This site is dedicated to the memory of Dr. Alan William Smolowe who gave birth to the creation of this database.
"Although there may be nothing new under the sun, what is old is new to us and so rich and astonishing that we never tire of it. If we do tire of it, if we lose our curiosity, we have lost something of infinite value, because to a high degree it is curiosity that gives meaning and savour to life." - Robertson Davies
"My curiosity was in no way cruel. Deviations from the commonplace attracted me strongly, as they still do; and to me the hermaphrodite and the living skeleton were interesting for the same reason as was Creator, or the resplendent Guardsmen of the bands " - Robertson Davies
"When we do elect activists, we want them to change the thinking and behavior of other people, rarely our own." - Ronald A. Heifetz
"Furthermore, what profit was it to me that I, rascally slave of selfish ambitions that I was, read and understood by myself as many books as I could get concerning the so-called liberal arts?...I had turned my back to the light and my face to the things it illuminated, and so no light played upon my own face, or on the eyes that perceived them." - Saint Augustine, aka Augustine of Hippo, St. Austin, Bishop of Hippo NULL
"Let him go abroad to a distant country; let him go to some place where he is not known. Don't let him go to the devil where he is known." - Samuel Johnson, aka Doctor Johnson
"The great movers of the human mind are the desire of good, and the fear of evil." - Samuel Johnson, aka Doctor Johnson
"Where secrecy or mystery begins, vice or roguery is not far off." - Samuel Johnson, aka Doctor Johnson
"Whenever we approve, we can find a hundred good reasons to justify our approbation. Whenever we dislike, we can find a thousand to justify our dislike." - Samuel Richardson
"Many persons of high intelligence have notoriously poor judgment." - Sydney J. Harris
"I have seen too much not to know that the impression of a woman may be more valuable than the conclusion of an analytical reasoner." - Arthur Conan Doyle, fully Sir Arthur Ignatius Conan Doyle
"Perhaps randomness is not merely an adequate description for complex causes that we cannot specify. Perhaps the world really works this way, and many events are uncaused in any conventional sense of the word. Perhaps our gut feeling that it cannot be so reflects only our hopes and prejudices, our desperate striving to make sense of a complex and confusing world, and not the ways of nature." - Stephan Jay Gould
"Truly grand and powerful theories… do not and cannot rest upon single observations. Evolution is an inference from thousands of independent sources, the only conceptual structure that can make unified sense of all this disparate information. The failure of a particular claim usually records a local error, not the bankruptcy of a central theory... If I mistakenly identify your father's brother as your own dad, you don't become genealogically rootless and created de novo. You still have a father; we just haven't located him properly." - Stephan Jay Gould
"If you are going to sell yourself, you should at least get a good price." - Stefan Zweig
"To bemoan the messiness of politics is not just a folly it betrays a dangerous impatience with basic realities. It is like becoming disturbed that people do not fall in love sensibly -- and so deciding to computerize the problem." - Theodore Roszak
"Tell us, ye men who are so jealous of right and of honor, who take sudden fire at every insult, and suffer the slightest imagination of another’s contempt, or another’s unfairness, to chase from your bosom every feeling of complacency; ye men whom every fancied affront puts in such a turbulence of emotion, and in whom every fancied infringement stirs up the quick and the resentful appetite for justice, how will you stand the rigorous application of that test by which the forgiven of God are ascertained, even that the spirit of forgiveness is in them, and by which it will be pronounced whether you are, indeed, the children of the Highest, and perfect as your Father in heaven is perfect?" - Thomas Chalmers
"Civilization is the order and freedom is promoting cultural activity." - Will Durant, fully William James "Will" Durant
"How easy it would be to dream one's life out in some cleft in the world." - Willa Cather, fully Willa Sibert Cather
"And then there is the thrill of creatively sowing ideas and inspiration into the minds of others. Often our contributions will actually change lives by sharing appreciation, courage, love, and joy. Carry the ideal of being a creative sower, that you are on the side of growth, plenty, peace, and progress. Make it a point to scatter creative seeds every day of your life!" - Wilferd Peterson, fully Wilferd Arlan Peterson
""What right do you have to tell me things?" I can see this question in your apprehensive look. I hear this question from your impertinent mouth, Little Man. You are afraid to look at yourself, you are afraid of criticism, Little Man, just as you are afraid of the power they promise you. You would not know how to use this power. You dare not think that you ever might experience yourself differently: free instead of cowed; open instead of tactical; loving openly instead of like a thief in the night. You despise yourself Little Man. You say: "Who am I to have an opinion of my own, to determine my own life and to declare the world to be mine?" You are right: Who are you to make a claim to your life?" - Wilhelm Reich
"The [genuine] leader will always be aware of the well hidden tendency in people to see things in the mirror only, to take over great things only to render them impotent, to care far more for the admiring of someone than for what he has to offer, to flock around the unimportant and to force the crucial thing toward impotence." - Wilhelm Reich
