This site is dedicated to the memory of Dr. Alan William Smolowe who gave birth to the creation of this database.
"However we may pity the mother whose health and even life is imperiled by the performance of her natural duty, there yet remains no sufficient reason for condoning the direct murder of the innocent." - Pope Pius XI, born Ambrogio Damiano Achille Ratti NULL
"My pacifism is an instinctive feeling, a feeling that possesses me because the murder of men is disgusting. My attitude is not derived from any intellectual theory but is based on my deepest antipathy to every kind of cruelty and hatred. " - Albert Einstein
"As long as Man continues to be the ruthless destroyer of lower living beings, he will never know health or peace. For as long as men massacre animals, they will kill each other. Indeed, he who sows the seed of murder and pain cannot reap joy and love." - Pythagoras, aka Pythagoras of Samos or Pythagoras the Samian NULL
"For as long as man continues to be the ruthless destroyer of lower living beings, he will never know health or peace. For as long as men massacre animals, they will kill each other. Indeed, he who sows the seeds of murder and pain cannot reap joy and love." - Pythagoras, aka Pythagoras of Samos or Pythagoras the Samian NULL
"Hammett gave murder back to the kind of people that commit it for reasons, not just to provide a corpse; and with the means at hand, not hand-wrought dueling pistols, curare, and tropical fish." - Raymond Chandler, fully Raymond Thornton Chandler
"It is just possible that the tensions in a novel of murder are the simplest and yet most complete pattern of the tensions on which we live in this generation." - Raymond Chandler, fully Raymond Thornton Chandler
"The boys with their feet on the desks know that the easiest murder case in the world to break is the one somebody tried to get very cute with; the one that really bothers them is the murder somebody only thought of two minutes before he pulled it off." - Raymond Chandler, fully Raymond Thornton Chandler
"What right has any free, reasonable soul on earth to sell himself for a shilling a day to murder any man, right or wrong, even his own brother or his own father, just because such a whiskered, profligate jackanapes as that officer, without learning, without any good except his own looking-glass and his opera-dancer,--a fellow who, just because he was born a gentleman, is set to command gray-headed men before he can command his own meanest passions. Good heavens! that the lives of free men should be entrusted to such a stuffed cockatoo; and that free men should be such traitors to their own flesh and blood as to sell themselves, for a shilling a day and the smirks of the nursery-maids, to do that fellow's bidding." - Charles Kingsley
"I want to say that killing for God is not only hideous murder " - Richard Dawkins
"The consequences of. It is rather like a detective coming on a murder after the scene. And you" - Richard Dawkins
"This is an unmistakable fact; nobody could seriously deny it. Yet people with full knowledge of the arbitrary nature of this heredity, somehow manage to go on believing in their religion, often with such fanaticism that they are prepared to murder people who follow a different one." - Richard Dawkins
"You've just said a very revealing thing. Are you telling me that the only reason you don't steal and rape and murder is that you're frightened of God?" - Richard Dawkins
"Not to know the end of the tale filled me with a sense of emptiness, loss. I hungered for the sharp, frightening, breathtaking, almost painful excitement that the story had given me, and I vowed that as soon as I was old enough I would buy all the novels there were and read them to feed that thirst for violence that was in me, for intrigue, for plotting, for secrecy, for bloody murders. So profoundly responsive a chord had the tale struck in me that the threats of my mother and grandmother had no effect whatsoever. They read my insistence as mere obstinacy, as foolishness, something that would quickly pass; and they had no notion how desperately serious the tale had made me. They could not have known that Ella's whispered story of deception and murder had been the first experience in my life that had elicited from me a total emotional response. No words or punishment could have possibly made me doubt. I had tasted what to me was life, and I would have more of it, somehow, someway." - Richard Wright, fully Richard Nathaniel Wright
"Ye Hypocrites, are these your pranks To murder men and gie God thanks Desist for shame, proceed no further God won't accept your thanks for murder. " - 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
"When the demons see us disdaining the things of the world in order through them not to hate men and fall away from love, they then incite slanders against us, hoping that, unable to bear the hurt, we will come to hate those who slander us." - Saint Maximus the Confessor NULL
"Political freedom cannot exist in any land where religion controls the state, and religious freedom cannot exist in any land where the state controls religion." - Sam Ervin, fully Samuel James "Sam" Ervin, Jr.
