This site is dedicated to the memory of Dr. Alan William Smolowe who gave birth to the creation of this database.
"Man's last freedom is his freedom to choose how he will react in any given situation" - Viktor Frankl, fully Viktor Emil Frankl
"The third aspect of the tragic triad concerns death. But it concerns life as well, for at any time each of the moments of which life consists is dying, and that moment will never recur. And yet is not this transitoriness a reminder that challenges us to make the best possible use of each moment of our lives?" - Viktor Frankl, fully Viktor Emil Frankl
"There is also purpose in life which is almost barren of both creation and enjoyment and which admits of but one possibility of high moral behavior: namely, in man's attitude to his existence, an existence restricted by external forces." - Viktor Frankl, fully Viktor Emil Frankl
"Thus it can be seen that mental health is based on a certain degree of tension, the tension between what one has already achieved and what one still ought to accomplish, or the gap between what one is and what one should become. Such a tension is inherent in the human being and therefore is indispensable to mental well-being. We should not, then, be hesitant about challenging man with a potential meaning for him to fulfill. It is only thus that we evoke his will to meaning from its state of latency. I consider it a dangerous misconception of mental hygiene to assume that what man needs in the first place is equilibrium or, as it is called in biology homeostasis, i.e., a tensionless state. What man actually needs is not a tensionless state but rather the striving and struggling for a worthwhile goal, a freely chosen task. What he needs is not the discharge of tension at any cost but the call of a potential meaning waiting to be fulfilled by him." - Viktor Frankl, fully Viktor Emil Frankl
"Fill the World with Love. Love will warn you against advising another to do something which you are unwilling to do; your conscience will tell you that you are living in a lie." - Atharva Veda, or Atharvaveda
"The river of human life meanders along, through many a valley, leaps over many a cliff, loses itself in many a marsh and seeks to empty itself in the ocean of Divine Grace; though, what happens is that it falls into the undrinkable expanse of salt." - Atharva Veda, or Atharvaveda
"The American People will take Socialism, but they won't take the label. I certainly proved it in the case of EPIC. Running on the Socialist ticket I got 60,000 votes, and running on the slogan to End Poverty in California I got 879,000. I think we simply have to recognize the fact that our enemies have succeeded in spreading the Big Lie. There is no use attacking it by a front attack, it is much better to out-flank them." - Upton Sinclair, fully Upton Beall Sinclair, Jr.
"The only salvation of the world today... is the rapid dissemination of the basic values of the West, that is, the ideas of democracy, human rights, the civil society, and the free market." - Václav Havel
"We had all become used to the totalitarian system and accepted it as an unchangeable fact and thus helped to perpetuate it. In other words, we are all — though naturally to differing extents — responsible for the operation of the totalitarian machinery. None of us is just its victim. We are all also its co-creators." - Václav Havel
"If you have not reached the state of being able to accord with conditions without changing, you must be very careful not to indulge in idle thoughts at any time." - Hsuan Hua, aka An Tzu and Tu Lun
"We should know that nothing in the world comes easily; how can we expect a reward when we haven't put in the work?" - Hsuan Hua, aka An Tzu and Tu Lun
"I don't think this kind of thing has an impact on the unconverted, frankly. It's not even preaching to the converted; it's titillating the converted.... I'm fond of quoting Peter Cook, who talked about the satirical Berlin kabaretts of the 1930s, which did so much to stop the rise of Hitler and prevent the Second World War." - Tom Lehrer, fully Thomas Andrew Lehrer
"Every exchange which takes place in a country, effects a distribution of its produce better adapted to the wants of society... If two districts, one of which possessed a rich copper mine, and the other a rich tin mine, had always been separated by an impassable river or mountain, there can be no doubt that an opening of a communication, a greater demand would take place, and a greater price be given for both the tin and the copper; and this greater price of both metals, though it might be only temporary, would alone go a great way towards furnishing the additional capital wanted to supply the additional demand; and the capitals of both districts, and the products of both mines, would be increased both in quantity and value to a degree which could not have taken place without the this new distribution of the produce, or some equivalent to it." - Thomas Malthus, fully Thomas Robert Malthus
"In a state therefore of great equality and virtue, where pure and simple manners prevailed, the increase of the human species would evidently be much greater than any increase that has been hitherto known." - Thomas Malthus, fully Thomas Robert Malthus
"The laboring poor, to use a vulgar expression, seem always to live from hand to mouth. Their present wants employ their whole attention, and they seldom think of the future. Even when they have an opportunity of saving they seldom exercise it, but all that is beyond their present neccessities goes, generally speaking, to the ale house." - Thomas Malthus, fully Thomas Robert Malthus
"The superior power of population cannot be checked without producing misery or vice." - Thomas Malthus, fully Thomas Robert Malthus
"Adventurers swarmed out of the North, as much the enemies of one race as of the other, to cozen, beguile and use the negroes. The white men were aroused by a mere instinct of self-preservation — until at last there sprung into existence a great Kuklux Klan, a veritable empire of the South, to protect the Southern country." - Woodrow Wilson, fully Thomas Woodrow Wilson
"I would never read a book if it were possible for me to talk half an hour with the man who wrote it." - Woodrow Wilson, fully Thomas Woodrow Wilson
"If a dog will not come to you after having looked you in the face, you should go home and examine your conscience." - Woodrow Wilson, fully Thomas Woodrow Wilson
