This site is dedicated to the memory of Dr. Alan William Smolowe who gave birth to the creation of this database.
"In those whom I like, I can find no common denominator; in those whom I love I can: they all make me laugh." - W. H. Auden, fully Wystan Hugh Auden
"One ever feels his twoness - an American, a Negro; two souls, two thoughts, two unreconciled strivings; two warring ideals in one dark body, whose dogged strength alone keeps it from being torn asunder" - W. E. B. Du Bois, fully William Edward Burghardt Du Bois
"When in this world a man comes forward with a thought, a deed, a vision, we ask not how does he look, but what is his message?. . . The world still wants to ask that a woman primarily be pretty. . . ." - W. E. B. Du Bois, fully William Edward Burghardt Du Bois
"All over Europe the organs that represent dogmatic interests are in permanent opposition to the progressive tendencies around them, and are rapidly sinking into contempt. In every country in which a strong political life is manifested, the secularization of politics is the consequence. Each stage of that movement has been initiated and effected by those who are most indifferent to dogmatic theology, and each has been opposed by those who are most occupied with theology." - W. E. H. Lecky, fully William Edward Hartpole Lecky
"Terror is everywhere the beginning of religion." - W. E. H. Lecky, fully William Edward Hartpole Lecky
"Comrade Stalin, having become Secretary-General, has unlimited authority concentrated in his hands, and I am not sure whether he will always be capable of using that authority with sufficient caution." - Vladimir Lenin, fully Vladimir Ilyich Lenin
"Napoleon, I think, wrote: “On s’engage et puis ... on voit.” rendered freely this means: “First engage in a serious battle and then see what happens. ” Well, we did first engage in a serious battle in October 1917. And now there can be no doubt that in the main we have been victorious." - Vladimir Lenin, fully Vladimir Ilyich Lenin
"The art of any propagandist and agitator consists in his ability to find the best means of influencing any given audience, by presenting a definite truth, in such a way as to make it most convincing, most easy to digest, most graphic, and most strongly impressive." - Vladimir Lenin, fully Vladimir Ilyich Lenin
"The government is tottering. We must deal it the death blow at any cost. To delay action is the same as death." - Vladimir Lenin, fully Vladimir Ilyich Lenin
"The sole "property" of matter with whose recognition philosophical materialism is bound up is the property of being an objective reality, of existing outside the mind." - Vladimir Lenin, fully Vladimir Ilyich Lenin
"Complacency is a state of mind that exists only in retrospective: it has to be shattered before being ascertained." - Vladimir Nabokov, fully Vladimir Vladimirovich Nabokov
"We have moved very far away from love in our collective lives, dangerously near destruction, close to starvation. Perhaps we have the wisdom now, the awareness that love is as essential to human beings as the air we breathe, the water we drink, and the food we eat. Love is the beauty, the delicate mystery, the soul of life, the radiant unspoiled purity that brings spontaneous joy, songs of ecstasy, poems, paintings, dances, dramas to celebrate its indescribable, never-to-be-fully-captured bliss of being. Can we bring love into the marketplaces, into the homes, the schools, the places of business, and transform them completely? You may call it a utopian challenge, but it is the only one that will make a significant difference or that is fully worthy of the potential of whole human beings." - Vimala Thakar
"Romans, never forget that government is your medium! Be this your art:-to practice men in habit of peace, generosity to the conquered, and firmness against aggressors." - Virgil, also Vergil, fully Publius Vergilius Maro NULL
"One can never be the judge of another's grief. That which is a sorrow to one, to another is joy. Let us not dispute with any one concerning the reality of his sufferings; it is with sorrows as with countries - each man has his own." - François-René de Chateaubriand, fully François-René, vicomte de Chateaubriand
"Without taste genius is only a sublime kind of folly. That sure touch which the lyre gives back the right note and nothing more, is even a rarer gift than the creative faculty itself." - François-René de Chateaubriand, fully François-René, vicomte de Chateaubriand
"Of him that sits, and him that walks, of him that stands and looks about, of these the eyes we do shut, just as these premises (are shut)." - Atharva Veda, or Atharvaveda
"I cannot make decisions about things it is not proper for him to decide. He is merely putting in a good word for genuine peace, and for achieving it quickly." - Václav Havel
"My only school was life itself." - Václav Havel
"Our country, if that is what we want, can now permanently radiate love, understanding, the power of the spirit and of ideas. It is precisely this glow that we can offer as our specific contribution to international politics." - Václav Havel
"Happiness is like manna; it is to be gathered in grains, and enjoyed every day. It will not keep; it cannot be accumulated; nor have we got to go out of ourselves or into remote places to gather it, since it has rained down from Heaven, at our very doors." - Tryon Edwards
"Maybe this neighborhood is just beyond transformation. That will become clear in the next few months as we see just what kind of minority the Sunnis in Iraq intend to be. If they come around, a decent outcome in Iraq is still possible, and we should stay to help build it. If they won’t, then we are wasting our time. We should arm the Shiites and Kurds and leave the Sunnis of Iraq to reap the wind." - Thomas L. Friedman, fully Thomas Lauren Friedman
"By 'radical,' I understand one who goes too far; by 'conservative,' one who does not go far enough; by 'reactionary,' one who won't go at all." - Woodrow Wilson, fully Thomas Woodrow Wilson
