This site is dedicated to the memory of Dr. Alan William Smolowe who gave birth to the creation of this database.
"The most important decision we make is whether we believe we live in a friendly or hostile universe." - Albert Einstein
"Never make a decision until you have to. He'd also warn me that even if I was in a position of strength, whether at work or in a relationship, I had to play fair. Just because you're in the driver's seat, doesn't mean you have to run people over." - Randy Pausch, fully Randolph Frederick "Randy" Pausch
"It is often by a trivial, even an anecdotal decision, that we direct our activities into a certain channel, and thus determine which of the potential expressions of our individuality become manifest. Usually we know nothing of the ultimate orientation or of the outlet toward which we travel, and the stream sweeps us to a formula of life from which there is no returning. Every decision is like a murder, and our march forward is over the stillborn bodies of all our possible selves that will never be." - René Dubos, fully René Jules Dubos
"Our choice is between cynicism and hope. Hope is a decision you make. Hope means believing in spite of the evidence and then waiting for the evidence to change. Be the ones that we have been waiting for." - Jim Wallis
"She wants her silence to be final. Here, more than anyplace else, she wants her memory uncontested. She does not want me talking to others, gathering other stories, looking into the remnants of my father's past. When she is silent, she wants those things about which she refuses to speak to remain as quiet as the tomb. That is the ultimate power of stories. They take on themselves the decision about what will be remembered and what will be told. The part of the past she claims most fiercely is the part she wants forgotten." - Richard Grant White
"Presidents and other decision makers usually get the intelligence they want. This doesn't mean that intelligence reports should be ignored, but that they must be viewed with skepticism." - Richard Neustadt, fully Richard Elliott Neustadt
"I refuse to make a decision that somebody else can make. The first rule of leadership is to save yourself for the big decision. Don't allow your mind to become cluttered." - Richard Nixon, fully Richard Milhous Nixon
"I was under medication when I made the decision not to burn the tapes." - Richard Nixon, fully Richard Milhous Nixon
"My own view is that taping of conversations for historical purposes was a bad decision on the part of all the presidents. I don't think Kennedy should have done it. I don't think Johnson should have done it, and I don't think we should have done it." - Richard Nixon, fully Richard Milhous Nixon
"Lord of the world, O hear my psalm, And as sweet incense take my plea. My heart hath set its love on Thee And finds in speech its only balm. This thought forever haunts my mind, Some day to Thee I must return, From Thee I came and backward yearn My very fount and source to find. Not mine the merit that I stand Before Thee thus, since all is Thine, The glorious work of force divine, No product of my heart or hand. My soul to Thee was humbly bent Even before she had her birth, Before upon the sphere of earth Her heav’nly greatness made descent." - Salomon ibn Gabirol, aka Solomon ben Judah or Avicebron
"The long ages of infancy and childhood, through which the human race has to pass, have receded into the background. Humanity is now experiencing the commotions invariably associated with the most turbulent stage of its evolution, the stage of adolescence, when the impetuosity of youth and its vehemence reach their climax, and must gradually be superseded by the calmness, the wisdom, and the maturity that characterize the stage of adulthood. Mankind, in these fateful years... is... being simultaneously called upon to give account of its past actions, and is being purged and prepared for its future mission. It can neither escape the responsibilities of the past, nor shirk those of the future. Then will a world civilization be born, flourish, and perpetuate itself, a civilization with a fullness of life such as the world has never seen nor can as yet conceive... Then will the promise enshrined in all the books of God be redeemed, and all the prophecies uttered by the prophets of old come to pass, and the vision of seers and poets be realized. Then will the planet, galvanized through the universal belief of its dwellers in one God, and their allegiance to one common revelation... be acclaimed as the earthly heaven, capable of fulfilling that ineffable destiny fixed for it from time immemorial by the love and wisdom of its Creator." - Shoghí Effendi, fully Shoghí Effendí Rabbání
"Every new day begins with possibilities. It's up to us to fill it with the things that move us toward progress and peace." - Ronald Reagan, fully Ronald Wilson Reagan
"Most tax revisions didn't improve the system, they made it more like Washington itself complicated, unfair, cluttered with gobbledygook and loopholes designed for those with the power and influence to hire high-priced legal and tax advisers." - Ronald Reagan, fully Ronald Wilson Reagan
"Society requires honest and able leadership; and if natural and institutional differences are destroyed, presently some tyrant or host of squalid oligarchs will create new forms of inequality." - Russell Kirk
"Society in its full sense ... is never an entity separable from the individuals who compose it. No individual can arrive even at the threshold of his potentialities without a culture in which he participates. Conversely, no civilization has in it any element which in the last analysis is not the contribution of an individual." - Ruth Benedict, born Ruth Fulton
"I wasn’t all that bright. I had difficulty keeping up in class and I had always carried with me a bit of an inferiority complex regarding socializing at school and I never felt confident about dating girls. But I enjoyed my work and I enjoyed the rewards of working. As I read Mr. Hill’s book, I realized I could do anything if I wanted it badly enough. His words motivated me and showed me that I live in a do-it-yourself world." - S. Truett Cathy
