This site is dedicated to the memory of Dr. Alan William Smolowe who gave birth to the creation of this database.
"Take care of your health, that it may serve you to serve God." - Saint Francis de Sales NULL
"As regards the individual nature, woman is defective and misbegotten, for the active power of the male seed tends to the production of a perfect likeness in the masculine sex; while the production of a woman comes from defect in the active power." - Saint Thomas Aquinas, aka Thomas of Aquin or Aquino, Doctor Angelicus, Doctor Communis or Doctor Universalis
"There is only one difference between a madman and me. The madman thinks he is sane. I know I am mad." - Salvador Dalí, fully Salvador Domingo Felipe Jacinto Dalí i Domènech
"No grand idea was ever born in a conference, but a lot of foolish ideas have died there." - Samuel Butler
"Against us we find arrayed a host guarded by special privilege, buttressed by legalized trusts, fed by streams of legalized monopolists, picketed by gangs of legalized Pinkertons, and having in reserve thousands of embryo employers who, under the name of Militia, are organized, uniformed, and armed for the sole purpose of holding the discontented in subservient bondage to iniquitous conditions." - Samuel Gompers
"The brave man is an inspiration to the weak, and compels them, as it were, to follow him." - Samuel Smiles
"The poor ego has a still harder time of it; it has to serve three harsh masters, and it has to do its best to reconcile the claims and demands of all three.... The three tyrants are the external world, the superego, and the id." - Sigmund Freud, born Sigismund Schlomo Freud
"The needs of a human being are sacred. Their satisfaction cannot be subordinated either to reasons of state, or to any consideration of money, nationality, race, or colour, or to the moral or other value attributed to the human being in question, or to any consideration whatsoever. There is no legitimate limit to the satisfaction of the needs of a human being except as imposed by necessity and by the needs of other human beings. The limit is only legitimate if the needs of all human beings receive an equal degree of attention." - Simone Weil
"The proportions of good and evil in any society depend partly upon the proportion of consent to that of refusal and partly upon the distribution of power between those who consent and those who refuse. If any power of any kind is in the hands of a man who has not given total, sincere, and enlightened consent to this obligation such power is misplaced. If a man has willfully refused to consent, then it is in itself a criminal activity for him to exercise any function, major or minor, public or private, which gives him control over people's lives. All those who, with knowledge of his mind, have acquiesced in his exercise of the function are accessories to the crime. Any State whose whole official doctrine constitutes an incitement to this crime is itself wholly criminal. It can retain no trace of legitimacy. Any State whose official doctrine is not primarily directed against this crime in all its forms is lacking in full legitimacy. Any legal system which contains no provisions against this crime is without the essence of legality. Any legal system which provides against some forms of this crime but not others is without the full character of legality. Any government whose members commit this crime, or authorize it in their subordinates, has betrayed its function." - Simone Weil
"By my soul! I would rather have a dry death, quoth Sir Oliver. Though, Mort Dieu! I have eaten so many fish that it were but justice that the fish should eat me." - Arthur Conan Doyle, fully Sir Arthur Ignatius Conan Doyle
"I'm not sure about whether I shall go. I am the most incurably lazy devil that ever stood in shoe leather -- that is, when the fit is on me, for I can be spry enough at times." - Arthur Conan Doyle, fully Sir Arthur Ignatius Conan Doyle
"In their recently aborted struggle to inject Genesis literalism into science classrooms, fundamentalist groups followed their usual opportunistic strategy of arguing two contradictory sides of a question when a supposed rhetorical advantage could be extracted from each. Their main pseudoargument held that Genesis literalism is not religion at all, but really an alternative form of science not acknowledged by professional biologists too hidebound and dogmatic to appreciate the cutting edge of their own discipline. When we successfully pointed out that ‘creation science’ — as an untestable set of dogmatic proposals — could not qualify as science by any standard definition, they turned around and shamelessly argued the other side. […] (They actually pulled off the neater trick of holding both positions simultaneously.) Now they argued that, yes indeed, creation science is religion, but evolution is equally religious. Thus, they claimed, creation science and evolution science are symmetrical — that is, equally religious. Creation science isn't science because it rests upon the untestable fashioning of life ex nihilo by God. Evolution science isn't science because it tries, as its major aim, to resolve the unresolvable and ultimate origin of life. But we do no such thing. We understand Hutton's wisdom — ‘he has nowhere treated of the first origin …of any substance… but only of the transformations which bodies have undergone…’" - Stephan Jay Gould
