This site is dedicated to the memory of Dr. Alan William Smolowe who gave birth to the creation of this database.
"No one's happiness but my own is in my power to achieve or to destroy." - Ayn Rand, born Alisa Zinovyevna Rosenbaum
"Good qualities are easier to destroy than bad ones, and therefore uniformity is most easily achieved by lowering all standards." - Bertrand Russell, fully Bertrand Arthur William Russell, 3rd Earl Russell
"All the lessons of history in four sentences: Whom the gods would destroy, they first make mad with power. The mills of God grind slowly, but they grind exceedingly small. The bee fertilizes the flower it robs. When it is dark enough, you can see the stars." - Charles A. Beard, fully Charles Austin Beard
"It is far more easy to pull down than to build up, and to destroy than to preserved. Revolutions have on this account been falsely supposed to be fertile of great talent; as the dregs rise to the top during a fermentation, and the lightest things are carried highest by the whirlwind." - Charles Caleb Colton
"Passions destroy more prejudices than philosophy does." - Denis Diderot
"Wouldn’t it be wonderful to have no fear? That is the greatest gift: no fear! When you truly realize what it is, then there is no fear, nothing to hurt you, nothing to destroy you. Nothing can take your life, because your life is unborn, therefore undying. All the rest is a dream." - Dennis Genpo Merzel, aka Genpo Merzel Roshi
"Manners are of more importance than laws. Upon them, in a great measure, the laws depend. The law touches us but here and there, and now and then. Manners are what vex or soothe, corrupt or purify, exalt or debase, barbarize or refine us, by a constant, steady, uniform, insensible operation, like that of the air we breathe in. They give their whole form and color to our lives. According to their quality, they aid morals; they supply them or they totally destroy them." - Edmund Burke
"They that deny a God destroy man’s nobility; for certainly man is of kin to the beasts by his body; and, if he be not of kin to God by his spirit, he is a base and ignoble creature." - Francis Bacon
"All the crimes on earth do not destroy so much of the human race, nor alienate so much property as drunkenness." - Francis Bacon
"That they deny a God, destroy a man’s nobility; for certainly man is of kin to the beasts by; his body; an if he is not kin to God by his spirit he is a base and ignoble creature." - Francis Bacon
"We are a nation of many nationalities, many races, many religions - bound together by a single unity, the unity of freedom and equality. Whoever seeks to set one race against another seeks to enslave all races. Whoever seeks to set one religion against another seeks to destroy all religion." - Franklin D. Roosevelt, fully Franklin Delano Roosevelt, aka FDR
"All larger organisms, including ourselves, are living testimonies to the fact that destructive practices do not work in the long run. In the end, the aggressors always destroy themselves, making way for others who know how to cooperate and get along. Life is much less a competitive struggle for survival than a triumph of cooperation and creativity." - Fritjof Capra
"Our laws make law impossible; our liberties destroy all freedom; our property is organized robbery; our morality an impudent hypocrisy; our wisdom is administered by inexperienced or mal-experienced dupes; our power wielded by cowards and weaklings; and our honor false in all its points. I am an enemy of the existing order for good reasons." - George Bernard Shaw
"We have two tyrannous physical passions: concupiscence and chastity. We become mad in pursuit of sex: we become equally mad in the persecution of that pursuit. Unless we gratify our desire the race is lost; unless we restrain it we destroy ourselves." - George Bernard Shaw
"The sole means now for the savings of the beings on the planet Earth would be to implant into their presences a new organ with such properties that every one of these unfortunates during the process of existence should constantly sense and be cognizant of the inevitability of his own death as well as the death of everyone upon whom his eyes or attention rests. Only such a sensation and such a cognizance can now destroy the egoism completely crystallized in them that has swallowed up the whole of their Essence and also the tendency to hate others which flows from it - the tendency, namely, which engenders all those mutual relationships existing there, which serve as the chief cause of all their abnormalities unbecoming to three-brained beings and maleficent for them themselves and for the whole Universe." - George Gurdjieff, fully George Ivanovich Gurdjieff
"Reality can destroy the dream; why shouldn't the dream destroy reality?" - George Moore, fully George Augustus Moore
"Men almost universally have acknowledged a Providence, but that fact has had no force to destroy natural aversions and fears in the presence of events." - George Santayana
"The masses have never thirsted after truth. They turn aside from evidence that is not to their taste, preferring to deify error, if error seduce[s] them. Whoever can supply them with illusions is easily their master; whoever attempts to destroy their illusions is always their victim." - Gustave Le Bon
"Habit and routine have an unbelievable power to waste and destroy" - Henri de Lubac
"Watch lest prosperity destroy generosity." - Henry Ward Beecher
"Enslave a man and you destroy his ambition, his enterprise, his capacity. In the constitution of human nature, the desire of bettering one’s condition is the mainspring of effort. The first touch of slavery snaps this spring." - Horace Mann
"Suppose that we are wise enough to learn and know -- and yet not wise enough to control our learning and knowledge, so that we use it to destroy ourselves? Even if that is so, knowledge remains better than ignorance. It is better to know -- even if the knowledge endures only for the moment that comes before destruction -- than to gain eternal life at the price of a dull and swinish lack of comprehension of a universe that swirls unseen before us in all its wonder. That was the choice of Achilles, and it is mine, too." - Isaac Asimov, born Isaak Yudovich Ozimov