"Far from rejecting such a good man as you, He never even abandons a wicked man who hopes for His mercy." - Saint Vincent de Paul
"Most people offend God by passing judgment on the things others do, especially important people, not knowing the reasons why they are doing what they do; for when one does not know the primary cause of some matter, what conclusions can he draw from it?" - Saint Vincent de Paul
"A poet’s work is to name the unnamable, to point at frauds, to take sides, start arguments, shape the world, and stop it going to sleep." - Salman Rushdie, fully Sir Ahmed Salman Rushdie
"And thank goodness we never thought we had to go out and buy anything like an island." - Sam Walton, fully Samuel Moore "Sam" Walton
"When someone abuses me I can defend myself, but against praise I am defenseless." - Sigmund Freud, born Sigismund Schlomo Freud
"The schools would fail through their silence, the Church through its forgiveness, and the home through the denial and silence of the parents. The new generation has to hear what the older generation refuses to tell it." - Simon Wiesenthal
"I have often been amused by our vulgar tendency to take complex issues, with solutions at neither extreme of a continuum of possibilities, and break them into dichotomies, assigning one group to one pole and the other to an opposite end, with no acknowledgment of subtleties and intermediate positions—and nearly always with moral opprobrium attached to opponents." - Stephan Jay Gould
"The Devil accuses us when we fall, but he has not so much on his side as we have." - Stephen Charnock
"Everything evolved during those three-plus years that we were traveling the country together. He became a much better speaker. I became much more equipped to write speeches for him. Day after day after day after day, he's up there on the platform speaking, and I'm sitting in the audience listening, and I find out what works and what doesn't, what fits his style." - Ted Sorensen, fully Theodore Chalkin "Ted" Sorensen
"The place became full of a watchful intentness now; for when other things sank brooding to sleep the heath appeared slowly to awake and listen. Every night its Titanic form seemed to await something; but it had waited thus, unmoved, during so many centuries, through the crises of so many things, that it could only be imagined to await one last crisis—the final overthrow." - Thomas Hardy
"We took the liberty to make some enquiries concerning the ground of their pretensions to make war upon nations who had done them no injury, and observed that we considered all mankind as our friends who had done us no wrong, nor had given us any provocation. The Ambassador [of Tripoli] answered us that it was founded on the Laws of their Prophet, that it was written in their Koran, that all nations who should not have acknowledged their authority were sinners, that it was their right and duty to make war upon them wherever they could be found, and to make slaves of all they could take as Prisoners, and that every Musselman who should be slain in battle was sure to go to Paradise." - Thomas Jefferson
"In actual fact, conventions are the death of real tradition as they are of all real life. They are parasites which attach themselves to the living organism of tradition and devour all its reality, turning it into a hollow formality. Tradition is living and active, but convention is passive and dead. Tradition does not form us automatically: we have to work to understand it. Convention is accepted passively, as a matter of routine. Therefore, convention easily becomes an evasion of reality. It offers us only pretended ways of solving the problems of living - a system of gestures and formalities. Tradition really teaches us to live and shows us how to take full responsibility for our own lives. Thus tradition is often flatly opposed to what is ordinary, to what is mere routine. But convention, which is a mere repetition of familiar routines, follows the line of least resistance. One goes through an act, without trying to understand the meaning of it all, merely because everyone else does the same. Tradition, which is always old, is at the same time ever new because it is always reviving - born again in each new generation, to be lived and applied in a new and particular way. Convention is simply the ossification of social customs. The activities of conventional people are merely excuses for NOT acting in a more integrally human way. Tradition nourishes the life of the spirit; convention merely disguises its interior decay." - Thomas Merton
"My own personal task is not simply that of poet and writer (still less commentator, pseudo-prophet); it is basically to praise God out of an inner center of silence, gratitude, and ‘awareness.’ This can be realized in a life that apparently accomplishes nothing. Without centering on accomplishment or non-accomplishment, my task is simply the breathing of this gratitude from day to day, in simplicity, and for the rest turning my hand to whatever comes, work being part of praise, whether splitting logs or writing poems, or best of all simple notes." - Thomas Merton
"Sunrise: hidden by pines and cedars to the east, I saw the red flame of the kingly sun glaring through the black trees, not like dawn but like a forest fire. Then the sun became distinguished as a person, and he shone silently and with solemn power through the branches, and the whole world was silent and calm." - Thomas Merton
"There must be a time of day when the man who makes plans forgets his plans, and acts as if he had no plans at all. There must be a time of day when the man who has to speak falls very silent. And his mind forms no more propositions, and he asks himself: Did they have a meaning? There must be a time when the man of prayer goes to pray as if it were the first time in his life he had ever prayed; when the man of resolutions puts his resolutions aside as if they had all been broken, and he learns a different wisdom: distinguishing the sun from the moon, the stars from the darkness, the sea from the dry land, and the night sky from the shoulder of a hill." - Thomas Merton