"Science is an integral part of culture. It's not this foreign thing, done by an arcane priesthood. It's one of the glories of the human intellectual tradition." - Stephan Jay Gould
"History doth not reckon twenty professed atheists in all ages in the compass of the whole world: and we have not the name of any one absolute atheist upon record in Scripture: yet it is questioned, whether any of them, noted in history with that infamous name, were downright deniers of the existence of God, but rather because they disparaged the deities commonly worshipped by the nations where they lived, as being of a clearer reason to discern that those qualities, vulgarly attributed to their gods, as lust and luxury, wantonness and quarrels, were unworthy of the nature of a god." - Stephen Charnock
"The Steady State theory was what Karl Popper would call a good scientific theory: it made definite predictions, which could be tested by observation, and possibly falsified. Unfortunately for the theory, they were falsified." - Stephen Hawking
"The thing that got me started on the science that I've been building now for about 20 years or so was the question of okay, if mathematical equations can't make progress in understanding complex phenomena in the natural world, how might we make progress?" - Stephen Wolfram
"To my mind the failure resolutely to follow progressive policies is the negation of democracy as well of progress, and spells disaster. But for this very reason I feel concern when progressives act with heedless violence, or go so far and so fast as to invite reaction. The experience of John Brown illustrates the evil of the revolutionary short-cut to ultimate good ends. The liberty of the slave was desirable, but it was not to be brought about by a slave insurrection. The better distribution of property is desirable, but it is not to be brought about by the anarchic form of Socialism which would destroy all private capital and tend to destroy all private wealth. It represents not progress, but retrogression, to propose to destroy capital because the power of unrestrained capital is abused. John Brown rendered a great service to the cause of liberty in the earlier Kansas days; but his notion that the evils of slavery could be cured by a slave insurrection was a delusion analogous to the delusions of those who expect to cure the evils of plutocracy by arousing the baser passions of workingmen against the rich in an endeavor at violent industrial revolution. And, on the other hand, the brutal and shortsighted greed of those who pro?t by what is wrong in the present system, and the attitude of those who oppose all effort to do away with this wrong, serve in their turn as incitements to such revolution; just as the insolence of the ultra pro-slavery men ?nally precipitated the violent destruction of slavery." - Theodore “Teddy” Roosevelt
"Your first love has no beginning or end. Your first love is not your first love, and it is not your last. It is just love. It is one with everything." - Thich Nhất Hanh
"Is confidence or discretion, or is STRICT LIMIT, the principle of our Constitution?" - Thomas Jefferson
"The most sacred of the duties of a government is to do equal and impartial justice to all its citizens." - Thomas Jefferson
"As death, when we come to consider it closely, is the true goal of our existence, I have formed during the last few years such close relations with this best and truest friend of mankind, that his image is not only no longer terrifying to me, but is indeed very soothing and consoling And I thank my God for graciously granting me the opportunity...of learning that death is the key which unlocks the door to our true happiness." - Thomas Mann, fully Paul Thomas Mann
"Pragmatism is offered as a revolutionary new way of thinking about ourselves and our thoughts, but it is apparently disabled by its own character from offering arguments that might show its suyperiority to the common sense it seeks to displace." - Thomas Nagel
"As to religion, I hold it to be the indispensable duty of all government to protect all conscientious professors thereof, and I know of no other business which government hath to do therewith." - Thomas Paine
"I love the man that can smile in trouble, that can gather strength from distress, and grow brave by reflection. 'Tis the business of little minds to shrink, but he whose heart is firm, and whose conscience approves his conduct, will pursue his principles unto death." - Thomas Paine
