there. Every Bogart movie has been wiped, he said to himself, and that gave him a nasty knock. McDonald’s, he thought. There is no longer any such thing as a McDonald’s hamburger." -