This site is dedicated to the memory of Dr. Alan William Smolowe who gave birth to the creation of this database.
"Never in the history of the world have so many people been so rich; never in the history of the world have so many of those same people felt themselves so poor." - Lewis H. Lapham
"History is only a confused heap of facts." - Lord Chesterfield, Philip Dormer Stanhope, 4th Earl of Chesterfield
"Today the children of our public schools are taught more of the history, heroes, legends, and sagas of the wold world than of the land of their birth, while they are furnished with little material on the people and institutions that are truly American." - Luther Standing Bear, aka Ota Kte or Mochunozhin
"Life is what we are alive to. It is not length, but breadth. To be alive only to appetite, pleasure, pride, money-making, and not to goodness and kindness, purity and love, history, poetry, music, flowers, stars, God and eternal hopes, it is to be all but dead." - Maltbie Babcock, fully Maltbie Davenport Babcock
"Thanks to television, for the first time the young are seeing history made before it is censored by their leaders." - Margaret Mead
"As the greatest single social influence during the formative years, schools have been the instruments of our greatest denial, unconsciousness, conformity, and broken connections. Just as allopathic medicine treats symptoms without concern for the whole system, schools break knowledge and experience into “subjects,” relentlessly turning wholes into parts, flowers into petals, history into events, without ever restoring continuity... Worse yet, not only the mind is broken, but too often, so is the spirit. Allopathic teaching produces the equivalent of iatrogenic, or doctor-caused” illness - teacher-caused learning disabilities. We might call these pedogenic illnesses. The child who may have come to school intact, with the budding courage to risk and explore, finds stress enough to permanently diminish that adventure." - Marilyn Ferguson
"The great man is powerful, involuntarily and composedly powerful, but he is not avid for power. What he is avid for is the realization of what he has in mind, the incarnation of the spirit. So long as a man's power is bound to the goal, the work, the calling, it is, in itself, neither good nor evil, only a suitable or unsuitable instrument. But as soon as this bond with the goal is broken off or loosened, and the man ceases to think of power as the capacity to do something, but thinks of it as a possession, then his power, being cut off and self-satisfied, is evil and corrupts the history of the world." - Martin Buber
"[The Bible] is the history of God’s disappointments." - Martin Buber
"People whose history and future were threatened each day by extinction considered that it was only by divine intervention that they were able to live at all. I find it interesting that the meanest life, the poorest existence, is attributed to God’s will, but as human beings become more affluent, as their living standard and style begin to ascend the material scale, God descends the scale of responsibility at a commensurate speed." - Maya Angelou, born Marguerite Annie Johnson
"When Descartes said, “I think, therefore I am,” he uttered a very profound thought. But there are times in the history of peoples when thought alone does not prove their existence. A people may “think”: and yet its sons, with their thoughts and in spite of them, may be turned into a herd of slaves - or into soap. There are times when everything in you cries out: your very self-respect as a human being lies in your resistance to evil. We fight, therefore we are!" - Menachem Begin
"History is taught with little regard to the ecology, the economics, the sociology or psychology - let alone the biology - that are necessary to understand human action. The same is true of all other academic subjects. Yet if we continue to teach physics separately from ethics, or molecular biology without concern for empathy, the chances of a monstrous evolutionary miscarriage are going to increase. To avoid these possibilities, it is imperative to begin thinking about a truly integrative, global education that takes seriously the actual interconnectedness of causes and effects." - Mihaly Csikszentmihalyi, native form is Csíkszentmihályi Mihály
"Freedom is a rare and delicate plant. Our minds tell us, and history confirms, that the great threat to freedom is the concentration of power. Government is necessary to preserve our freedom, it is necessary to preserve our freedom. It is an instrument through which we can exercise our political freedom; yet by concentrating power in political hands, it is also a threat to freedom." -
"Problems linked to illness, such as psychic crises, but also pains of a physiological nature (fever, migraines, rheumatic pains) can be assumed to be just so many initiatory trials. Uncovering the religious significance of illness and physical pain constitutes in effect shamanism’s essential contribution to the history of spirit." - Mircea Eliade
"Ultimately, there can be no disagreement between history, science, philosophy, and theology. Where there is disagreement, there is either ignorance or error." - Mortimer J. Adler, fully Mortimer Jerome Adler
"History is but a fable [a set of lies] agreed upon." - Napoleon Bonaparte, Napoleon I
"Knowledge and history are the enemies of religion." - Napoleon Bonaparte, Napoleon I
"What is history but a fable agreed upon?" - Napoleon Bonaparte, Napoleon I
"It is essential that we enable young people to see themselves as participants in one of the most exciting eras in history, and to have a sense of purpose in relation to it." - Nelson Rockefeller, fully Nelson Aldrich Rockefeller
"A library, to modify the famous metaphor of Socrates, should be the delivery room for the birth of ideas - a place where history comes to life." - Norman Cousins