"The awakening of the people of China to the possibilities under free government is the most significant, if not the most momentous, event of our generation." - Woodrow Wilson, fully Thomas Woodrow Wilson
"Be convinced that to be happy means to be free and that to be free means to be brave. Therefore do not take lightly the perils of war." - Thucydides NULL
"The growth of the power of Athens, and the alarm which this inspired in Sparta, made war inevitable." - Thucydides NULL
"Fire is the reuniting of matter with oxygen. If one bears that in mind, every blaze may be seen as a reunion, an occasion of chemical joy." - Tom Robbins, fully Thomas Eugene "Tom" Robbins
"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
"A great perturbation in nature, to receive at once the benefit of sleep and do the effects of watching! Macbeth, Act v, Scene 1" - William Shakespeare
"A sad tale's best for winter. I have one of sprites and goblins. When daffodils begin to peer, With heigh! the doxy, over the dale, Why, then comes in the sweet o' the year; For the red blood reigns in the winter's pale. A Winter’s Tale, Act ii, Scene 1" - William Shakespeare
"But if the while I think on thee, dear friend, all losses are restored and sorrows end." - William Shakespeare
"But if thou, jealous, dost return to pry in what I further shall intend to do, by heaven, I will tear thee joint by joint and strew this hungry churchyard with thy limbs: the time and my intents are savage-wild, more fierce and more inexorable far than empty tigers or the roaring sea. Romeo and Juliet, Act v, Scene 3" - William Shakespeare
"Muslim women do not regard Islam as an obstacle to their progress; indeed, many may see it as a crucial component of that progress." - Dalia Mogahed
"Psychologists call this habituation, economists call it declining marginal utility, and the rest of us call it marriage." - Daniel Gilbert, fully Daniel Todd Gilbert, aka Professor Happiness
"Revolution is engendered by an indignation with tyranny, yet is itself pregnant with tyranny." - William Godwin
"The diligent scholar is he that loves himself, and desires to have reason to applaud and love himself." - William Godwin
"I avow myself the partisan of truth alone." - William Harvey
"Toil of the mind destroys health by attracting the spirits from their task of concoction to the brain; whither they carry along with them clouds of vapours and excrementitious humours." - William Harvey
"Education is the organization of acquired habits of conduct and tendencies to behavior ." - William James
"Fatalism, whose solving word in all crises of behavior is "All striving is vain," will never reign supreme, for the impulse to take life strivingly is indestructible in the race. Moral creeds which speak to that impulse will be widely successful in spite of inconsistency, vagueness, and shadowy determination of expectancy. Man needs a rule for his will, and will invent one if one be not given him." - William James
"I do indeed disbelieve that we or any other mortal men can attain on a given day to absolutely incorrigible and unimprovable truth about such matters of fact as those with which religions deal. But I reject this dogmatic ideal not out of a perverse delight in intellectual instability. I am no lover of disorder and doubt as such. Rather do I fear to lose truth by this pretension to possess it already wholly." - William James
"I wished by treating Psychology like a natural science, to help her become one." - William James
"The necessity of faith as an ingredient in our mental attitude is strongly insisted on by the scientific philosophers of the present day; but by a singularly arbitrary caprice they say that it is only legitimate when used in the interests of one particular proposition, — the proposition, namely, that the course of nature is uniform. That nature will follow to-morrow the same laws that she follows to-day is, they all admit, a truth which no man can know; but in the interests of cognition as well as of action we must postulate or assume it." - William James
"There is but one indefectibly certain truth, and that is the truth that pyrrhonistic scepticism itself leaves standing, the truth that the present phenomenon of consciousness exists." - 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
"In theory, Equal Time for Nutjobs should be harmless. The people being interviewed are obviously out of their gourds. The problem is that a Mass Media mention gives them instant credibility. The media audience automatically assumes that the Mass Media wouldn’t give coverage to anything they knew was patently false." - Drew Curtis
"Some accidents there are in life that a little folly is necessary to help us out of." - François de La Rochefoucauld, François VI, Duc de La Rochefoucauld, Prince de Marcillac, Francois A. F. Rochefoucauld-Liancourt
"The varieties of obscurity (tamas) are eight-fold, as also those of delusion (moha); extreme delusion (mahamoha) is ten-fold; gloom is eighteen-fold, and so is utter darkness." - Ishvarakrishna, aka Iśvarakṛṣṇa NULL
"The hanging gate, of something like trelliswork, was propped on a pole, and he could see that the house was tiny and flimsy. He felt a little sorry for the occupants of such a place--and then asked himself who in this world had a temporary shelter." - Murasaki Shikibu, aka Lady Murasaki
"We are not told of things that happened to specific people exactly as they happened; but the beginning is when there are good things and bad things, things that happen in this life which one never tires of seeing and hearing about, things which one cannot bear not to tell of and must pass on for all generations. If the storyteller wishes to speak well, then he chooses the good things; and if he wishes to hold the reader’s attention he chooses bad things, extraordinarily bad things. Good things and bad things alike, they are things of this world and no other. Writers in other countries approach the matter differently. Old stories in our own are different from new. There are differences in the degree of seriousness. But to dismiss them as lies is itself to depart from the truth. Even in the writ which the Buddha drew from his noble heart are parables, devices for pointing obliquely at the truth. To the ignorant they may seem to operate at cross purposes. The Greater Vehicle is full of them, but the general burden is always the same. The difference between enlightenment and confusion is of about the same order as the difference between the good and the bad in a romance. If one takes the generous view, then nothing is empty and useless." - Murasaki Shikibu, aka Lady Murasaki