This site is dedicated to the memory of Dr. Alan William Smolowe who gave birth to the creation of this database.
"If we choose a weak and foolish speculation as a primary textbook illustration (falsely assuming that the tale possesses a weight of history and a sanction of evidence), then we are in for trouble - as critics properly nail the particular weakness, and then assume that the whole theory must be in danger if supporters choose such a fatuous case as a primary illustration." - Stephan Jay Gould
"It is so hard for an evolutionary biologist to write about extinction caused by human stupidity. […] Let me then float an unconventional plea, the inverse of the usual argument. […] The extinction of Partula is unfair to Partula. That is the conventional argument, and I do not challenge its primacy. But we need a humanistic ecology as well, both for the practical reason that people will always touch people more than snails do or can, and for the moral reason that humans are legitimately the measure of all ethical questions—for these are our issues, not nature's." - Stephan Jay Gould
"The effects of general change [in literature] are most tellingly recorded not in alteration of the best products, but in the transformation of the most ordinary workaday books; for when potboilers adopt the new style, then the revolution is complete." - Stephan Jay Gould
"The equation of evolution with progress represents our strongest cultural impediment to a proper understanding of this greatest biological revolution in the history of human thought." - Stephan Jay Gould
"The theory of punctuated equilibrium, proposed by Niles Eldredge and myself, is not, as so often misunderstood, a radical claim for truly sudden change, but a recognition that ordinary processes of speciation, properly conceived as glacially slow by the standard of our own life-span, do not resolve into geological time as long sequences of insensibly graded intermediates (the traditional, or gradualistic, view), but as geologically sudden origins at single bedding planes." - Stephan Jay Gould
"If self-denial be the greatest part of godliness, the great letter in the alphabet of religion, self-love is the great letter in the alphabet of practical atheism. Self is the great antichrist and anti-God in the world, that sets up itself above all that is called God; self-love is the captain of that black band: it sits in the temple of God, and would be adored as God. Self-love begins; but denying the power of godliness, which is the same with denying the ruling power of God, ends the list." - Stephen Charnock
"The human capacity for guilt is such that people can always find ways to blame themselves" - Stephen Hawking
"I have never lived a life so much larger than death." - Stephen Levine
"Four features of a good speech: 1. Clarity – achieved if you have a good outline. 2. Charity – praise the audience. 3. Brevity – JFK believed anything worth saying can be covered in a 20 minute speech. 4. Levity – as evidenced by Kennedy’s ironic wit." - Ted Sorensen, fully Theodore Chalkin "Ted" Sorensen
"Our surest protection against assault from abroad has been not all our guards, gates and guns, or even our two oceans, but our essential goodness as a people. Our richest asset has been not our material wealth but our values." - Ted Sorensen, fully Theodore Chalkin "Ted" Sorensen
"War is not merely justifiable, but imperative upon honorable men, upon an honorable nation, where peace can only be obtained by the sacrifice of conscientious conviction or of national welfare." - Theodore “Teddy” Roosevelt
"When you feel anger arising, remember to return to your breathing and follow it. The other person may see that you are practicing, and she may even apologize." - Thich Nhất Hanh
"A true delineation of the smallest man is capable of interesting the greatest man." - Thomas Carlyle
"If they be inhabited, what a scope for misery and folly; if they be na inhabited, what a waste of space." - Thomas Carlyle
"Give way to the Better if way to the Better there be, It exacts a full look at the Worst." - Thomas Hardy
"To make covenants with brute beasts is impossible, because not understanding our speech, they understand not, nor accept of any translation of right, nor can translate any right to another; and without mutual acception, there is no covenant. - Thomas Hobbes, Leviathan, pt.I, ch.14, 1651." - Thomas Hobbes
"Whatsoever therefore is consequent to a time of Warre, where every man is Enemy to every man; the same is consequent to the time, wherein men live without other security, than what their own strength, and their own invention shall furnish them withall. In such condition, there is no place for Industry; because the fruit thereof is uncertain: and consequently no Culture of the Earth; no Navigation, nor use of the commodities that may be imported by Sea; no commodious Building; no Instruments of moving, and removing, such things as require much force; no Knowledge of the face of the Earth; no account of Time; no Arts; no Letters; no Society; and which is worst of all, continual fear, and danger of violent death; And the life of man, solitary, poore, nasty, brutish, and short." - Thomas Hobbes
"When a body is once in motion, it moveth, unless something else hinder it, eternally; and whatsoever hindereth it cannot in an instant, but in time and by degrees, quite extinguish it; and, as we see in the water though the wind cease the waves give not over rolling for a long time after: so also it happeneth in that motion which is made in the internal parts of a man, then, when he sees, dreams, etc. For, after the object is removed, or the eye shut, we still retain an image of the thing seen, though more obscure than when we see it. And this is it the Latins call ‘imagination,’ from the image made in seeing; and apply the same, though improperly, to all the other senses. But the Greeks call it ‘fancy,’ which signifies ‘appearance,’ and is as proper to one sense as to another. ‘Imagination,’ therefore, is nothing but ‘decaying sense,’ and is found in men, and many other living creatures, as well sleeping as waking." - Thomas Hobbes
"An equal application of law to every condition of man is fundamental." - Thomas Jefferson
"I am an Epicurean. I consider the genuine (not the imputed) doctrines of Epicurus as containing everything rational in moral philosophy which Greek and Roman leave to us." - Thomas Jefferson
"I will not say that public life is the line for making a fortune. But it furnishes a decent and honorable support, and places one's children on good grounds for public favor." - Thomas Jefferson