"History is a vast early warning system." - Norman Cousins
"The desire to lead a more purposeful life, to search for ultimate meanings, is a central theme of human experience... This spiritual urge is undeniable. From the beginning of human history, we have been embarked on a search for transcendent meaning." - Norman Lear, fully Norman Milton Lear
"Disobedience, in the eyes of any one who has read history, is man's original virtue. It is through disobedience that progress has been made, through disobedience and through rebellion." - Oscar Wilde, pen name for Fingal O'Flahertie Wills
"[Written] history is largely the glorification of the iniquities of the triumphant." - Paul Eldridge
"Little liars are makers of gossip; big liars, makers of history." - Paul Eldridge
"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
"History repeats itself. Historians repeat each other." - Philip Guedalla
"Poetry comes nearer to vital truth than history." - Plato NULL
"So very difficult a matter is it to trace and find out the truth of anything by history, when, on the one hand, those who afterwards write it find long periods of time intercepting their view, and, on the other hand, the contemporary records of any actions and lives, partly through envy and ill-will, partly through favor and flattery, pervert and distort truth." - Plutarch, named Lucius Mestrius Plutarchus after becoming Roman citizen NULL
"The study of history is in the truest sense an education and a training for political life... The most instructive, or rather the only, method of learning to bear with dignity the vicissitudes of fortune is to recall the catastrophes of others." - Polybius NULL
"To be a man of destiny is to arrive at a point in history when the only gift you have to offer has suddenly become relevant." - Quentin Crisp, born Denis Charles Pratt
"For history, the object to be discovered is not the mere event, but the thought expressed in it... All history is the history of thought." - R. G. Collingwood, fully Robert George Collingwood
"In the later nineteenth century the idea of progress became almost an article of faith. This conception was a piece of sheer metaphysics derived from evolutionary naturalism and foisted upon history by the temper of the age." - R. G. Collingwood, fully Robert George Collingwood
"Humanitarianism needs no apology... Unless we... feel it toward all men without exception, we shall have lost the chief redeeming force in human history." - Ralph Barton Perry
"Most of the great results in history are brought about by discreditable means." - Ralph Waldo Emerson
"All history becomes subjective; in other words there is properly no history, only biography." - Ralph Waldo Emerson
"All history is a record of the power of minorities, and of minorities of one." - Ralph Waldo Emerson
"All history is the decline of war, though the slow decline. All that society has yet gained is mitigation; the doctrine of the right of war still remains." - Ralph Waldo Emerson
"All things are engaged in writing their history... Every act of the man inscribes itself in the memories of its fellows, and in his own manners and face. The air is full of sounds, the sky of tokens, the ground is all memoranda and signatures, and every object covered over with hints which speak to the intelligent." - Ralph Waldo Emerson
"An institution is the lengthened shadow of one man... and all history resolves itself easily into the biography of a few stout and earnest persons. Let a man, then, know his worth, and keep things under his feet." - Ralph Waldo Emerson
"Great men have often the shortest biographies. Their real life is in their books or deeds. There is properly no history, only biography." - Ralph Waldo Emerson
"The first lesson of history is that evil is good." - Ralph Waldo Emerson
"The most fugitive word or deed, the more air of doing a thing, the intimated purpose, expresses character, and the remote results of character are civil history and events that shake or settle the world. If you act, you show character; if you sit still, you show it; if you sleep, you show it." - Ralph Waldo Emerson
"The true doctrine of omnipresence is that God reappears with all his parts in every moss and cobweb. The value of the universe contrives to throw itself into every point. If the good is there, so is the evil; if the affinity, so the repulsion; if the force, so the limitation. Thus is the universe alive. All things are moral. That soul which within us is a sentiment, outside of us is a law. We feel its inspiration; out there in history we can see its fatal strength. "It is in the world, and the world was made by it." Justice is not postponed. A perfect equity adjusts its balance in all parts of life. The dice of God are always loaded." - Ralph Waldo Emerson
"There is properly no history, only biography." - Ralph Waldo Emerson
"We cannot describe the natural history of the soul, but we know that it is divine. All things are known to the soul. It is not to be surprised by any communication. Nothing can be greater than it, let those fear and those fawn who will. The soul is in her native realm; and it is wider than space, older than time, wide as hope, rich as love. Pusillanimity and fear she refuses with a beautiful scorn; they are not for her who putteth on her coronation robes, and goes out through universal love to universal power." - Ralph Waldo Emerson
"With the Past, as past, I have nothing to do; nor with the Future as future; I live now, and will verify all past history in my own moments." - Ralph Waldo Emerson
"All history is the record of the power of minorities, and of minorities of one." - Ralph Waldo Emerson
"Most of the great results of history are brought about by discreditable means." - Ralph Waldo Emerson
"The first lesson of history is the good of evil." - Ralph Waldo Emerson