This site is dedicated to the memory of Dr. Alan William Smolowe who gave birth to the creation of this database.
"Doubtless the free play of initiative, competition between buyers and sellers, would be unthinkable if human nature had not been sullied by the Fall. The individual would give of his best in the interests of others without hope of recompense, without concern for his own interests." - Raymond Aron, fully Raymond-Claude-Ferdinand Aron
"Really to believe in human nature while striving to know the thousand forces that warp it from its ideal development-to call for and expect much from men and women, and not to be disappointed and embittered if they fall short- to try to do good with people rather than to them- this is my religion on its human side. And if God exists, I think that he must be in the warm sun, in the kindly actions of the people we know and read of, in the beautiful things of art and nature, and in the closeness of friendships." - Randolph Bourne, fully Randolph Silliman Bourne
"It is my strong conviction that a realist conception of human nature should be made a servant of an ethic of progressive justice and should not be made into a bastion of conservatism, particularly a conservatism which defends unjust privileges." - Reinhold Niebuhr, fully Karl Paul Reinhold Niebuhr
"There is a great deal of human nature in man." - Charles Kingsley
"He who has so little knowledge of human nature as to seek happiness by changing anything but his own dispositions will waste his life in fruitless efforts and multiply the griefs which he purposes to remove." - Robertson Davies
"Essentially Americanism, which in democracy, is a moraland spiritual adventure, concerned primarily with a sound and workable philosophy of life, summed up in the fatherhood of God and the brotherhood of man, respect for human personality, and recognition of the dignity and value of the individual. In his brilliant statement on The Coming Victory of Democracy, Thomas Mann tells us he believes in democracy because he believes in freedom, and he believes in freedom because he believes in human nature and the dignity of man, who is more than a depersonalized unit in the state. Man is a spiritual being whom it is the duty of the state to serve. He is more than a slave to be kept in order and submission by the crack of a master's whip. "The essential man," says he, "is not the creature who hurls down bombs on children, but the mind that devised the flying machine, the seeker and builder, not the destroyer."" - Robert Gordon Sproul
"For a nation is no stronger than the numerous little communities of which it is composed." - Russell Kirk
"One of its [James A. Garfield’s assassination] lessons, perhaps its most important lesson, is the folly, the wickedness, and the danger of the extreme and bitter partisanship which so largely prevails in our country. This partisan bitterness is greatly aggravated by that system of appointments and removals which deals with public offices as rewards for services rendered to political parties or to party leaders. Hence crowds of importunate place-hunters of whose dregs Guiteau is the type. The required reform [of the civil service] will be accomplished whenever the people imperatively demand it, not only of their Executive, but also of their legislative officers. With it, the class to which the assassin belongs will lose their occupation, and the temptation to try to administer government by assassination will be taken away." - Rutherford B. Hayes, fully Rutherford Birchard Hayes
"We all agree that neither the Government nor political parties ought to interfere with religious sects. It is equally true that religious sects ought not to interfere with the Government or with political parties. We believe that the cause of good government and the cause of religion both suffer by all such interference." - Rutherford B. Hayes, fully Rutherford Birchard Hayes
"Simply underscores the fact that primarily war is made with fire, and that logistics have a decisive effect upon the arena only when they enable military forces to bring a superior fire to bear." - S. L. A. Marshall, Samuel Lyman Atwood Marshall
"As the memory of fire does not warm the body, so faith without love does not bring about the illumination of knowledge in the soul." - Saint Maximus the Confessor NULL
"The extremities of the earth, and all in every part of it who purely and rightly confess the Lord look directly towards the most holy Roman Church and its confession and faith, as it were to a sun of unfailing light, awaiting from it the bright radiance of the sacred dogmas of our Fathers according to what the six inspired and holy councils have purely and piously decreed, declaring most expressly the symbol of faith. For from the coming down of the incarnate Word amongst us, all the Churches in every part of the world have held that greatest Church alone as their base and foundation, seeing that according to the promise of Christ our Savior, the gates of hell do never prevail against it, that it has the keys of a right confession and faith in Him, that it opens the true and only religion to such as approach with piety, and shuts up and locks every heretical mouth that speaks injustice against the Most High." - Saint Maximus the Confessor NULL
