This site is dedicated to the memory of Dr. Alan William Smolowe who gave birth to the creation of this database.
"Be just: the unjust never prosper. Be valiant: die rather than yield. Be merciful: slay neither old men, children, nor women. Destroy neither fruit trees, grain, nor cattle. Keep your word, even to your enemies." - Abu-Bakr NULL
"I believe natural beauty has a necessary place in the spiritual development of any individual or any society. I believe that whenever we destroy beauty, or whenever we substitute something man-made and artificial for a natural feature of the earth, we have retarded some part of man’s spiritual growth." - Rachel Carson, fully Rachel Louise Carson
"What is wrong with our culture is that it often offers us an inaccurate conception of the self. It depicts the personal self as existing in competition with and in opposition with and in opposition to nature. We thereby fail to realize that if we destroy our environment, we are destroying what is in fact our larger self." - Robert E. Carter, fully Robert Edgar Carter
"First, erase your name, unravel your years, destroy your surroundings, uproot what you seem, and who remains standing? Then, rewrite your name, restore your age, rebuild your house, pursue your path, and then, endlessly, start over, all over again." - Andrée Chedid
"The ancient theory of the just war breaks down when victory is impossible, when the weapons are so undiscriminating as to destroy both sides." - Christian Century Editorial NULL
"To build may have to be the slow and laborious task of years. To destroy can be the thoughtless act of a single day." - Winston Churchill, fully Sir Winston Leonard Spencer-Churchill
"The best and the deepest moral training is that which one gets by having to enter into proper relationships with others… Present educational systems, so far as they destroy or neglect this unity, render it difficult or impossible to get any genuine, regular moral training." - John Dewey
"Every new idea will… be troublesome to [the individual’s] entire being. He will defend himself against it because it threatens to destroy his certainties. He thus actually comes to hate everything opposed to what propaganda has made him acquire. Propaganda has created in him a system of opinions and tendencies which may not be subjected to criticism… Incidentally, this refusal to listen to new ideas usually takes on a vigorous propaganda will declare that all new ideas are propaganda." - Jacques Ellul
"The only way to get rid of your problem is to change your belief, or reverse the false process of thought. Fear is always present when there is in harmony, and an affirmation will not in itself destroy fear. You must refuse to be intimidated by the seeming danger, whatever it is, and put your reliance on the Love of God. Then fear will begin to go." - Emmet Fox
"Grace does not destroy our liberty by its certain efficacy; rather by that very efficacy divine grace moves the free will without doing violence to it." - Reginald Garrigou-Lagrange, fully Réginald Marie Garrigou-Lagrange
"In my opinion, better far it be to destroy vanity within my life than to destroy my life in vanity." - Juana Inés de la Cruz
"In the process of becoming educated we learn from each other and, in so doing, we destroy the barriers that separate us from one another; we demolish prejudices that impede us from becoming fully human." - Francisco Jiménez
"You do not destroy an idea by killing people; you replace it with a better one." - Edward Keating
"Justice, being violated, destroys; justice, being preserved, preserves: therefore justice must not be violated, lest violated justice destroy us." - Laws of Manu, aka Manusmṛti, Manusmriti, Manusmruti or Mānava-Dharmaśāstra NULL
"The best way to destroy an enemy is to make him a friend." - Abraham Lincoln
"Learning is the best of all wealth; it is easy to carry, thieves cannot steal it, and tyrants cannot seize it; neither fire nor water can destroy it; and far from decreasing, it increases by giving." - Naladiyar, or The Naladiyar NULL
"What does your mind seek? Where is your heart? If you give your heart to each and every thing, you lead it nowhere; you destroy your heart. Can anything be found on earth?" - Nezahualcoyotl NULL
"What does not destroy me makes me strong." - Friedrich Nietzsche, fully Friedrich Wilhelm Nietzsche
"It is good to maintain and to encourage life; it is bad to destroy life or to obstruct it." - Albert Schweitzer
"Let me give you a definition of ethics: It is good to maintain and further life; it is bad to damage and destroy life." - Albert Schweitzer
