This site is dedicated to the memory of Dr. Alan William Smolowe who gave birth to the creation of this database.
"We know too much about ecology today to have any excuse for the many abuses that are currently going on in the management of the land, in the management of animals, in food storage, food processing, and in heedless urbanization. If we permit them, this is not due to poverty, as if we could not afford to stop them; it is due to the fact that, as a society, we have no firm basis of belief in any meta-economic values, and when there is no such belief the economic calculus takes over." - E. F. Schumacher, fully Ernst Friedrich "Fritz" Schumacher
"We should be searching for policies to reconstruct rural culture, to open the land for the gainful occupation to larger numbers of people, whether it be on a full-time or a part-time bases, and to orientate all our actions on the land towards the threefold ideal of health, beauty and permanence." - E. F. Schumacher, fully Ernst Friedrich "Fritz" Schumacher
"God knows I am no friend of probability theory, I have hated it from the first moment when our dear friend Max Born gave it birth. For it could be seen how easy and simple it made everything, in principle, everything ironed and the true problems concealed. Everybody must jump on the bandwagon [Ausweg]. And actually not a year passed before it became an official credo, and it still is" - Erwin Schrödinger, fully Erwin Rudolf Josef Alexander Schrödinger
"Science is reticent too when it is a question of the great Unity – the One of Parmenides – of which we all somehow form part, to which we belong. The most popular name for it in our time is God – with a capital ‘GÂ’." - Erwin Schrödinger, fully Erwin Rudolf Josef Alexander Schrödinger
"We are, I believe, at the moment in grave danger of missing the 'path to perfection'." - Erwin Schrödinger, fully Erwin Rudolf Josef Alexander Schrödinger
"A man who has learned much is rich." - Estonian Proverbs
"A poor beggar is the one who begs without a bag." - Estonian Proverbs
"The marriage where the husband is the head and the wife the heart." - Estonian Proverbs
"When God gives a child, he also gives the clothing." - Estonian Proverbs
"Who is a piece of stick in youth will be a block of wood in old age." - Estonian Proverbs
"Who is careless will be unhappy." - Estonian Proverbs
"Advise and counsel him; if he does not listen, let adversity teach him." - Ethiopian Proverbs
"Anticipate the good so that you may enjoy it." - Ethiopian Proverbs
"The little stars will always shine while the great sun is often eclipsed." - Ethiopian Proverbs
"To one who knows no better, a small garden is a forest." - Ethiopian Proverbs
"Woman without man is like a field without seed." - Ethiopian Proverbs
"Every time our intellect thus succeeds in substituting some principles and causes of knowledge for knowledge itself, it is on the right road to wisdom. As a matter of fact, it has already found wisdom, at least in part, while awaiting the day when, fully aware of what the absolutely first principles and first causes truly are, it begins to see everything else in their light." - Étienne Gilson, fully Étienne Henry Gilson
"Not merely to learn philosophy, but to become a philosopher, this is what is now at stake. It does not involve giving up philosophy as a science; it rather involves aiming at possessing philosophy in a different and more exalted way as included in wisdom itself, to which it is in the same relation as a body to its soul. Then also does the philosophical life truly begin, and its beginning does not consist in any addition to already acquired learning; it rather looks like falling in love, like answering the call of a vocation, or undergoing the transforming experience of a conversion." - Étienne Gilson, fully Étienne Henry Gilson
"The knowledge of GodÂ’s existence thereby acquires a universal significance and absolute certitude. Indeed, even those who do not understand the philosophical proofs of the existence of God are informed about this truth by divine revelation. Philosophers or not, everyone to whom his word is communicated through the preaching of scripture and who receives it as coming from him, in this way knows that God exists. Philosophers themselves need to remember that God has revealed his existence and to hold onto that truth by faith." - Étienne Gilson, fully Étienne Henry Gilson
"Thus the same statement that guarantees that God exists and that his most suitable name is He Who Is, also reveals to us the perfect simplicity of the divine essence. And indeed, God did not say: I am this or that, but simply I Am. I am what? I am ‘I Am.Â’ So, more than ever, the statement of Exodus seems to soar above in a kind of empty space, where the attraction of the weight of philosophy can no longer be felt. The work of reason is good, healthy, and important, for it proves that, left to itself, philosophy can establish with certitude the existence of the primary being whom everyone calls God. But a single word of the sacred text at once puts us in personal relations with him. We say his name, and by the simple fact of saying it, it teaches us the simplicity of the divine essence." - Étienne Gilson, fully Étienne Henry Gilson
"Why should those eminently rational beings, the scientists, deliberately prefer to the simple notions of design, or purposiveness, in nature, the arbitrary notions of blind force, chance, emergence, sudden variation, and similar ones? Simply because they much prefer a complete absence of intelligibility to the presence of a nonscientific intelligibility." - Étienne Gilson, fully Étienne Henry Gilson
