This site is dedicated to the memory of Dr. Alan William Smolowe who gave birth to the creation of this database.
"It has always been my view that terrorism is not spawned by the poverty of money; it is spawned by the poverty of dignity. Humiliation is the most underestimated force in international relations and in human relations. It is when people or nations are humiliated that they really lash out and engage in extreme violence." - Thomas L. Friedman, fully Thomas Lauren Friedman
"There is no future in vanilla for most companies in a flat world. A lot of vanilla making in software and other areas is going to shift to open-source communities." - Thomas L. Friedman, fully Thomas Lauren Friedman
"With Saddam rattled, now is the time to really rattle his cage: Turn up the volume on Radio Free Iraq to extra loud and call for his ouster 24 hours a day: ”All Saddam, all the time.” Take steps to have Saddam declared a war criminal by the U.N. Blow up a different power station in Iraq every week, so no one knows when the lights will go off or who’s in charge. Offer a reward for removing Saddam from office. Use every provocation by Saddam to blow up another Iraqi general’s home." - Thomas L. Friedman, fully Thomas Lauren Friedman
"Do not mistake me. Our interest just now is in the life of complete obedience to God, not in amazing revelations of His glory graciously granted only to some. Yet the amazing experiences of the mystics leave a permanent residue, a God-subdued, a God-possessed will. States of consciousness are fluctuating. The vision fades. But holy and listening and alert obedience remains, as the core and kernel of a God-intoxicated life, as the abiding pattern of sober, workaday living. And some are led into the state of complete obedience by this well-nigh passive route, wherein God alone seems to be the actor and we seem to be wholly acted upon. And our wills are melted and dissolved and made pliant, being firmly fixed in Him, and He wills in us. But in contrast to this passive route to complete obedience most people must follow what Jean-Nicholas Grou calls the active way, wherein we must struggle and, like Jacob of old, wrestle with the angel until the morning dawns, the active way wherein the will must be subjected bit by bit, piecemeal and progressively, to the divine Will." - Thomas R. Kelly, fully Thomas Raymond Kelly
"Statesmen have to bend to the collective will of their peoples or be broken" - Woodrow Wilson, fully Thomas Woodrow Wilson
"There is no higher religion than human service. To work for the common good is the greatest creed." - Woodrow Wilson, fully Thomas Woodrow Wilson
"We have come to be one of the worst ruled, one of the most completely controlled and dominated Governments in the world." - Woodrow Wilson, fully Thomas Woodrow Wilson
"The bravest are surely those who have the clearest vision of what is before them, glory and danger alike, and yet notwithstanding, go out to meet it." - Thucydides NULL
"Words had to change their ordinary meaning and to take that which was now given them. Reckless audacity came to be considered the courage of a loyal ally; prudent hesitation, specious cowardice; moderation was held to be a cloak for unmanliness; ability to see all sides of a question, inaptness to act on any. Frantic violence became the attribute of manliness; cautious plotting, a justifiable means of self-defense. The advocate of extreme measures was always trustworthy; his opponent a man to be suspected. To succeed in a plot was to have a shrewd head, to divine a plot a still shrewder; but to try to provide against having to do either was to break up your party and to be afraid of your adversaries." - Thucydides NULL
"Surely the fact that a uniformed police officer is wearing his hair below his collar will make him no less identifiable as a policeman." - Thurgood Marshall
"The least degree of ambiguity, which leaves the mind in suspense as to the meaning, ought to be avoided with the greatest care." - Hugh Blair
"The now legendary Fonda photo shows her with diminutive Vietnamese women examining an antiaircraft weapon, implying in the rightist imagination that she relished the thought of killing those American pilots innocently flying overhead." - Tom Hayden, fully Thomas Emmet "Tom" Hayden
"A stony adversary, an inhuman wretch, uncapable of pity, void and empty from any dram of mercy. The Merchant of Venice, act iv, Scene 1" - William Shakespeare
"A tear for pity and a hand open as day for melting charity. Henry IV, Act iv, Scene 4" - William Shakespeare
"Ah, she doth teach the torches to burn bright, it seems she hangs against the cheek of night like a rich jewel from an Ethiope's ear, beauty too rich for use, for earth too dear." - William Shakespeare