"The person who loves God cannot help loving every man as himself, even though he is grieved by the passions of those who are not yet purified. But when they amend their lives, his delight is indescribable and knows no bounds. A soul filled with thoughts of sensual desire and hatred is unpurified. If we detect any trace of hatred in our hearts against any man whatsoever for committing any fault, we are utterly estranged from love for God, since love for God absolutely precludes us from hating any man." - Saint Maximus the Confessor NULL
"There is certainly no greater happiness than to be able to look back on a life usefully and virtuously employed, to trace our own progress in existence by such tokens as excite neither shame nor sorrow." - Samuel Johnson, aka Doctor Johnson
"O! what a Godlike Power is that of doing Good! I envy the Rich and the Great for nothing else!" - Samuel Richardson
"A great many wise sayings have been uttered about the effects of solitary retirement; but the motives which impel men to seek it are not more various than the effects which it produces on different individuals. One thing is certain, that those who can with truth affirm that they are never less alone than when alone, might generally add that they never feel more lonely than when not alone." - Arthur Helps, fully Sir Arthur Helps
"Political rule is so natural and necessary to the human race that it cannot be withdrawn without destroying nature itself; for the nature of man is such that he is a social animal." - Robert Bellarmine, fully Saint Robert Bellarmine
"I am particularly fond of [Emmanuel Mendes da Costa's] Natural History of Fossils because this treatise, more than any other work written in English, records a short episode expressing one of the grand false starts in the history of natural science—and nothing can be quite so informative and instructive as a juicy mistake." - Stephan Jay Gould
"I think it would be a disaster [meeting an alien civilization]. The extraterrestrials would probably be far in advance of us. The history of advanced races meeting more primitive people on this planet is not very happy, and they were the same species. I think we should keep our heads low." - Stephen Hawking
"The greatest star is that at the little end of the telescope,—the star that is looking, not looked after, nor looked at." - Theodore Parker
"The union of men in large masses is indispensable to the development and rapid growth of their higher faculties. - Cities have always been the fireplaces of civilization, whence light and heat radiated out into the dark, cold world." - Theodore Parker
"With nations, as with individuals, our interests soundly calculated, will ever be found inseparable from our moral duties; and history bears witness to the fact, that a just nation is taken on its word, when recourse is had to armaments, and wars to bridle others." - Thomas Jefferson
"Cruelty is one of the chief ingredients of love, and divided about equally between the sexes: cruelty of lust, ingratitude, callousness, maltreatment, domination. The same is true of the passive qualities, patience under suffering, even pleasure in ill-usage." - Thomas Mann, fully Paul Thomas Mann
"For divinity, indeed, the father and fabricator of all things, is more ancient than the sun and the heavens, more excellent than time and eternity, and every flowing nature, and is a legislator without law, ineffable by voice, and invisible by the eyes. Not being able, however, to comprehend his essence, we apply for assistance to words and names, to animals and figures of gold, and ivory and silver, to plants and rivers, to the summits of mountains, and to streams of water; desiring, indeed, to understand his nature, but through imbecility calling him by the names of such things as appear to us to be beautiful. And in thus acting we are affected in the same manner as lovers, who are delighted with surveying the images of the objects of their love, and with recollecting the lyre, the dart, and the seat of these, the circus in which they ran, and every thing, in short, which excites the memory of the beloved object. What then remains for me to investigate and determine respecting statues? only to admit the subsistence of deity. But if the art of Phidias excites the Greeks to the recollection of divinity, honour to animals the Egyptians, a river others, and fire others, I do not condemn the dissonance: let them only know, let them only love, let them only be mindful of the object they adore." - Maximus of Tyre, fully Cassius Maximus Tyrius NULL
"In the primitive church were not prayers simple, unpremeditated, united; prayers of the well-taught apostle; prayers of the accomplished scholar; prayers of the rough but fervent peasant; prayers of the new and zealous convert; prayers which importuned and wrestled with an instant and irrepressible urgency; — were they not an essential part of that religion, which holy fire had kindled; and which daily supplications alone could fan?" - William Arthur
"If we would indicate an idea which, throughout the whole course of history, has ever more and more widely extended its empire, or which, more than any other, testifies to the much-contested and still more decidedly misunderstood perfectibility of the whole human race, it is that of establishing our common humanity — of striving to remove the barriers which prejudice and limited views of every kind have erected among men, and to treat all mankind, without reference to religion, nation, or color, as one fraternity, one great community, fitted for the attainment of one object, the unrestrained development of the physical powers. This is the ultimate and highest aim of society." - Wilhelm von Humboldt, fully Friedrich Wilhelm Christian Karl Ferdinand von Humboldt