"Further, laws and public transactions, together with everything that deserved the attention of mankind, were multiplied to such a degree, that the memory grew too weak for so heavy a burden; and human societies increased in such a manner, that the promulgation of the laws could not, without difficulty, reach the ears of every individual." - Étienne Bonnot de Condillac
"Mankind did not multiply words without necessity, especially in the beginning: for they were, at no small trouble to invent and to retain them." - Étienne Bonnot de Condillac
"A willingness enemy s' attaches me to hold in a state of suspension and obstacles to me fooled by the things vague and the expectations evasive." - Étienne Pivert de Senancour
"I can do what I want, but the trouble is that I do not quite know what to do." - Étienne Pivert de Senancour
"Life is hope and wait." - Étienne Pivert de Senancour
"The man is perishable. It can, but perish in resistant, and if nothing we are booked, not do not that this is a justice!" - Étienne Pivert de Senancour
"The man who loves the higher it gets, the more it is bound, it is more loved, more like it." - Étienne Pivert de Senancour
"The means expeditious not occur as the work of a day." - Étienne Pivert de Senancour
"The more a man has what he desired, he cherishes most it has." - Étienne Pivert de Senancour
"The really irreparable loss is that of desires." - Étienne Pivert de Senancour
"When money represents so many things, not to love it would be to love nearly nothing. To forget true needs can be only a weak moderation; but to know the value of money and to sacrifice it always, maybe to duty, maybe even to delicacy,—that is real virtue." - Étienne Pivert de Senancour
"Without doubt it is natural to include that love long what we love so much." - Étienne Pivert de Senancour
"You have described only too well, replied the Master, where the difficulty lies...The right shot at the right moment does not come because you do not let go of yourself. You...brace yourself for failure. So long as that is so, you have no choice but to call forth something yourself that ought to happen independently of you, and so long as you call it forth your hand will not open in the right way--like the hand of a child." - Eugen Herrigel
"Like the sacramental use of water and bread and wine, friendship takes what's common in human experience and turns it into something holy." - Eugene Peterson
"It kills the pain. You go back until at last you are beyond its reach. Only the past when you were happy is real." - Eugene O'Neill, fully Eugene Gladstone O'Neill
"Now it is certain. There is no magic stone. No secret to be found. One must go with the mind's winnowed learning." - Eugene McCarthy, fully Eugene Joseph "Gene" McCarthy
"Anais Nin gave me my most original, or so I thought, creation. As I read Incest, I realized that something which I had always taken to be unique, the voice of Myra Breckinridge, was actually that of Anaïs in all the flowing megalomania of the diaries. Of course, I had not read the diaries then, but even so, if only for that one thundering voice, I am forever in her debt." - Gore Vidal, fully Eugene Luther Gore Vidal
"Every time a friend succeeds, I die a little." - Gore Vidal, fully Eugene Luther Gore Vidal
"For a writer, memory is everything. But then you have to test it; how good is it, really? Whether it's wrong or not, I'm beyond caring. It is what it is. As Norman Mailer would say, "It's existential." He went to his grave without knowing what that word meant." - Gore Vidal, fully Eugene Luther Gore Vidal
"The more money an American accumulates, the less interesting he becomes." - Gore Vidal, fully Eugene Luther Gore Vidal
"A prison is a cross section of society in which every human strain is clearly revealed." - Eugene V. Debs, fully Eugene Victor Debs
"I do not oppose the insane asylum — but I abhor and condemn the cutthroat system that robs man of his reason, drives him to insanity and makes the lunatic asylum an indispensable adjunct to every civilized community." - Eugene V. Debs, fully Eugene Victor Debs
"I have no country to fight for; my country is the earth, and I am a citizen of the world." - Eugene V. Debs, fully Eugene Victor Debs
"Ten thousand times has the labor movement stumbled and fallen and bruised itself, and risen again; been seized by the throat and choked and clubbed into insensibility; enjoined by courts, assaulted by thugs, charged by the militia, shot down by regulars, traduced by the press, frowned upon by public opinion, deceived by politicians, threatened by priests, repudiated by renegades, preyed upon by grafters, infested by spies, deserted by cowards, betrayed by traitors, bled by leeches, and sold out by leaders, but notwithstanding all this, and all these, it is today the most vital and potential power this planet has ever known, and its historic mission of emancipating the workers of the world from the thraldom of the ages is as certain of ultimate realization as is the setting of the sun." - Eugene V. Debs, fully Eugene Victor Debs
"The most barbarous fact in all christendom is the labor market. The mere term sufficiently expresses the animalism of commercial civilization.They who buy and they who sell in the labor market are alike dehumanized by the inhuman traffic in the brains and blood and bones of human beings." - Eugene V. Debs, fully Eugene Victor Debs