"Angels and ministers of grace defend us. Be thou a spirit of health, or goblin damned, bring with thee airs from heaven, or blasts from hell, be thy intents wicked, or charitable, thou com'st in such a questionable shape, that I will speak to thee." - William Shakespeare
"There is at present in the world a cold reserve that keeps man at a distance from man. There is an art in the practice of which individuals communicate forever, without anyone telling his neighbor what estimate he forms of his attainments and character, how they ought to be employed, and how to be improved. There is a sort of domestic tactics, the object of which is to elude curiosity, and keep up the tenor of conversation, without the disclosure either of our feelings or opinions. The friend of justice will have no object more deeply at heart than the annihilation of this duplicity. The man whose heart overflows with kindness for his species will habituate himself to consider, in each successive occasion of social intercourse, how that occasion may be most beneficently improved. Among the topics to which he will be anxious to awaken attention, politics will occupy a principal share." - William Godwin
"An acre of performance is worth a whole world of promise." - William Howells, fully William Dean Howells, aka The Dean of American Letters
"I am done with great things and big plans, great institutions and big success. I am for those tiny, invisible, loving, human forces that work from individual to individual, creeping through the crannies of the world like so many rootlets, or like the capillary oozing of water, which, if given time, will rend the hardest monuments of pride." - William James
"Objective evidence and certitude are doubtless very fine ideals to play with, but where on this moonlit and dream-visited planet are they found?" - William James
"So long as antimilitarists propose no substitute for war's disciplinary function, no moral equivalent of war, analogous, as one might say, to the mechanical equivalent of heat, so long they fail to realize the full inwardness of the situation." - William James
"The great thing, then, in all education, is to make our nervous system our ally instead of our enemy." - William James
"The human individual lives usually far within his limits; he possesses powers of various sorts which he habitually fails to use. He energizes below his maximum, and he behaves below his optimum. . . . it is only an inveterate habit -- the habit of inferiority to our full self." - William James
"This sadness lies at the heart of every merely positivistic, agnostic, or naturalistic scheme of philosophy. Let sanguine healthy-mindedness do its best with its strange power of living in the moment and ignoring and forgetting, still the evil background is really there to be thought of, and the skull will grin in at the banquet. In the practical life of the individual, we know how his whole gloom or glee about any present fact depends on the remoter schemes and hopes with which it stands related. Its significance and framing give it the chief part of its value. Let it be known to lead nowhere, and however agreeable it may be in its immediacy, its glow and gilding vanish. The old man, sick with an insidious internal disease, may laugh and quaff his wine at first as well as ever, but he knows his fate now, for the doctors have revealed it; and the knowledge knocks the satisfaction out of all these functions. They are partners of death and the worm is their brother, and they turn to a mere flatness." - William James
"When you have broken the reality into concepts you never can reconstruct it in its wholeness." - William James
"We must alter our lives in order to alter our hearts, for it is impossible to live one way and pray another." - William Law
"Where has the Scripture made merit the rule or measure of charity?" - William Law
"It is extraordinary how many emotional storms one may weather in safety if one is ballasted with ever so little gold." - William (Morley Punshon) McFee
"I pondered all these things, and how men fight and lose the battle, and the thing that they fought for comes about in spite of their defeat, and when it comes turns out not to be what they meant, and other men have to fight for what they meant under another name." - William Morris
"The room was much as he had left it, festeringly untidy, though the effect was muted a little by a thick layer of dust. Half-read books and magazines nestled among piles of half-used towels. Half-pairs of socks reclined in half-drunk cups of coffee. What once had been a half-eaten sandwich had now half-turned into something that Arthur didn’t entirely want to know about. Bung a fork of lightning through this lot, he thought to himself, and you’d start the evolution of life off all over again." - Douglas Adams, fully Douglas Noel Adams