"The only difference between men of great achievement and those who remain in mediocrity is that the great pay little attention to what has been done and what obstacles or apparent reasons may stand in the way of achievement but devote themselves to contemplating what can or ought to be done. Those who allow their mental and emotional natures to recoil, refusing to let this sense reach out into the undiscovered, destroy their own capabilities and this keeps them always in the prison house of limitation. But it should be noted that prison is only the recoil or reflex of their own nature. Genius is that which goes on through conditions and circumstances and keeps eternally in the process of expansion and extension of achieving power." - Baird T. Spalding
"It is a tragic paradox that the very qualities that have led to a person's extra-ordinary capacity for success are also those most likely to destroy them." - Anthony Storr
"The flea bites, hops, and bites, again, nimbly avoiding the foot that would crush him. He does not seek to kill his enemy at a blow, but to bleed him and feed on him, to plague and bedevil him, to keep him from resting and to destroy his nerve and his morale." - Robert Taber
"Faith is the knowledge of the meaning of human life, in consequence of which man does not destroy himself but lives. Faith is the force of life. If a man lives he believes in something. If he did not believe there was something to live for, he would not live. If he does not see and understand the unreality of the finite, he believes in the finite; if he sees that unreality, he must believe in the infinite. Without faith it is impossible to live." - Leo Tolstoy, aka Count Lev Nikolayevich Tolstoy or Tolstoi
"One of the ways of helping to destroy a people is to tell them they don’t have a history, that they have no roots." - Desmond Tutu, fully Desmond Mpilo Tutu
"The surest way to destroy a neurosis is to induce a sense of creative purpose, of meaning." - Colin Wilson
"Attack another's rights and you destroy your own." - John Jay Chapman
"There's no honorable way to kill, no gentle way to destroy. There is nothing good in war. Except its ending." - Abraham Lincoln
"Why will you take by force what you may obtain by love? Why will you destroy us who supply you with food? What can you get by war?... We are unarmed, and willing to give you what you ask, if you come in friendly manner... I am not so simple as not to know it is better to eat good meat, sleep comfortably, live quietly with my women and children, laugh and be merry with the English, and being their friend, trade for their copper and hatchets, than to run away from them... Take away your guns and swords, the cause of all our jealousy, or you may die in the same manner." - Powhatan, proper name was Wahunsenacawh, also spelled Wahunsonacock NULL
"The really basic thing in government is policy. Bad administration… can destroy good policy, but good administration can never save bad policy." - Adlai Ewing Stevenson
"Those who plot against their companions often unwittingly destroy themselves." - Aesop NULL
"Destroy the seed of evil, or it will grow up to your ruin." - Aesop NULL
"If it were all so simple! If only there were evil people somewhere insidiously committing evil deeds, and it were necessary to separate them from the rest of us and destroy them. But the line dividing good and evil cuts through the heart of every human being. And who is willing to destroy a piece of his own heart?" - Alexander Solzhenitsyn, fully Aleksandr Isayevich Solzhenitsyn
"If it were all so simple! If only there were evil people somewhere insidiously committing evil deeds, and it were necessary to separate them from the rest of us and destroy them. But the line dividing good and evil cuts through the heart of every human being. And who is willing to destroy a piece of his own heart?" -
"Sin is the refusal to submit to the order of things. Any act or thought which tends to diminish, disintegrate or destroy life in its specifically human expression is a sin." - Alexis Carrel
"[Democratic government] covers the surface of society with a network of small complicated rules, minute uniform, through which the most original minds and the most energetic characters cannot penetrate to rise above the crowd. The will of man is not shattered but softened, bent, and guided; men are seldom forced by it to act, but they are constantly restrained from acting. Such a power does not destroy, but it prevents existence; it does not tyrannize, but it compresses, enervates, extinguishes, and stupefies a people, till each nation is reduced to nothing better than a flock of timid and industrious animals, of which the government is the shepherd." - Alexis de Tocqueville, Alexis-Charles-Henri Clérel de Tocqueville
"You can never read bad literature too little, nor good literature too much. Bad books are intellectual poison; they destroy the mind." - Arthur Schopenhauer