This site is dedicated to the memory of Dr. Alan William Smolowe who gave birth to the creation of this database.
"I refuse to accept the cynical notion that nation after nation must spiral down a militaristic stairway into the hell of thermonuclear destruction. I believe that unarmed truth and unconditional love will have the final word in reality. This is why right temporarily defeated is stronger than evil triumphant." - Martin Luther King, Jr.
"Hell is the ego, sated with its own satisfied wishes, having to consume itself forever with no hope of release." - Fulton Sheen, fully Archbishop Fulton John Sheen
"I have never seen the slightest scientific proof of the religious theories of heaven and hell, of future life for individuals, or of a personal God." - Thomas Edison, fully Thomas Alva Edison
"By means of shrewd lies, unremittingly repeated, it is possible to make people believe that heaven is hell and hell heaven. The greater the lie, the more readily it will be believed." - Adolph Hitler
"I read about an Eskimo hunter who asked the local missionary priest, “If I did not know about God and sin, would I go to hell?” “No,” said the priest, “not if you did not know.” “Then why,” asked the Eskimo earnestly, “did you tell me?”" - Annie Dillard
"Hell is the place where one has ceased to hope." - A.J. Cronin, fully Archibald Joseph "A.J." Cronin
"The heaven of the envied is hell for the envious." - Baltasar Gracián
"Hell itself must yield to industry." - Ben Jonson
"Many might go to Heaven with half the labor they go to Hell." - Ben Jonson
"No greater hell than to be slave to fear." - Ben Jonson
"Men fear thought as they fear nothing else on earth- even more than death. Thought is subversive, and revolutionary, destructive and terrible; though its merciless to privilege, established institutions, and comfortable habits; thought is anarchic and lawless, indifferent to authority, careless to the well-trained wisdom of ages. Thought looks into the pit of hell and is not afraid... Thought is great and swift and free, the light of the world and the chief glory of man. But if thought is to become the possession of the many, and not the privilege of the few, we must have done with fear. It is fear that holds man back - fear that their cherished beliefs should prove delusions, fear lest the institutions by which they live should prove harmful, fear least they themselves prove less worthy to the respect they have supposed themselves to be." - Bertrand Russell, fully Bertrand Arthur William Russell, 3rd Earl Russell
"Men fear thought as they fear nothing else on earth more than ruin more even than death.... Thought is subversive and revolutionary, destructive and terrible, thought is merciless to privilege, established institutions, and comfortable habit. Thought looks into the pit of hell and is not afraid. Thought is great and swift and free, the light of the world, and the chief glory of man." - Bertrand Russell, fully Bertrand Arthur William Russell, 3rd Earl Russell
"The infliction of cruelty with a good conscience is a delight to moralists. That is why they invented Hell." - Bertrand Russell, fully Bertrand Arthur William Russell, 3rd Earl Russell
"Thought is subversive and revolutionary, destructive and terrible, thought is merciless to privilege, established institutions and comfortable habit. Thought looks into the pit of hell and is not afraid. Thought is great and swift and free, the light of the world, and the chief glory of man." - Bertrand Russell, fully Bertrand Arthur William Russell, 3rd Earl Russell
"The uncontrolled mind cannot concentrate. Who cannot concentrate has no peace, without peace, where is happiness?" - Bhagavad Gītā, simply known as Gita NULL
"Knowledge is indeed better than blind practice; meditation excels knowledge; surrender of the fruits of action is more esteemed than meditation. Peace immediately follows surrender... Lust, anger, and greed, these three are the soul-destroying gates of hell" - Bhagavad Gītā, simply known as Gita NULL
"Hell has three doors: lust, rage, and greed." - Bhagavad Gītā, simply known as Gita NULL
"Hell has three gates: lust, anger, and greed." - Bhagavad Gītā, simply known as Gita NULL
"A mind enlightened is heaven; a mind darkened is hell." - Chinese Proverbs
"Hell hath no limits, nor is circumscrib'd in one self place, for where we are is hell, and where hell is, must we euer be." - Christopher Marlowe
"Hell is but the collected ruins of the moral world, and sin is the principle that has made them." - Christopher Marlowe
"Ours is a world where people don't know what they want and are willing to go through hell to get it." - Don Marquis, fully Donald Robert Perry Marquis
"Everything I did in my life that was worthwhile I caught hell for." - Earl Warren
"‘Tis the beginning of hell in this life, and a passion not to be excused. Every other sin hath some pleasure annexed to it, or will admit of an excuse: envy alone wants both." - Edmund Burke
"Life without absorbing occupation is hell - joy consists in forgetting life." - Elbert Green Hubbard
"There is no hell like a troubled conscience." - English Proverbs
"Without tolerance, our world turns into hell." - Friedrich Dürrenmatt
"A lifetime of happiness! No man alive could bear it: it would be hell on earth." - George Bernard Shaw
"To be in hell is to drift: to be in heaven is to steer." - George Bernard Shaw
"But a lifetime of happiness! No man alive could bear it: it would be hell on earth." - George Bernard Shaw
"Death is for many of us the gate of hell: but we are inside on the way out, not outside on the way in." - George Bernard Shaw
"Hell is paved with good intentions, not with bad ones." - George Bernard Shaw
"The secret of being miserable is to have leisure to bother about whether you are happy or not. The cure for it is occupation... A perpetual holiday is a good working definition of hell." - George Bernard Shaw
"In Hell there is no hope, and consequently no duty, no work, nothing to be gained by praying, nothing to be lost by doing what you like. Hell, in short, being a place where you have nothing to do but amuse yourself, is the paradise of the worthless." - George Bernard Shaw
"Hell is full of good meanings and wishings." - George Herbert
"Hell, Madame, is to love no longer." - Georges Bernanos
"Hell begins on the day when God grants us a clear vision of all that we might have achieved, of all the gifts which we have wasted, of all that we might have done which we did not do... For me, the conception of hell lies in two words: “too late.”" - Gian-Carlo Menotti
"I never give them hell; I just tell them the truth and they think it is hell." - Harry S. Truman
"For that man is detested by me as the gates of hell, whose outward words conceal his inmost thoughts." - Homer NULL
"There is no such place in the world from which a path would not lead to hell." - Hungarian Proverbs
"A generous man has never gone to hell." - Irish Proverbs
"Not sharp revenge, nor hell itself can find a fiercer torment than a guilty mind." - John Dryden
"The pride of dying rich raises the loudest laugh in hell." - John Foster, fully John Watson Foster
"Jealousy is the injured lover's hell." - John Milton
"If the will, which is the law of our nature, were withdrawn from our memory, fancy, understanding, and reason, no other hell could equal, for a spiritual being, what we should then feel from the anarchy of our powers. It would be conscious madness, a horrid thought!" - John Milton
"The mind is its own place, and in itself can make a heaven of hell, and a hell of heaven." - John Milton
"Hell is the place of people who could not yield their ego system to allow the grace of a transpersonal power to move them." - Joseph Campbell