This site is dedicated to the memory of Dr. Alan William Smolowe who gave birth to the creation of this database.
"Terrorism is escalating to the point that Americans soon may have to choose between civil liberties and more intrusive means of protection." - William Cohen, fully William Sebastian Cohen
"Don't run. Have the courage to look at yourself!" - Wilhelm Reich
"Did you, too, O friend, suppose democracy was only for elections, for politics, and for a party name? I say democracy is only of use there that it may pass on and come to its flower and fruit in manners, in the highest forms of interaction between [people], and their beliefs -- in religion, literature, colleges and schools -- democracy in all public and private life...." - Walt Whitman, fully Walter "Walt" Whitman
"O You whom I often and silently come where you are, that I may be with you; as I walk by your side, or sit near, or remain in the same room with you, little you know the subtle electric fire that for your sake is playing within me." - Walt Whitman, fully Walter "Walt" Whitman
"This combination virtually assures both Berkshire and General Re shareholders that they will have a better future than if the two companies operated separately," - Warren Buffett, fully Warren Edward Buffett, aka Oracle of Omaha
"As a single atom, man is an enigma: as a whole, he is a mathematical problem. As an individual, he is a free agent: as a species, the offspring of necessity. The unity of the universe is a scientific fact. To assert that it is the operation of a single Mind is a conjecture based on analogy, and analogy may be a deceptive guide." - W. Winwood Reade, fully William Winwood Reade
"Discussion in class, which means letting twenty young blockheads and two cocky neurotics discuss something that neither their teacher nor they know." - Vladimir Nabokov, fully Vladimir Vladimirovich Nabokov
"I felt my life needed a shake-up." - Vladimir Nabokov, fully Vladimir Vladimirovich Nabokov
"It is hard, I submit, to loathe bloodshed, including war, more than I do, but it is still harder to exceed my loathing of the very nature of totalitarian states in which massacre is only an administrative detail." - Vladimir Nabokov, fully Vladimir Vladimirovich Nabokov
"Vivian Bloodmark, a philosophical friend of mine, in later years, used to say that while the scientist sees everything that happens in one point in space, the poet sees everything that happens in one point in time. Lost in thought, he taps his knee with his wandlike pencil, and at the same instant a car (New York license plate) passes along the road, a child bangs the screen door of a neighbouring porch, an old man yawns in a misty Turkestan orchard, a granule of cinder-grey sand is rolled by the wind on Venus, a Docteur Jacques Hirsch in Grenoble puts on his reading glasses, and trillions of other such trifles occur - all forming an instantaneous and transparent organism of events, of which the poet (sitting in a lawn chair in Ithaca, N.Y.) is the nucleus." - Vladimir Nabokov, fully Vladimir Vladimirovich Nabokov
"Your Majesty may think me an impatient sick man, and that the Turks are even sicker." - Voltaire, pen name of François-Marie Arouet NULL
"I regard (parenting) as the hardest, most complicated, anxiety-ridden, sweat-and-blood-producing job in the world. Succeeding requires the ultimate in patience, common sense, commitment, humor, tact, love, wisdom, awareness, and knowledge. At the same time, it holds the possibility for the most rewarding, joyous experience of a lifetime, namely, that of being successful guides to a new and unique human being." - Virginia Satir
"A moral character is attached to autumnal scenes. - The flowers fading like our hopes, the leaves falling like our years, the clouds fleeting like our illusions, the light diminishing like our intelligence, the sun growing colder like our affections, the rivers becoming frozen like our lives - all bear secret relations to our destinies." - François-René de Chateaubriand, fully François-René, vicomte de Chateaubriand
"Each man should frame life so that at some future hour fact and his dreaming meet." - Victor Hugo
"In violent emotions, we do not read, we prostrate the paper we hold, so to speak, we strangle it like a victim, we crush the paper, we bury the nails of our wrath our delight in it." - Victor Hugo
"Suspicions are nothing more nor less than wrinkles. Early youth has none. What overwhelms Othello glides over Candide." - Victor Hugo
"No man should judge unless he asks himself in absolute honesty whether in a similar situation he might not have done the same." - Viktor Frankl, fully Viktor Emil Frankl
"What will it matter to him if he notices that he is growing old? Has he any reason to envy the young people whom he sees or wax nostalgic over his own lost youth? What reasons has he to envy a young person? For the possibilities that a young person has, the future which is in store for him? "No, thank you," he will think. "Instead of possibilities, I have realities in my past, not only the reality of work done and love loved, but of sufferings bravely suffered. These sufferings are even the things of which I am most proud, though these things are things that cannot inspire envy." - Viktor Frankl, fully Viktor Emil Frankl
"When the impossibility of replacing a person is realized, it allows the responsibility which a man has for his existence and its continuance to appear in all its magnitude. A man who becomes conscious of the responsibility he bears toward a human being who affectionately waits for him, or to an unfinished work, will never be able to throw away his life. He knows the why for his existence, and will be able to bear almost any how." - Viktor Frankl, fully Viktor Emil Frankl
"I have no beauty, understanding or strength; I am a stranger, from far away." - Atharva Veda, or Atharvaveda
"They are blessed with peace, celestial bliss, tranquility and ecstasy; chanting and meditating, they live in supreme bliss." - Atharva Veda, or Atharvaveda