"A man’s mother is his misfortune, but his wife is his fault." - Walter Bagehot
"Conquest is the missionary of valor, and the hard impact of military virtues beats meanness out of the world." - Walter Bagehot
"The best history is but like the art of Rembrandt; it casts a vivid light on certain selected causes, on those which were best and greatest; it leaves all the rest in shadow and unseen." - Walter Bagehot
"Because courage consists in transcending normal fears, the highest kind of courage is cold courage; that is to say, courage in which the danger has been fully realized and there is no emotional excitement to conceal the danger." - Walter Lippmann
"Without offering any data on all that occurs between conception and the age of kindergarten, they announce on the basis of what they have got out of a few thousand questionnaires that they are measuring the hereditary mental endowment of human beings. Obviously, this is not a conclusion obtained by research. It is a conclusion planted by the will to believe. It is, I think, for the most part unconsciously planted.... If the impression takes root that these tests really measure intelligence, that they constitute a sort of last judgment on the child's capacity, that they reveal 'scientifically' his predestined ability, then it would be a thousand times better if all the intelligence testers and all their questionnaires were sunk in the Sargasso Sea. [In the course of a debate with Lewis Terman]" - Walter Lippmann
"It is a horrible fact that we can read in the daily paper, without interrupting our breakfast, numerical reckonings of death and destruction that ought to break our hearts or scare us out of our wits." - Wendell Berry
"When you are new at sheep-raising and your ewe has a lamb, your impulse is to stay there and help it nurse and see to it and all. After a while you know that the best thing you can do is walk out of the barn." - Wendell Berry
"In my own country for nearly a century I have been nothing but a nigger." - W. E. B. Du Bois, fully William Edward Burghardt Du Bois
"Consequently, since this study is vast in extent, embellished and enriched as it is with many different kinds of learning, I think that men have no right to profess themselves architects hastily, without having climbed from boyhood the steps of these studies and thus, nursed by the knowledge of many arts and sciences, having reached the heights of the holy ground of architecture." - Vitruvius, fully Marcus Vitruvius Pollio NULL
"One can only believe entirely, perhaps, in what one cannot see." - Virginia Woolf, nee Stephen, fully Adeline Virginia Woolf
"Really it would profit little to write down what they said, for they knew each other so well that they could say anything they liked, which is tantamount to saying nothing, or saying such stupid, prosy things, as how to cook an omelet or where to buy the best boots in London, which have no lustre taken from their setting, yet are positively of amazing beauty within it. For it has come about, by the wise economy of nature, that our modern spirit can almost dispense with language; the commonest expressions do, since no expressions do; hence, the most ordinary conversation is often the most poetic, and the most poetic is precisely that which cannot be written down. For which reasons we leave a great blank here, which must be taken to indicate that the space is filled to repletion." - Virginia Woolf, nee Stephen, fully Adeline Virginia Woolf
"So we went to the Zoo; and I daresay I could write something interesting about that--a pale stone desert given over to charwomen and decorators: a few bears, a mandrill, and a fox or two--all in the desolation of depression." - Virginia Woolf, nee Stephen, fully Adeline Virginia Woolf
"A collision at sea will ruin your entire day." - Thucydides NULL
"I originally studied medicine in order to be a physiologist, but I drifted into psychology and philosophy from a sort of fatality. I never had any philosophic instruction, the first lecture on psychology I ever heard being the first I ever gave." - William James
"Regarding mutual tolerance: It is negative in one sense, but positive in another. It absolutely forbids us to be forward in pronouncing on the meaninglessness of forms of existence other than our own; and it commands us to tolerate, respect, and indulge those whom we see harmlessly interested and happy in their own ways, however unintelligible these may be to us. Hands off . . . ." - William James
"The faith state...is the psychic correlate of a biological growth reducing contending-desires to one direction." - 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
"We are thinking beings, and we cannot exclude the intellect from participating in any of our functions." - 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
"The popular tendency is to listen approvingly to the most extreme statements and claims of politicians and orators who seek popularity by declaring their own country right in everything and other countries wrong in everything." - Elihu Root