"Eternity appear’d above them as One Man, enfolded In Luvah’s robes of blood, and bearing all his afflictions: As the sun shines down on the misty earth, such was the Vision. But purple Night, and crimson Morning, and golden Day, descending Thro’ the clear changing atmosphere, display’d green fields among The varying clouds, like Paradises stretch’d in the expanse, With towns, and villages, and temples, tents, sheep-folds and pastures, Where dwell the children of the Elemental worlds in harmony." - William Blake
"Some have said that the thesis [of indeterminacy] is a consequence of my behaviorism. Some have said that it is a reductio ad absurdum of my behaviorism. I disagree with this second point, but I agree with the first. I hold further that the behaviorism approach is mandatory. In psychology one may or may not be a behaviorist, but in linguistics one has no choice." - Willard Quine, fully Willard Van Orman Quine
"We can applaud the state lottery as a public subsidy of intelligence, for it yields public income that is calculated to lighten the tax burden of us prudent abstainers at the expense of the benighted masses of wishful thinkers." - Willard Quine, fully Willard Van Orman Quine
"I was walking among the fires of Hell, delighted with the enjoyments of Genius; which to Angels look like torment and insanity." - William Blake
"In yonder Grave a Druid lies Where slowly winds the Stealing Wave! The Year's best Sweets shall duteous rise To deck its Poet's sylvan Grave!" - William Collins
"One realizes that even in harmonious families there is this double life: the group life, which is the one we can observe in our neighbor’s household, and, underneath, another – secret and passionate and intense – which is the real life that stamps the faces and gives character to the voices of our friends. Always in his mind each member of these social units is escaping, running away, trying to break the net which circumstances and his own affections have woven about him. One realizes that human relationships are the tragic necessity of human life; that they can never be wholly satisfactory, that every ego is half the time greedily seeking them, and half the time pulling away from them. In those simple relationships of loving husband and wife, affectionate sisters, children and grandmother, there are innumerable shades of sweetness and anguish which make up the pattern of our lives day by day . . ." - Willa Cather, fully Willa Sibert Cather
"Agitation prevents rebellion, keeps the peace, and secures progress. Every step she gains is gained forever. Muskets are the weapons of animals. Agitation is the atmosphere of the brains." - Wendell Phillips
"Thus one becomes entangled in contradictions if one speaks of the probable position of the electron without considering the experiment used to determine it ... It must also be emphasized that the statistical character of the relation depends on the fact that the influence of the measuring device is treated in a different manner than the interaction of the various parts of the system on one another. This last interaction also causes changes in the direction of the vector representing the system in the Hilbert space, but these are completely determined. If one were to treat the measuring device as a part of the system—which would necessitate an extension of the Hilbert space—then the changes considered above as indeterminate would appear determinate. But no use could be made of this determinateness unless our observation of the measuring device were free of indeterminateness. For these observations, however, the same considerations are valid as those given above, and we should be forced, for example, to include our own eyes as part of the system, and so on. The chain of cause and effect could be quantitatively verified only if the whole universe were considered as a single system—but then physics has vanished, and only a mathematical scheme remains. The partition of the world into observing and observed system prevents a sharp formulation of the law of cause and effect. (The observing system need not always be a human being; it may also be an inanimate apparatus, such as a photographic plate.)" - Werner Heisenberg, fully Werner Karl Heisenberg
"Whenever we proceed from the known into the unknown we may hope to understand, but we may have to learn at the same time a new meaning of the word "understanding."" - Werner Heisenberg, fully Werner Karl Heisenberg
"The way to get started is to quit talking and begin doing" - Walt Disney, fully Walter Elias "Walt" Disney
"Let us therefore create a new guild of craftsmen without the class-distinctions that raise an arrogant barrier between craftsmen and artists! Let us desire, conceive, and create the new building of the future together. It will combine architecture, sculpture, and painting in a single form, and will one day rise towards the heavens from the hands of a million workers as the crystalline symbol of a new and coming faith." - Walter Gropius, fully Walter Adolph Georg Gropius