"Question with boldness even the existence of a God; because, if there be one, he must more approve of the homage of reason, than that of blind-folded fear... Do not be frightened from this inquiry from any fear of its consequences. If it ends in the belief that there is no God, you will find incitements to virtue in the comfort and pleasantness you feel in its exercise..." - Thomas Jefferson
"The character of our coasts, remarkable in considerable parts of it for admitting no vessels of size to pass near the shores, would entitle us, in reason, to as broad a margin of protected navigation, as any nation whatever. Not proposing, however, at this time, and without a respectful and friendly communication with the Powers interested in this navigation, to fix on a distance to which we may ultimately insist on the right of protection, the President gives instructions to the officers, acting under this authority, to consider those heretofore given them as restrained for the present to the distance of one sea-league, or three geographical miles from the sea-shore. This distance can admit of no opposition as it is recognized by treaties between some of the Powers with whom we are connected in commerce and navigation, and is as little or less than is claimed by any of them on their own coasts." - Thomas Jefferson
"Businesses, are, in reality, quasi-religious sects. When you go to work in one, you embrace A New Faith. And if they are really big businesses, you progress from faith to a kind of mystique. Belief in the product, preaching the product, in the end the product becomes the focus of a transcendental experience. Through “the product” one communes with the vast forces of life, nature, and history that are expressed in business." - Thomas Merton
"Do not be too quick to condemn the man who no longer believes in God for it is perhaps your own coldness and avarice and mediocrity and materialism and selfishness that have chilled his faith." - Thomas Merton
"In the woods I can think of nothing except God." - Thomas Merton
"It is when we pray truly that we really are. Our being is brought to a high perfection by this. 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. This new language of prayer has to come out of something that transcends all our traditions, and comes out of the immediacy of love. Prayer and love are learned in the hour when prayer becomes impossible and your heart has turned to stone." - Thomas Merton
"Prayer is the movement of trust, of gratitude, of adoration, or of sorrow, that places us before God, seeing both Him and ourselves in the light of His infinite truth, and moves us to ask Him for the mercy, the spiritual strength, the material help, that we all need. The man whose prayer is so pure that he never asks God for anything does not know who God is, and does not know who he is himself: for he does not know his own need of God. All true prayer somehow confesses our absolute dependence on the Lord of life and death. It is, therefore, a deep and vital contact with Him whom we know not only as Lord but as Father. It is when we pray truly that we really are. Our being is brought to a high perfection by this." - Thomas Merton
"Unless political decisions rest on a foundation of something better and higher than politics, they can never do any real good for men." - Thomas Merton
"And as a man, who is attached to a prostitute, is unfitted to choose or judge of a wife, so any prepossession in favour of a rotten constitution of government will disable us from discerning a good one." - Thomas Paine
"It is not a God, just and good, but a devil, under the name of God, that the Bible describes." - Thomas Paine
"Men did not make the earth... It is the value of the improvements only, and not the earth itself, that is individual property... Every proprietor owes to the community a ground rent for the land which he holds." - Thomas Paine
"There is a natural firmness in some minds, which cannot be unlocked by trifles, but which, when unlocked, discovers a cabinet of fortitude." - Thomas Paine
"To establish any mode to abolish war, however advantageous it might be to Nations, would be to take from such Government the most lucrative of its branches." - Thomas Paine
"Love to faults is always blind; Always is to joy inclin’d, Lawless, wing’d and unconfin’d, And breaks all chains from every mind. Deceit to secrecy confin’d, Lawful, cautious and refin’d; To anything but interest blind, And forges fetters for the mind." - William Blake
"Thousands of pulpit orators have swayed their audiences as a wind sways standing corn; but in the result, those who were most affected differed nothing from their former selves. An effect of eloquence is sufficient to account for a vast amount of feeling at the moment; but to trace to this a moral power, by which a man, for his life-long, overcomes his besetting sins, and adorns his name with Christian virtues, is to make sport of human nature." - William Arthur
"Time is the mercy of eternity; without time's swiftness which is the swiftest of all things: all were eternal torment." - William Blake
"A gambler is nothing but a man who makes his living out of hope." - William Bolitho, pen name for Charles William Ryall
"If, as it appears, it was an act of terrorists, then we will do everything in our power to track them down and hold them accountable." - William Cohen, fully William Sebastian Cohen
"Nothing but you can lay hold of my mind, and that can lay hold of nothing but you." - William Congreve
"Every man meets his Waterloo at last." - Wendell Phillips
"The old Hindoo saw, in his dream, the human race led out to its various fortunes. - First, men were in chains that went back to an iron hand - then he saw them led by threads from the brain, which went upward to an unseen hand. The first was despotism, iron, and ruling by force. - The last was civilization, ruling by ideas." - Wendell Phillips
"At issue in the Hiss Case was the question whether this sick society, which we call Western civilization, could in its extremity still cast up a man whose faith in it was so great that he would voluntarily abandon those things which men hold good, including life, to defend it." - Whittaker Chambers, born Jay Vivian Chambers, aka Jay David Whittaker Chambers
"It is part of the failure of the West to understand that it is at grips with an enemy having no moral viewpoint in common with itself, that two irreconcilable viewpoints and standards of judgment, two irreconcilable moralities, proceeding from two irreconcilable readings of man’s fate and future are involved, and, hence, their conflict is irrepressible." - Whittaker Chambers, born Jay Vivian Chambers, aka Jay David Whittaker Chambers