This site is dedicated to the memory of Dr. Alan William Smolowe who gave birth to the creation of this database.
"Whatever mitigates the woes or increases the happiness of others - this is my criterion of goodness. And whatever injures society at large, or any individual in it - this is my measure of iniquity." - Robert Burns, aka Rabbie Burns, Scotland's favourite son, the Ploughman Poet, Robden of Solway Firth, the Bard of Ayrshire and in Scotland as simply The Bard
"There are two great rules of life, the one general and the other particular. The first is that everyone can in the end, get what he wants, if he only tries. That is the general rule. The particular rule is that every individual is, more or less, an exception to the rule." - Samuel Butler
"While the law (of competition) may be sometimes hard for the individual, it is the best for the race, because it insures the survival of the fittest in every department." - Andrew Carnegie
"The time, the people, and the individual converge only once." - Hélène Cixous
"Man-made barriers, laws, social customs and prejudices continue to keep a majority of women in an inferior position without full control of our lives and bodies. From infancy throughout life, in personal and public relations, in the family, in the schools, in every occupation and profession, too often we find our individuality, our capabilities, our earning powers diminished by discriminatory practices and outmoded ideas of what a woman is, what a woman can do, and what a woman must be... We lack effective political and economic power We have only minor and insignificant roles in making, interpreting and enforcing our laws, in running our political parties, businesses, unions, schools and institutions, in directing the media, in governing our country, in deciding issues of war or peace. We do not seek special privileges, but we demand as a human right a full voice and role for women in determining the destiny of our world, our nation, our families and our individual lives." - Declaration of American Women NULL
"The individual's whole experience is built upon the plan of his language." - Henri Delacroix
"The trouble with the sacred Individual is that he has no significance, except as he can acquire it from others, from the social whole." - Bernard Augustine DeVoto
"I believe that... education, therefore, is a process of living and not a preparation for future living... all education proceeds by the participation of the individual in the social consciousness of the race... Every thinker puts one portion of an apparently stable world in peril." - John Dewey
"Everything without tells the individual that he is nothing; everything within persuades him that he is everything." - Ximénès Doudan
"Time, to the nation as to the individual, is nothing absolute; its duration depends on the rate of thought and feeling." - John William Draper
"The most barbarous and the most fantastic rites and the strangest myths translate some human need, some aspect of life, either individual or social... In reality, then, there are no religions which are false. All are true in their own fashion; all answer, though in different ways, to the given conditions of human existence." - Émile Durkheim, fully David Émile Durkheim
"Let every man be respected as an individual and no man idolized." - Albert Einstein
"The highest destiny of the individual is to serve rather than to rule." - Albert Einstein
"The most important kind of tolerance is tolerance of the individual by society and the state." - Albert Einstein
"Those who rage today against the ideals of reason and of individual freedom, and seek to impose an insensate state of slavery by means of brutal force, rightly see in the Jews irreconcilable opponents." - Albert Einstein
"To make clear fundamental ends and valuations, and to set them for the fast in the emotional life of an individual, seems to me precisely the most important function which religion has to perform in the social life of a man... They come into being not through demonstration but through revelation, through the medium of powerful personalities." - Albert Einstein
"With the seizing of the means of production by society, production of commodities is done away with, and, simultaneously, the mastery of the product over the producer. Anarchy in social production is replaced by plan-conforming, conscious organization. The struggle for individual existence disappears... Only from that time will man himself, with full consciousness, make his own history - only from that time will the social causes set in movement by him have, in the main and in a constantly growing measure, the results intended by him. It is the ascent of man from the kingdom of necessity to the kingdom of freedom." - Friedrich Engels
"Every individual is a king in the castle of his own mind. As king of his thoughts he can think those thought which will make him an unhappy and fearful monarch, or he can make his reign joyous and harmonious by listening to the Father within himself before making decisions." - Lowell Fillmore
"Education is the process by which the individual relates himself to the universe, gives himself citizenship in the changing world, shares the race's mind and enfranchises his own soul." - John Huston Finley
"It is the lone worker who makes the first advance in a subject: the details may be worked out by a team, but the prime idea is due to the enterprise, thought and perception of an individual." - Alexander Fleming, fully Sir Alexander Fleming
"It is one of the ironic and yet pathetic aspects of our competitive life that with each step up the ladder of success, the regimentation of the individual and his family becomes more intense and coercive. The goal of competitive striving is to be allowed to submit to these extractions and find fulfillment only in doing as faithfully as possible what others in one's competitive class are doing" - Lawrence K. Frank
"Religion is an attempt to get control over the sensory world, in which we are placed, by means of the wish-world, which we have developed inside us as a result of biological and psychological necessities. But it cannot achieve its end. Its doctrines carry with them the stamp of the times in which they originated, the ignorant childhood days of the human race. Its consolations deserve no trust. Experience teaches us that the world is not a nursery. The ethical commands, to which religion seeks to lend its weight, require some other foundations instead, for human society cannot do without them, and it is dangerous to link up obedience to them with religious belief. If one attempts to assign to religion its place in man’s evolution, it seems not so much to be a lasting acquisition, as a parallel to the neurosis which the civilized individual must pass through on his way from childhood to maturity." - Sigmund Freud, born Sigismund Schlomo Freud