"Football strategy does not originate in a scrimmage it is useless to expect solutions in a political campaign." - Walter Lippmann
"In the printed book, these vague psychic "places" became quite physically and visibly localized. A new noetic world was shaping up, spatially organized. In this new world, the book was less like an utterance, and more like a thing." - Walter J. Ong, fully Walter Jackson Ong
"The reason we hang onto self-defeating behaviors is because it's easier not to take responsibility." - Wayne Dyer, fully Wayne Walter Dyer
"Let us live gladly! Quite certainly we are free to do it. Perhaps it is our only freedom, but ours it is, and it is only phenomenally a freedom. "Living free" is being "as one is." Can we not do it now? Indeed can we not-do-it? It is not even a "doing": It is beyond doing and not-doing. It is being as-we-are." - Wei Wu Wei, pen name for Terence James Stannus Gray
"This may account for the extraordinary popularity of such works as the Tao Te Ching, and in a lesser degree for that of the Diamond and Heart Sutras and Padma Sambhava's Knowing the Mind. For despite the accretion of superfluous verbiage in which the essential doctrine of some of the latter has become embedded, their direct pointing at the truth, instead of explaining it, goes straight to the heart of the matter and allows the mind itself to develop its own vision. An elaborately developed thesis must always defeat its own end where this subject matter is concerned, for only indication could produce this understanding, which requires an intuitional faculty, and it could never be acquired wholesale from without." - Wei Wu Wei, pen name for Terence James Stannus Gray
"The period of Catholic ascendancy was on the whole one of the most deplorable in the history of the human mind.... The spirit that shrinks from enquiry as sinful and deems a state of doubt a state of guilt, is the most enduring disease that can afflict the mind of man. Not till the education of Europe passed from the monasteries to the universities, not till Mohammedan science, and clasical free thought, and industrial independence broke the sceptre of the Church, did the intellectual revival of Europe begin." - W. E. H. Lecky, fully William Edward Hartpole Lecky
"A manager of people needs to understand that all people are different. This is not ranking people. He needs to understand that the performance of anyone is governed largely by the system that he works in, the responsibility of management." - W. Edwards Deming, fully William Edwards Deming
"Owing to this favor I need to have no fear of want to the end of my life, and being thus laid under obligation I began to write this work for you, because I saw that you have built and are now building extensively, and that in future also you will take care that our public and private buildings shall be worthy to go down to posterity by the side of your other splendid achievements." - Vitruvius, fully Marcus Vitruvius Pollio NULL
"The steps in front must be arranged so that there shall always be an odd number of them; for thus the right foot, with which one mounts the first step, will also be the first to reach the level of the temple itself." - Vitruvius, fully Marcus Vitruvius Pollio NULL
"Once we accept the point of view that human knowledge develops from ignorance, we shall find millions of examples of it just as simple as the discovery of alizarin in coal tar, millions of observations not only in the history of science and technology but in the everyday life of each and every one of us that illustrate the transformation of “things-in-themselves” into “things-for-us.”" - Vladimir Lenin, fully Vladimir Ilyich Lenin
"The crisis in Germany has only begun. It will inevitably end in the transfer of political power to the German proletariat. The Russian proletariat is following events with the keenest attention and enthusiasm. Now even the blindest workers in the various countries will see that the Bolsheviks were right in basing their whole tactics on the support of the world workers' revolution." - Vladimir Lenin, fully Vladimir Ilyich Lenin
"I need to become beautiful, become remarkable, become unforgettable, become someone’s everything." - Vladimir Nabokov, fully Vladimir Vladimirovich Nabokov
"And ask each passenger to tell his story, and if there is one of them all who has not cursed his existence many times, and said to himself over and over again that he was the most miserable of men, I give you permission to throw me head-first into the sea." - Voltaire, pen name of François-Marie Arouet NULL
"Let us keep courage and try to be patient and gentle. And let us not mind being eccentric, and make distinction between good and evil." - Vincent van Gogh, fully Vincent Willem van Gogh