This site is dedicated to the memory of Dr. Alan William Smolowe who gave birth to the creation of this database.
"It is true that no people have yet come near to establishing the ideal society. Yet Humanism asserts that human reason and human efforts are our best and, indeed, only hope; and that our refusal to recognize this point is one of the chief causes of our many human failures throughout history." - Corliss Lamont
"Throughout human history, progress has come through the men and women who dared to challenge the precepts and dogmas that curtailed freedoms. Freethinking (which includes skepticism, rationalism, unbelief, atheism, agnosticism, humanism and so forth) has made great and lasting contributions to human freedom, human rights, and human equality." - Gerald Alexander Larue
"The history of a nation is, unfortunately, too easily written as the history of its dominant class." - Kwame Nkrumah
"Throughout history, individuals have solved apparently impossible problems during moments of intense inner clarity. Variously called inspiration, peak performance, creative insight, and higher creativity, such moments produce illuminated understanding, which can then be shaped, revised, and carried forward by skill alone." - Helen Palmer
"Kindness [has the] power to create change, to make things happen. And in a period of human history in which we are obsessed with change - personal or political - and are unsure whether it is possible at all, kindness could be our salvation." - Anita Roddick
"The smallest bookstore still contains more ideas of worth than have been presented in the entire history of television." - Andrew Ross
"To see what students learn in school, look at how they leave school. If they leave thinking that reading and writing are difficult and pointless, that mathematics is confusing, that history is irrelevant, and that art is a bore, then that is what they have been taught. People learn what is demonstrated to them, and this reality will not change to suit the convenience of politicians and educations administrators." - Frank Smith
"A wise man does not try to hurry history. Many wars have been avoided by patience and many have been precipitated by reckless haste." - Adlai Ewing Stevenson
"With the unlocking of the atom, mankind crossed one of the great watersheds of history. We have entered uncharted lands. The maps of strategy and diplomacy by which we guided ourselves until yesterday no longer reveal the way. Fusion and fission revolutionized the entire foundation of human affairs." - Adlai Ewing Stevenson
"With the unlocking of the atom, mankind crossed one of the great watersheds of history. We have entered uncharted lands. The maps of strategy and diplomacy by which we guided ourselves until yesterday no longer reveal the way. Fusion and fission revolutionized the entire foundation of human affairs." -
"With the unlocking of the atom, mankind crossed one of the great watersheds of history. We have entered uncharted lands. The maps of strategy and diplomacy by which we guided ourselves until yesterday no longer reveal the way. Fusion and fission revolutionized the entire foundation of human affairs." -
"Politics is history in the making." - Adolph Hitler
"Our history is the history of a majority of the species, yet the struggles of women for a “human” status have been relegated to footnotes to the sidelines. Above all, women’s relationships with women have been denied or neglected as a force in history." - Adrienne Rich, fully Adrienne Cecil Rich
"To grow, you must be willing to let your present and future be totally unlike your past. Your history is not your destiny." - Alan Cohen
"If, after all, men cannot always make history have meaning, they can always act so that their own lives have one." - Albert Camus
"Reality is a perpetual process of evolution, propelled by the fertile impact of antagonisms which are resolved each time into a superior synthesis which, itself, creates its opposite and again causes history to advance." - Albert Camus
"To have a sense of history one must consider oneself a piece of history." - Alfred Kazin
"When we consider what religion is for mankind, and what science is, it is no exaggeration to say that the future course of history depends upon the decision of this generation as to the relations between them." - Alfred North Whitehead
"Books won’t stay banned. They won’t burn. Ideas won’t go to jail. In the long run of history, the censor and the inquisitor have always lost. The only sure weapon against bad ideals is better ideas. The source of better ideas is wisdom. The surest path of wisdom is a liberal education." - Alfred Whitney Griswold
"Ideas won’t go to jail. In the long run of history, the censor and the inquisitor have always lost. The only sure weapon against bad ideas is better ideas." - Alfred Whitney Griswold
"The ultimate objective of social futurism [is] not merely the transcendence of technocracy and the substitution of more humane, more far-sighted, more democratic planning, but the subjection of the process of evolution itself to conscious human guidance. For this is the supreme instant, the turning point in history at which man either vanquishes the processes of change or vanishes, at which, from being the unconscious puppet of evolution he becomes either its victim or its master." - Alvin Toffler
"History, n. An account mostly false, of events mostly unimportant, which are brought about by rulers mostly knaves, and soldiers mostly fools." - Ambrose Gwinett Bierce
"Poetry is something more philosophic and of graver import than history, since its statements are of nature of universals, whereas those of history are of singulars." - Aristotle NULL
"The poet’s function is to describe, not the thing that has happened, but a kind of thing that might happen… Poetry is something more philosophic and of graver import than history, since its statements are of the nature rather of universals, whereas those of history are singulars." - Aristotle NULL
"My own view of history is that human beings do have genuine freedom to make choices. Our destiny is not predetermined for us; we determine it for ourselves." - Arnold J. Toynbee, fully Arnold Joseph Toynbee
"The history of almost every civilization furnishes examples of geographical expansion coinciding with deterioration in quality." - Arnold J. Toynbee, fully Arnold Joseph Toynbee
"The things that make good headlines attract our attention because they are on the surface of the stream of life and they distract our attention from the slower, impalpable, imponderable movements that work below the surface and penetrate to the depths. But, of course, it is really these deeper, slower movement that, in the end, make history, and it is they that stand out huge in retrospect, when the sensational passing events have dwindled, in perspective, to their true proportions." - Arnold J. Toynbee, fully Arnold Joseph Toynbee
"The most persistent sound which reverberates through man's history is the beating of war drums." - Arthur Koestler
"Science and technology revolutionize our lives, but memory, tradition and myth frame our response. Expelled from individual consciousness by the rush of change, history finds its revenge by stamping the collective unconscious with habits, values, expectations, dreams. The dialectic between past and future will continue to form our lives." - Arthur Meier Schlesinger, Jr., born Arthur Bancroft Schlesinger
"To labor and not see the end of our labors, to sow and not to reap, to be removed from this earthly scene before our work has been appreciated… is a law so common in the highest characters of history, that none can be said to be altogether exempt from its operation." - Arthur Penrhyn Stanley, known as Dean Stanley
"Christianity has this peculiar disadvantage, that unlike other religions, it is not a pure system of doctrine: its chief and essential feature is that it is a history, a series of events, a collection of facts, a statement of the actions and sufferings of individuals: it is this history which constitutes dogma, and belief in it is salvation." - Arthur Schopenhauer
"History has always been the favorite study of those who wish to learn something without having to face the effort demanded by any branch of real knowledge, which taxes the intelligence." - Arthur Schopenhauer
"Essentially religion is not in history. The essence of religion is pure, timeless awareness; and since this is participation in the Immutable, it is by its very nature immune to history. Mentally and doctrinally, however, the awareness is explained differently indifferent religions. However, religion as an institution controlling life in every domain - philosophy, art, literature, social life, etc. - is subject to history. As an institution every religion changes, and the change is always a decline... a decline arrested by periodical restitutions." - Arthur W Osborn