"There are some people you like immediately, some whom you think you might learn to like in the fullness of time, and some that you simply want to push away from you with a sharp stick." - Douglas Adams, fully Douglas Noel Adams
"It has become a conviction with me that psychology may in the long run do much to change the conception of the fundamental nature of the religious life, which, on the whole, is now too generally made a matter of doctrine. It is too intellectual At the doors of most churches one is met by required beliefs in a particular conception of God, in a speculative theory about the divinity of Christ, definite ideas concerning sin and salvation, the efficacy of ordinances, and the claims of supernatural revelation. What people are really seeking is access to refreshing fountains of life, sources of strength and guidance. They crave association with people and institutions which may convey to them a sense of what is most worthwhile in life and what may furnish impulsion toward real and enduring values. They know pretty well what those values are when allowed to let their own deepest desires express themselves." - Edward Scribner Ames
"It is a great thing, when the cup of bitterness is pressed to our lips, to feel that it is not fate or necessity, but divine love working upon us for good ends." - Edwin Hubbell Chapin
"On July 26, 1916, I announced to all my friends in America that from now on I resolved to write no more poems in the classical language, and to begin my experiments in writing poetry in the so-called vulgar tongue of the people." - Hu Shih, or Hú Shì
"An epigram often flashes light into regions where reason shines but dimly." - Edwin Percy Whipple
"What a man does with his wealth depends upon his idea of happiness. Those who draw prizes in life are apt to spend tastelessly, if not viciously; not knowing that it requires as much talent to spend as to make." - Edwin Percy Whipple
"Since you know you cannot see yourself so well as by reflection, I, your glass, will modestly discover to yourself that of yourself which yet you know not of." - William Shakespeare
"For you, I am even willing to suffer. Whatever pain happens to us in the future, I accept it already, just for the pleasure of being with you now. Let’s enjoy this time. It’s marvelous." - Elizabeth Gilbert
"I have far more enthusiasm in life than I have actual energy. In my excitement, I routinely take on more that I can physically or emotionally handle, which causes me to break down in quite predictable displays of dramatic exhaustion. You will be the one burdened with the job of mopping me up every time I've overextended myself and then fallen apart. This will be unbelievably tedious. I apologize in advance." - Elizabeth Gilbert
"I wonder if I am capable of being somebody’s sun, somebody’s everything. Am I centered enough now to be the center of somebody else’s life?" - Elizabeth Gilbert
"Some days are meant to be counted, others are meant to be weighed." - Elizabeth Gilbert
"The inability to open up to hope is what blocks trust, and blocked trust is the reason for blighted dreams." - Elizabeth Gilbert
"Your problem is you don't understand what that word means. People think a soul mate is your perfect fit, and that's what everyone wants. But a true soul mate is a mirror, the person who shows you everything that's holding you back, the person who brings you to your attention so you can change your life. A true soul mate is probably the most important person you'll ever meet, because they tear down your walls and smack you awake. But to live with a soul mate forever? Nah. Too painful. Soul mates, they come into your life just to reveal another layer of yourself to you, and then they leave." - Elizabeth Gilbert
"The Goddamn human race deserves itself, and as far as I'm concerned it can have it." - Elizabeth Janeway, born Elizabeth Ames Hall
"The memory of my own suffering has prevented me from ever shadowing one young soul with the superstition of the Christian religion." - Elizabeth Cady Stanton
"We found nothing grand in the history of the Jews nor in the morals inculcated in the Pentateuch. I know of no other books that so fully teach the subjection and degradation of woman." - Elizabeth Cady Stanton
"Whatever the theories may be of woman's dependence on man, in the supreme moments of her life he cannot bear her burdens." - Elizabeth Cady Stanton
"So long has the myth of feminine inferiority prevailed that women themselves find it hard to believe that their own sex was once and for a very long time the superior and dominant sex." - Elizabeth Gould Davis
"I have in sincerity pledged myself to your service, as so many of you are pledged to mine. Throughout all my life and with all my heart I shall strive to be worthy of your trust." - Elizabeth II, born Elizabeth Alexandra May NULL