"The recent period — and in particular the last six weeks of our peaceful revolution — has shown the enormous human, moral and spiritual potential, and the civic culture that slumbered in our society under the enforced mask of apathy. Whenever someone categorically claimed that we were this or that, I always objected that society is a very mysterious creature and that it is unwise to trust only the face it presents to you. I am happy that I was not mistaken. Everywhere in the world people wonder where those meek, humiliated, skeptical and seemingly cynical citizens of Czechoslovakia found the marvelous strength to shake the totalitarian yoke from their shoulders in several weeks, and in a decent and peaceful way." - Václav Havel
"People will kill, as they kill a poisonous snake, a cruel and ferocious person whose actions are against the people and hurt them. Those cruel persons who, by their sinful actions, inflict physical and mental injury on others are detested by people. Though such people may amass immense wealth they cannot retain it for long. They will perish like a tree whose roots have become decayed. In this world, one will, before long, suffer the consequences of one’s sinful actions in the same way as poisonous food taken by a person kills him within a short time." - Valmiki NULL
"I like the immaterial world. I like to live among thoughts and images of the past and the possible, and even of the impossible, now and then." - Thomas Love Peacock
"America was established not to create wealth but to realize a vision, to realize an ideal - to discover and maintain liberty among men." - Woodrow Wilson, fully Thomas Woodrow Wilson
"And Caesar's spirit, raging for revenge, with Ate by his side come hot from hell, shall in these confines with a monarch's voice cry Havoc! and let slip the dogs of war, that this foul deed shall smell above the earth with carrion men, groaning for burial." - William Shakespeare
"Give your dreams all you've got and you'll be amazed at the energy that comes out of you." - William James
"In the time of darkest defeat, victory may be nearest." - William McKinley
"The people against the bosses." - William McKinley
"Observation of the first kind projects its own light on to things and can, therefore, only touch their surface; all it does is render its objects invisible. That of the second kind projects light into things and makes objects luminous in themselves." - Egon Friedell, born Egon Friedmann
"Our estrangement is not drama-laden- we have not betrayed one another's trust, we have not stolen lovers or fought over money or property or any of the things that irreparably break families apart. The answer, for us, is much simpler." - Eleanor Brown, fully Nora Eleanor Louisa Hervey Brown
"Finding Love changes us. Who is out to find Love, matures along the way. The moment to go looking for love, you're going to change from the inside out." - Elif Safak
"If I – as a beneficiary of that exact formula – will concede that my own life was indeed enriched by that precise familial structure, will the social conservatives please (for once!) concede that this arrangement has always put a disproportionately cumbersome burden on women? Such a system demands that mothers become selfless to the point of near invisibility in order to construct these exemplary environments for their families. And might those same social conservatives – instead of just praising mothers as sacred and noble – be willing to someday join a larger conversation about how we might work together as a society to construct a world where healthy children can be raised and healthy families can prosper without women have to scrape bare the walls of their own souls to do so?" - Elizabeth Gilbert
"If you can plant yourself in stillness long enough, you will, in time, experience the truth that everything (both uncomfortable and lovely) does eventually pass." - Elizabeth Gilbert
"It is merely this world that is chaotic, bringing changes to us all that nobody could have anticipated." - Elizabeth Gilbert
"The Buddha referred to married people as householders. He even gave clear instructions as to how one should be a good householder: Be nice to your spouse, be honest, be faithful, give alms to the poor, buy some insurance against fire and flood . . . I’m dead serious: The Buddha literally advised married couples to buy property insurance." - Elizabeth Gilbert
"The search for satisfaction to Aahdf to protection and interest Almatatin, but a generous gift to the world. Saved one of every misery, Azaha of the way. To dream an obstacle, not in front of himself, but also in front of others. Only then will be free to serve the people and enjoy Bhbhm." - Elizabeth Gilbert
"There's a wonderful old Italian joke about a poor man who goes to church every day and prays before the statue of a great saint, begging, Dear saint-please, please, please...give me the grace to win the lottery. This lament goes on for months. Finally the exasperated staue comes to life, looks down at the begging man and says in weary disgust, My son-please, please, please...buy a ticket. Prayer is a realtionship; half the job is mine. If I want transformation, but can't even be bothered to articulate what, exactly, I'm ainming for, how will it ever occur? Half the benefit of prayer is in the asking itself, in the offering of a clearly posed and well-considered intention. If you don't have this, all your pleas and desires are boneless, floppy, inert; they swirl at your feet in a cold fog and never lift." - Elizabeth Gilbert
"The majority cares little for ideals and integrity. What it craves is display." - Emma Goldman
"Reason is alone. And in this sense knowledge never encounters anything truly other in the world. This is the profound truth of idealism. It betokens a radical difference between spatial exteriority and the exteriority of instants in relation to one another." - Emmanuel Lévinas , originally Emanuelis Lévinas