"There will be no justice as long as man will stand with a knife or with a gun and destroy those who are weaker than he is." - Isaac Bashevis Singer
"When we turn to each other, and not on each other, that’s victory. When we build each other and not destroy each other, that’s victory. Red, yellow, brown, black and white - we’re all precious in God’s sight. Everybody is somebody." - Jesse Jackson, fully Jesse Louis Jackson
"Lenin is said to have declared that the best way to destroy the Capitalist System was to debauch the currency. By a continuing process of inflation, Governments can confiscate, secretly and unobserved, an important part of the wealth of their citizens." - John Maynard Keynes
"Education is leading human souls to what is best, and no crime can destroy, no enemy can alienate, no despotism can enslave." - Joseph Addison
"The impulse to mar and to destroy is as ancient and almost as nearly universal as the impulse to create. The one is an easier way than the other of demonstrating power." - Joseph Wood Krutch
"A society that presumes a norm of violence and celebrates aggression, whether in the subway, on the football field, or in the conduct of its business, cannot help making celebrities of the people who would destroy it." - Lewis H. Lapham
"I will destroy my enemies by converting them to friends." - Maimonides, given name Moses ben Maimon or Moshe ben Maimon, known as "Rambam" NULL
"Goodwill is the one and only asset that competition cannot undersell nor destroy." - Marshall Field
"The perception of one’s fellow man as a whole, as a unity, as a unique – even if his wholeness, unity, and uniqueness are only partly developed, as is usually the case – is opposed in our time by almost everything that is commonly understood as specifically modern. In our time there predominates an analytical, reductive, and deriving look between man and man. This look is analytical, or rather pseudo-analytical, since it treats the whole being as put together and therefore able to be taken apart… An effort is being made today radically to destroy the mystery between man and man. The personal life, the ever-near mystery, once the source of the stillest enthusiasms, is leveled down." - Martin Buber
"A society that puts equality – in the sense of equality of outcome – ahead of freedom will end up with neither equality nor freedom. The use of force to achieve equality will destroy freedom, and the force, introduced for good purposes, will end up in the hands of people who use it to promote their own interests." -
"Life is seething before your eyes; corner stands collapse, illusions evaporate, truths come tottering like bombs, elements disintegrate demanding new components, new vices destroy the walls of muteness and rise, species amalgamate, forces are set free from their hiding places, and conscience asks its possessor to take a stand; Hold on… escape… live… die… complicate yourself… renew yourself… There is no other way than to wade into the waves of darkness and to swim to the shore of light." - Naguib Mahfouz
"The reality is that under capitalist conditions - meaning maximization of short-term gain - you're ultimately going to destroy the environment: the only question is whe...dealing with that problem is going to require large-scale social changes of an almost unimaginable kind." - Noam Chomsky, fully Avram Noam Chomsky
"We cannot leave behind us the sins of our past. We must not forget that nothing disappears. Everything is eternal. Everything that has been is still in existence. The whole history of humanity is the “history of crime”... Man must go back, seek for, and destroy the causes of evil however far back they lie. It is only in this idea that the hint of the possibilities of a general evolution can be found. It is only in this idea that the possibility of changing the karma of humanity lies, because changing the karma means changing the past... There will be no possibility of thinking of evolution of humanity, if the possibility did not exist for individually evolving man to go into the past and struggle against the causes of the present evil which lie there." - P.D. Ouspensky, fully Peter Demianovich Ouspensky, also Pyotr Demianovich Ouspenskii, also Uspenskii or Uspensky
"A man is a pair of hands, pretty dangerous tools, able to subdue the world or to un-build and destroy much faster than others can build." - Ralph Waldo Emerson
"Interpretation is the revenge of the intellect upon art... To interpret is to impoverish... The only interesting answers are those which destroy the questions." - Susan Sontag
"The things that will destroy America are prosperity-at-any-price, peace-at-any-price, safety-first instead of duty-first, the love of soft living and the get-rich-quick theory of life." - Theodore “Teddy” Roosevelt
"Intelligence must follow faith, never precede it, and never destroy it." - Thomas Kempis, aka Thomas à Kempis, Thomas von Kempen, Thomas Haemerkken or Hammerlein or Hemerken or Hämerken
"The vulgarity of inanimate things requires time to get accustomed to; but living, breathing, bustling, plotting, planning, human vulgarity is a species of moral ipecacuanha enough to destroy any comfort." - Thomas Carlyle
"Evil must never be fought with rage or hatred, for that will only make it stronger. You must never fear the evil ones, for your fear will consume and destroy you. Instead, fight the evil spirits with love and compassion, for those are our greatest weapons." - Tom Brown, Jr.
"Complacency makes one as guilty as those who destroy the Earth." - Tom Brown, Jr.
"Crows pick out the eyes of the dead when they are no longer of any use. But flatterers destroy the souls of the living by blinding their eyes." - Maximus of Tyre, fully Cassius Maximus Tyrius NULL
"Hate is death, forgiveness is life. Forgiveness works the miracle of change. When Lincoln was asked whey he did not destroy his enemies he replied: “If I make my enemies my friends, don’t I then destroy them?”... Forgiveness is the way to personal peace." - Wilferd Peterson, fully Wilferd Arlan Peterson
"When liberty destroys order, the hunger for order will destroy liberty." - Will Durant, fully William James "Will" Durant
"Those men who destroy a healthful constitution of body by intemperance and an irregular life do as manifestly kill themselves as those who hang or poison or drown themselves." - William Shakespeare