"By nature I am a non-conformist. I believe that restrictions dwarf personality and that largest usefulness comes through greatest personal freedom." - Samuel Gompers
"A thick, black cloud swirled before my eyes, and my mind told me that in this cloud, unseen as yet, but about to spring out upon my appalled senses, lurked all that was vaguely horrible, all that was monstrous and inconceivably wicked in the universe. Vague shapes swirled and swam amid the dark cloud-bank, each a menace and a warning of something coming, the advent of some unspeakable dweller upon the threshold, whose very shadow would blast my soul." - Arthur Conan Doyle, fully Sir Arthur Ignatius Conan Doyle
"The firmness with which the people have withstood the late abuses of the press, the discernment they have manifested between truth and falsehood, show that they may safely be trusted to hear everything true and false, and to form a correct judgment between them." - Thomas Jefferson
"We ought not to schismatize on either men or measures. Principles alone can justify that." - Thomas Jefferson
"To be grateful for all life's blessings ... is the best condition for a happy life. A joke, a good meal, a fine spring day, a work of art, a human personality, a voice, a glance — but this is not all. For there is another kind of gratitude, ...the feeling that makes us thankful for suffering, for the hard and heavy things of life, for the deepening of our natures which perhaps only suffering can bring." - Thomas Mann, fully Paul Thomas Mann
"I just remember their kindness and goodness to me, and their peacefulness and their utter simplicity. They inspired real reverence, and I think, in a way, they were certainly saints. And they were saints in that most effective and telling way: sanctified by leading ordinary lives in a completely supernatural manner, sanctified by obscurity, by usual skills, by common tasks, by routine, but skills, tasks, routine which received a supernatural form from grace within." - Thomas Merton
"We must remember that our experience of union with God, our feeling of His presence, is altogether accidental and secondary. It is only a side effect of His actual presence in our souls, and gives no sure indication of that presence in any case. For God Himself is above all apprehensions and ideas and sensations, however spiritual, that can ever be experienced by the spirit of man in this life." - Thomas Merton
"The story of the whale swallowing Jonah, though a whale is large enough to do it, borders greatly on the marvelous; but it would have approached nearer to the idea of a miracle if Jonah had swallowed the whale." - Thomas Paine
"Love to faults is always blind; Always is to joy inclin’d, Lawless, wing’d and unconfin’d, And breaks all chains from every mind. Deceit to secrecy confin’d, Lawful, cautious and refin’d; To anything but interest blind, And forges fetters for the mind." - William Blake
"Better to shun the bait than struggle in the snare." - William Blake
"Shallow artifice begets suspicion, and like a cobweb veil, but thinly shades the face of thy design, alone disguising what should have ne'er been seen, imperfect mischief." - William Congreve
"You are different from the really great man in only one thing: The great man, at one time, also was a very little man, but he developed one important ability: he learned to see where he was small in his thinking, and actions. Under the pressure of some task which was dear to him he learned better and better to sense the threat that comes from his smallness and pettiness. The great man, then, knows when and in what he is a little man." - Wilhelm Reich
"It's frightfully important for a writer to be his age, not to be younger or older than he is. One might ask, "What should I write at the age of sixty-four," but never, "What should I write in 1940."" - W. H. Auden, fully Wystan Hugh Auden
"This is the perennial danger which besets semiotics: what with man being preeminently the sign-using creature, and what with man using signs in everything that he does, semiotics runs the risk of being about everything and hence about nothing." - Walker Percy
"The man who leaves money to charity in his will is only giving away what no longer belongs to him." - Voltaire, pen name of François-Marie Arouet NULL
"The possible: that window of the dream opening upon reality. Music expresses that which cannot be said and on which it is impossible to remain silent. (I.2.iv)" - Victor Hugo
"To touch with the thought is almost the same as to touch with the hand." - Victor Hugo
"To possess money is very well; it may be a most valuable servant; to be possessed by it, is to be possessed by a devil, and one of the meanest and worst kind of devils." - Tryon Edwards
"No policy is sustainable without a public that broadly understands why it's necessary and sees the world the way you do..." - Thomas L. Friedman, fully Thomas Lauren Friedman
"I am not one of those who believe that a great standing army is the means of maintaining peace, because if you build up a great profession, those who form parts of it want to exercise their profession." - Woodrow Wilson, fully Thomas Woodrow Wilson
"No country can afford to have its prosperity originated by a small controlling class. The treasury of America lies in those ambitions, those energies, that cannot be restricted to a special favored class. It depends upon the inventions of unknown men, upon the originations of unknown men, upon the ambitions of unknown men. Every country is renewed out of the ranks of the unknown, not out of the ranks of those already famous and powerful and in control." - Woodrow Wilson, fully Thomas Woodrow Wilson
"All depression has its roots in self-pity, and all self-pity is rooted in people taking themselves too seriously." - Tom Robbins, fully Thomas Eugene "Tom" Robbins
"And, to add greater honors to his age than man could give him, he died fearing God." - William Shakespeare
"Blood will have blood." - William Shakespeare
"But there is no such man; for, brother, men can counsel and speak comfort to that grief which they themselves not feel; but, tasting it, their counsel turns to passion, which before would give preceptial medicine to rage, fetter strong madness in a silken thread, charm ache with air and agony with words. Much Ado About Nothing, Act v, Scene 1" - William Shakespeare
"‘Mysterious Repeating Sources’ are caused by the fact that news sources do a minimum amount of background research, especially during breaking news. If a piece of information originates with research they did themselves, they tend to do a decent job of fact-checking before reporting it. If it originates with someone else, Mass Media, or other blog-type media, they tend not to fact-check it at all." - Drew Curtis
"O, what a world of vile ill-favored faults Looks handsome in three hundred pounds a year. The Merry Wives of Windsor (Anne Page at III, iv)" - William Shakespeare
"Woman, essentially a purist, is naturally bigoted and relentless in her effort to make others as good as she thinks they ought to be." - Emma Goldman
"Now listen, Lam, he said, youÂ’re a nice egg but youÂ’ve got yourself poured into the wrong pan." - Erle Stanley Gardner
"When struck by a thunderbolt it is unnecessary to consult the Book of Dates as to the precise meaning of the omen." - Ernest Bramah, born Ernest Brammah Smith
"The parody is the last refuge of the frustrated writer. Parodies are what you write when you are associate editor of the Harvard Lampoon. The greater the work of literature, the easier the parody. The step up from writing parodies is writing on the wall above the urinal." - Ernest Hemingway, fully Ernest Miller Hemingway
"A time may come soon, said he, when none will return. Then there will be need of valour without renown, for none shall remember the deeds that are done in the last defense of your homes. Yet the deeds will not be less valiant because they are unpraised. She answered: All your words are but to say: you are a woman, and your part is in the house. But when the men have died in battle and honor, you have leave to be burned in the house, for the men will need it no more. But I am of the House of Eorl and not a serving-woman. I can ride and wield blade, and I do not fear either pain or death. What do you fear, lady? he asked. A cage, she said. To stay behind bars, until use and old age accept them, and all chance of doing great deeds is gone beyond recall or desire." - J. R. R. Tolkien, fully John Ronald Reuel Tolkien