"Art was always a means to an end with me. You get an idea, and you just can't wait. Once you've started, then you're in there with the punches flying. There's plenty of trouble, but you can handle it. You can't back out. It gets you down once in a while, but it's exciting. Our whole business is exciting." - Walt Disney, fully Walter Elias "Walt" Disney
"The difference in winning and losing is most often... not quitting." - Walt Disney, fully Walter Elias "Walt" Disney
"We like to have a point of view in our stories, not an obvious moral, but a worthwhile theme. ... All we are trying to do is give the public good entertainment. That is all they want." - Walt Disney, fully Walter Elias "Walt" Disney
"Then dearest child mournest thou only for Jupiter? Considerest thou alone the burial of the stars?" - Walt Whitman, fully Walter "Walt" Whitman
"For what is history, but... huge libel on human nature, to which we industriously add page after page, volume after volume, as if we were holding up a monument to the honor, rather than the infamy of our species." - Washington Irving
"An art that heals and protects its subject is a geography of scars." - Wendell Berry
"Follow, poet, follow right to the bottom of the night, with your unconstraining voice still persuade us to rejoice; with the farming of a verse make a vineyard of the curse, sing of human unsuccess in a rapture of distress; in the deserts of the heart let the healing fountain start, in the prison of his days teach the free man how to praise." - W. H. Auden, fully Wystan Hugh Auden
"There can indeed be little doubt that for nearly two hundred years after its establishment in Europe, the Christian community exhibited a moral purity which, if it has been equaled, has never for any long period been surpassed. Completely separated from the Roman world that was around them, abstaining alike from political life, from appeals to the tribunals, and from military occupations; looking forward continually to the immediate advent of their Master, and the destruction of the Empire in which they dwelt, and animated by all the fervor of a young religion, the Christiana found within themselves a whole order of ideas and feelings sufficiently powerful to guard them from the contamination of their age." - W. E. H. Lecky, fully William Edward Hartpole Lecky
"People work in the system. Management creates the system." - W. Edwards Deming, fully William Edwards Deming
"Children live in the present. They feel that at any moment something tremendously exciting may happen. Successful teaching makes them feel that something tremendously exciting has happened. Preparation for the business worries of adult life does not meet this specification. Mathematics teaching is practical and purposeful only if it enables children to do better something they desperately want to do here and now." - W. W. Sawyer, fully Walter Warwick Sawyer
"In some evolving civilizations, for reasons which we don't entirely understand, the evolution of consciousness is attended by a disaster of some sort which occurs shortly after the Sy breakthrough. It has something to do with the discovery of the self and the incapacity to deal with it, the consciousness becoming self-conscious but not knowing what to do with the self, not even knowing what its self is, and so ending by being that which is not, and making others what they are not." - Walker Percy
"The gentle and vague regions in which I moved assets were poets, not the land of crime" - Vladimir Nabokov, fully Vladimir Vladimirovich Nabokov
"One merit of poetry few persons will deny: it says more and in fewer words than prose." - Voltaire, pen name of François-Marie Arouet NULL
"That the threat is now intense is not a reason to abandon our quest for knowledge. It is a reason to hold it more tightly, in spite of the need for action to preserve our freedom, in spite of the distractions of living in turmoil, that it may not be lost or brushed aside by the demands of the hour. We would not neglect our duty to our country and our fellows to strive mightily to preserve our ways and our lives. There is an added duty, not inconsistent, not less. It is the duty to so live that there may be a reason for living, beyond the mere mechanisms of life. It is the duty to carry on, under stress, the search for understanding." - Vannevar Bush
"Just what is it that America stands for? If she stands for one thing more than another, it is for the sovereignty of self-governing people, and her example, her assistance, her encouragement, has thrilled two continents in this western world with all those fine impulses which have built up human liberty on sides of the water. She stands, therefore, as an example of independence, as an example of free institutions, and as an example of disinterested international action in the main tenets of justice." - Woodrow Wilson, fully Thomas Woodrow Wilson
"A better world has gotta start somewhere. Why not with you and me?" - Tom Robbins, fully Thomas Eugene "Tom" Robbins
"O, glorious laughter! thou man-loving spirit, that for a time doth take the burden from the weary back, that doth lay salve to the weary feet, bruised and cut by flints and shards." - Douglas William Jerrold
"It is a natural virtue incident to our sex to be pitiful of those that are afflicted." - Elizabeth II, born Elizabeth Alexandra May NULL
"I have never taken myself for a being. A non-citizen, a marginal type, a nothing who exists only by the excess, by the superabundance of his nothingness." - Emil M. Cioran
"Still on Israel's head forlorn, every nation heaps its scorn." - Emma Lazarus
"But these young people have such an intelligent, knowledgeable surface, and then the crust suddenly breaks and you look down into the depths of confusion you didn't know existed." - Evelyn Waugh, fully Evelyn Arthur St. John Waugh