"This age of childhood, in which the sense of shame is unknown, seems a paradise when we look back upon it alter, and paradise itself is nothing but the mass-phantasy of the childhood of the individual. This is why in paradise men are naked and unashamed, until the moment arrives when shame and fear awaken; expulsion follows, and sexual life and cultural development begin." - Sigmund Freud, born Sigismund Schlomo Freud
"Wars can never cease so long as nations live under such widely differing conditions, so long as the value of individual life is in each nation so variously computed, and so long as the animosities which divide them represent such powerful instinctual forces in the mind." - Sigmund Freud, born Sigismund Schlomo Freud
"Work has a greater effect than any other technique of living in the direction of binding the individual more closely to reality; in his work, at least, he is securely attached to a part of reality, the human community." - Sigmund Freud, born Sigismund Schlomo Freud
"For many children, the start of formal musical instruction marks the beginning of the end of musical development. The atomistic focus in most musical instruction - the individual pitch, its name, its notation -- and the measure-by-measure method of instruction and analysis run counter to the holistic way most children have come to think of, react to, and live with music." - Howard Gardner, fully Howard Earl Gardner
"I hold the relay race theory of history: progress in human affairs depends upon accepting, generation after generation, the individual duty to oppose the evils of the time." - Martha Gellhorn, fully Martha Ellis Gellhorn
"To succeed in a business, to reach the top, an individual must know all it is possible to know about that business." - J. Paul Getty, fully Jean Paul Getty
"I reverence the individual who understands distinctly what he wishes; who unweariedly advances, who knows the means conducive to his object, and can seize and use them." - Johann Wolfgang von Goethe
"If you treat an individual as if he were what he ought to be and could be, he will become what he ought to be and could be" - Johann Wolfgang von Goethe
"Behind every advance of the human race is a germ of creation growing in the mind of some long individual. An individual whose dreams waken him in the night while others lie contentedly asleep." - Crawford Greenewalt, fully Crawford Hallock Greenewalt
"Peace among nations, like happiness for the individual, is not an end, but a by-product that usually comes when you live right." - Edward Howard Griggs
"Nothing is constant but change! All existence is a perpetual flux of "being and becoming"! That is the broad lesson of the evolution of the world... The belief in the freedom of the will is inconsistent with the truth of evolution. Modern philosophy shows clearly that the will is never really free in man or animal, but determined by the organization of the brain; and that in turn acquires its individual character by the laws of heredity and the influence of environment." - Ernst Haeckel, full name Ernst Heinrich Phillip August Haeckel
"The ideal society would enable every man and woman to develop along their individual lines, and not attempt to force all into one mould, however admirable." - J. B. S. Haldane, fully John Burdon Sanderson Haldane
"Central to the notion of masculinity is its rejection of everything that is defined by a culture as feminine and its legitimated control of whatever counts as the feminine... Gender is an asymmetrical category of human thought, social organization, and individual identity and behavior." - Sandra G. Harding
"It is the individual who knows how little he knows about himself who stands a chance of finding something about himself before he dies." - S. I. Hayakawa, fully Samuel Ichiye Hayakawa
"Music is for the betterment and enrichment of the individual, just as education and reading are. When people come together to play music as they do to play bridge, civilization will have taken its longest stride forward since the beginning of time. Music is something to live with always, and children should be taught to regard it as a close and inalienable friend." - Jascha Heifetz
"In the pioneer days of our history it was easy to love one's neighbor and respect his rights, when possibly the neighbor lived at a distance of four or five miles and the relations were not intimate enough to occasion a clash of interests. Now one finds that society rather than another individual is his neighbor." - John Grier Hibben
"It’s universally wrong to steal from your neighbor, but once you get the one-to-one level, and pit the individual against the multinational conglomerate, the federal bureaucracy, the modern plantation of agro-business, or the utility company, it becomes strictly a value judgment to decide exactly who is stealing from whom. One person’s crime is another person’s profit. Capitalism is license to steal; the government simply regulates who steals and how much." - Abbie Hoffman, fully Abbot Howard "Abbie" Hoffman
"Anything that interferes with individual progress ultimately will retard group progress." - George Houston
"On perceiving any individual's mind, you perceive all mind. Glimpse one truth, and all truth is present in your vision, for there is nowhere at all which is devoid of the Truth." - Huang Po, also Huángbò Xīyùn
"Both these perspectives - that the government is responsible for us, and that we are responsible only for ourselves - are dehumanizing. To be fully human, we can neither give up responsibility for ourselves nor refuse responsibility for others. Indeed, we need to redefine individual responsibility to include social responsibility." - Arianna Huffington, born Arianna Stassinopoulos
"If we look abroad upon the great multitude of mankind, and endeavor to trace out the principles of action in every individual, it will, I think, seem highly probably that ambition runs through the whole species, and that every man, in proportion to the vigor of his complexion, is more or less actuated by it." - Thomas Hughes