"The conscious discovery by you that you have this Power within you, and your determination to make use of it, is the birth of the child. And it is easy to see how very apt the symbol is, for the infant that is born in consciousness is just such a weak, feeble entity as any new-born child, and it calls for the same careful nursing and guarding that any infant does in its earliest days. After a time, however, as the weeks go by, the child grows stronger and bigger, until a time comes when it can well take care of itself; and then it grows and grows in wisdom and stature until, no longer leaning on the mother’s care, the child, now arrived at man’s estate, turns the tables, and repays its debt by taking over the care of its mother. So your ability to contact the mystic Power within yourself, frail and feeble at first, will gradually develop until you find yourself permitting that Power to take your whole life into its care." - Emmet Fox
"The law of circulation is a Cosmic Law. That means that it is true everywhere and on all planes. The law is that constant rhythmical movement is necessary to health and harmony. Now the opposite of circulation is congestion, and it may be said that all sickness, in harmony, or trouble of any kind is really due to some form of congestion. If you think this subject out for yourself you will be fascinated to find how generally true it is, and in what unexpected places it appears. Much ill health is due to emotional congestion. This leads to congestion of the nerve, blood, and lymphatic fluids, producing disease. The depression belief under which the country labored for ten years was a case of congestion. There was plenty of raw material, machinery, and skill, and a very wide- spread demand for goods; but a case of congestion occurred! The dust bowl trouble and its allied misfortune, the floods, is, of course, an example of congestion. War itself is really due to frustrated circulation on many planes of existence. Some students of metaphysics shut their minds to the reception of new truth, and this always produces mental congestion and a failure to demonstrate. You should treat yourself two or three times a week for free circulation on all planes-by claiming that God is bringing this about." - Emmet Fox
"When we remember that God really is omnipotent, untrammeled by what we call time or space or matter, or the vagaries of human nature, it is easy to see that there can be no limit to the power of prayer. You can pray about a problem and solve it at any stage, but of course the earlier you tackle it the easier your work will be." - Emmet Fox
"It was Plato who bridged the gap between poetry and philosophy; for, in his work, appearance, despised by his Eleatic and Sophist predecessors, became a reflected image of perfection. He set poets the task of writing philosophically, not only in the sense of giving instruction, but in the sense of striving, by the imitation of appearance, to arrive at its true essence and to show its insufficiency measured by the beauty of the Idea." - Erich Auerbach
"The individual has to protect himself against the world, and he can do this only as any other animal would: by narrowing down the world, shutting off experience, developing an obliviousness both to the terrors of the world and to his own anxieties. Otherwise he would be crippled for action. We cannot repeat too often the great lesson of Freudian psychology: that repression is normal self-protection and creative self-restriction—in a real sense, man's natural substitute for instinct. Rank has a perfect, key term for this natural human talent: he calls it "partialization" and very rightly sees that life is impossible without it. What we call the well-adjusted man has just this capacity to partialize the world for comfortable action. I have used the term "fetishization," which is exactly the same idea: the "normal" man bites off what he can chew and digest of life, and no more. In other words, men aren't built to be gods, to take in the whole world; they are built like other creatures, to take in the piece of ground in front of their noses. Gods can take in the whole of creation because they alone can make sense of it, know what it is all about and for. But as soon as a man lifts his nose from the ground and starts sniffing at eternal problems like life and death, the meaning of a rose or a star cluster—then he is in trouble. Most men spare themselves this trouble by keeping their minds on the small problems of their lives just as their society maps these problems out for them. These are what Kierkegaard called the "immediate" men and the "Philistines." They "tranquilize themselves with the trivial"—and so they can lead normal lives." - Ernest Becker
"It is my conviction that the Constitution of the United States was established by the hands of wise men whom the Lord raised up unto this very purpose. The Lord expects us to safeguard this sacred and inspired document for the blessing of all of us and our posterity. If we fail so to do we will not only lose our priceless freedom but jeopardize the cause of truth throughout the entire world." - Ezra Taft Benson
"It’s a great blessing to live in America. It’s a great blessing to have the opportunity to enjoy the freedoms which are ours today. I have seen people, thousands of them, who have lost the freedom which is ours, where they can no longer meet, as we meet here this morning, and express themselves as they see fit, where they no longer have freedom of movement, freedom to select their own jobs, their own educational opportunities, freedom to speak their minds, to write what they wish – freedom of enterprise. In many parts of the world today these rich blessings of freedom no longer exist." - Ezra Taft Benson
"Under our system there has been released great creative capacity, because we have been free, unrestricted. What have we achieved? A standard of living unequalled anywhere in the world. Not because we are smarter, not because we are more brilliant, not because we have greater capacity than people of other nations, but because we have had a system which is superior — a system which was wisely provided by the Founding Fathers. We must protect and safeguard that system. Sometimes we find people who almost apologize for it — the free enterprise system. Of course it is not perfect; it is operated by human beings, but it is the best system in operation in this world today. If we are wise, we will preserve it, we will strengthen it and we will safeguard it for our children and our children’s children." - Ezra Taft Benson