"Perhaps the belief in God is the belief that the universe is intelligible, but not to us." - Thomas Nagel
"Emotionally, my attitude to the Arabs is the same as to all other nations – polite indifference. Politically, my attitude is determined by two principles. First of all, I consider it utterly impossible to eject the Arabs from Palestine. There will always be two nations in Palestine – which is good enough for me, provided the Jews become the majority. And secondly, I belong to the group that once drew up the Helsingfors Programme , the programme of national rights for all nationalities living in the same State. In drawing up that programme, we had in mind not only the Jews, but all nations everywhere, and its basis is equality of rights." - Ze'ev Jabotinsky, born Vladimir Jabotinsky
"I believe that we have been complacent as a society. We have failed to fully comprehend the gathering storm. Even now after September 11, it is far from clear that our society truly appreciates the gravity of the threat we face or is yet willing to do what is necessary to counter it. Even after September 11, and after anthrax and ricin attacks in the U.S., I remain concerned that the controversy over not finding Iraq’s weapons of mass destruction will lead to the erroneous assumption that all the talk about the dangers of WMD is just another exercise in the cynical exploitation of fear. After all, it is commonly noted, there have been no attacks since 9/11. This is a dangerous delusion. The enemy is not only coming, he has been here. He is already amongst us. He will continue to try to examine our weaknesses, exploit the crevices in our security, and destroy our way of living as well as our lives." - William Cohen, fully William Sebastian Cohen
"You can’t have a baby in one month by getting nine women pregnant." - Wernher von Braun, fully Wernher Magnus Maximilian, Freiherr von Braun
"An investor should ordinarily hold a small piece of an outstanding business with the same tenacity that an owner would exhibit if he owned all of that business." - Warren Buffett, fully Warren Edward Buffett, aka Oracle of Omaha
"Do God's other creatures waste the present in thoughts of the past and future?" - Wayne Dyer, fully Wayne Walter Dyer
"The quickest method for understanding and living your purpose, is to ask yourself if you're thinking in loving ways." - Wayne Dyer, fully Wayne Walter Dyer
"And the rest is rust and stardust." - Vladimir Nabokov, fully Vladimir Vladimirovich Nabokov
"The mouth obeys poorly when the heart murmurs." - Voltaire, pen name of François-Marie Arouet NULL
"Correct diet implies the right quality and quantity as well as the frequency of intake. Eating should be related to appetite. It should not cause any excitement, or emotional disturbance. It should be gone through peacefully and happily. One has to be very alert to see that everything one eats is fully digested. The body should not be burdened with undigested food. The cleanliness of all the internal organs is one of the most important factors of meditation." - Vimala Thakar
"Kay Arr, said the nursemaid, and Septimus heard her say Kay Arr close to his ear, deeply, softly, like a mellow organ, but with a roughness in her voice like a grasshopper's, which rasped his spine deliciously and sent running up into his brain waves of sound which, concussing, broke. A marvelous discovery indeed - that the human voice in certain atmospheric conditions (for one must be scientific, above all scientific) can quicken trees into life!" - Virginia Woolf, nee Stephen, fully Adeline Virginia Woolf
"Conscience is God present in man." - Victor Hugo
"Another time we were at work in a trench. The dawn was grey around us; grey was the sky above; grey the snow in the pale light of dawn; grey the rags in which my fellow prisoners were clad, and grey their faces. I was again conversing silently with my wife, or perhaps I was struggling to find the reason for my sufferings, my slow dying. In a last violent protest against the hopelessness of imminent death, I sensed my spirit piercing through the enveloping gloom. I felt it transcend that hopeless, meaningless world, and from somewhere I heard a victorious 'Yes' in answer to my question of the existence of an ultimate purpose. At that moment a light was lit in a distant farmhouse, which stood on the horizon as if painted there, in the midst of the miserable grey of a dawning morning in Bavaria. 'Et lux in tenebris lucent'--and the light shineth in the darkness. For hours I stood hacking at the icy ground. The guard passed by, insulting me, and once again I communed with my beloved. More and more I felt that she was present; that she was with me; I had the feeling that I was able to touch her, able to stretch out my hand and grasp hers. The feeling was very strong: she was there. Then, at that very moment, a bird flew down silently and perched just in front of me, on the heap of soil which I had dug up from the ditch, and looked steadily at me." - Viktor Frankl, fully Viktor Emil Frankl
"Man does not simply exist but always decides what his existence will be, what he will become the next moment. By the same token, every human being has the freedom to change at any instant." - Viktor Frankl, fully Viktor Emil Frankl
"Sigmund Freud once asserted, “Let one attempt to expose a number of the most diverse people uniformly to hunger. With the increase of the imperative urge of hunger all individual differences will blur, and in their stead will appear the uniform expression of the one unstilled urge.” Thank heaven, Sigmund Freud was spared knowing the concentration camps from the inside. His subjects lay on a couch designed in the plush style of Victorian culture, not in the filth of Auschwitz. There, the individual differences did not blur but, on the contrary, people became more different; people unmasked themselves, both the swine and the saints." - Viktor Frankl, fully Viktor Emil Frankl
"The best rules of rhetoric are, to speak intelligently; speak from the heart; have something to say; say it; and stop when you've done." - Tryon Edwards
"Comparisons of one's lot with others' teaches us nothing and enfeebles the will." - Thornton Wilder, fully Thornton Niven Wilder