"I am a most unhappy man. I have unwittingly ruined my country. A great industrial nation is controlled by its system of credit. Our system of credit is concentrated. The growth of the nation, therefore, and all our activities are in the hands of a few men. We have come to be one of the worst ruled, one of the most completely controlled and dominated governments in the civilized world. No longer a government by free opinion, no longer a government by conviction and the vote of the majority, but a government by the opinion and duress of a small group of dominant men." - Woodrow Wilson, fully Thomas Woodrow Wilson
"I come from the South and I know what war is, for I have seen its terrible wreckage and ruin. It is easy for me as President to declare war. I do not have to fight, and neither do the gentlemen on the Hill who now clamor for it. It is some poor farmer's boy, or the son of some poor widow - who will have to do the fighting and dying." - Woodrow Wilson, fully Thomas Woodrow Wilson
"If I am to speak ten minutes, I need a week for preparation; if fifteen minutes, three days; if half an hour, two days; if an hour, I am ready now." - Woodrow Wilson, fully Thomas Woodrow Wilson
"Is there any man, is there any woman, let me say any child here that does not know that the seed of war in the modern world is industrial and commercial rivalry?" - Woodrow Wilson, fully Thomas Woodrow Wilson
"It is easier to change the location of a cemetery, than to change the school curriculum." - Woodrow Wilson, fully Thomas Woodrow Wilson
"Statesmen have to bend to the collective will of their peoples or be broken" - Woodrow Wilson, fully Thomas Woodrow Wilson
"The question upon which the whole future peace and policy of the world depends is this: Is the present war a struggle for a just and secure peace, or only for a new balance of power? If it be only a struggle for a new balance of power, who will guarantee, who can guarantee, the stable equilibrium of the new arrangement? Only a tranquil Europe can be a stable Europe. There must be, not a balance of power, but a community of power; not organized rivalries, but an organized common peace." - Woodrow Wilson, fully Thomas Woodrow Wilson
"There are blessed intervals when I forget by one means or another that I am President of the United States." - Woodrow Wilson, fully Thomas Woodrow Wilson
"We shall not, I believe, be obliged to alter our policy of watchful waiting." - Woodrow Wilson, fully Thomas Woodrow Wilson
"I do indeed disbelieve that we or any other mortal men can attain on a given day to absolutely incorrigible and unimprovable truth about such matters of fact as those with which religions deal. But I reject this dogmatic ideal not out of a perverse delight in intellectual instability. I am no lover of disorder and doubt as such. Rather do I fear to lose truth by this pretension to possess it already wholly." - William James
"I wished by treating Psychology like a natural science, to help her become one." - William James
"In my individual heart I fully believe my faith is as robust as yours. The trouble with your robust and full bodied faiths, however, is, that they begin to cut eachothers’ throats too soon, and for getting on in the world and establishing amodus vivendi these pestilential refinements and reasonablenesses and moderations have to creep in." - William James
"The difference between a good man and a bad man is the choice of cause." - William James
"The war-party is assuredly right in affirming and reaffirming that the martial virtues, although originally gained by the race through war, are absolute and permanent human goods. Patriotic pride and ambition in their military form are, after all, only specifications of a more general competitive passion. They are its first form, but that is no reason for supposing them to be its last form. Men are now proud of belonging to a conquering nation, and without a murmur they lay down their persons and their wealth, if by so doing they may fend off subjection. But who can be sure that other aspects of one's country may not, with time and education and suggestion enough, come to be regarded with similarly effective feelings of pride and shame? Why should men not someday feel that is it worth a blood-tax to belong to a collectivity superior in any respect? Why should they not blush with indignant shame if the community that owns them is vile in any way whatsoever? Individuals, daily more numerous, now feel this civic passion. It is only a question of blowing on the spark until the whole population gets incandescent, and on the ruins of the old morals of military honor, a stable system of morals of civic honor builds itself up. What the whole community comes to believe in grasps the individual as in a vise. The war-function has grasped us so far; but the constructive interests may someday seem no less imperative, and impose on the individual a hardly lighter burden." - 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
"Whatever is beyond this narrow rational consciousness we mistake for our only consciousness." - William James
"In the time of darkest defeat, victory may be nearest." - William McKinley
"Humor implies a sure conception of the beautiful, the majestic, and the true, by whose light it surveys and shapes their opposites. It is an humane influence, softening with mirth the ragged inequalities of existence, prompting tolerant views of life, bridging over the spaces which separate the lofty from the lowly, the great from the humble." - Edwin Percy Whipple
"The growth of modern constitutional government compels for its successful practice the exercise of reason and considerate judgment by the individual citizens who constitute the electorate." - Elihu Root
"It was just so in the American Revolution, in 1776, the first delicacy the men threw overboard in Boston harbor was the tea, woman's favorite beverage. The tobacco and whiskey, though heavily taxed, they clung to with the tenacity of the devil-fish." - Elizabeth Cady Stanton
"At night, after the exhausting games of canasta, we would look out over the immense sea, full of white-flecked and green reflections, the two of us leaning side by side on the railing, each of us far away, flying in his own aircraft to the stratospheric regions of our own dreams. There we understood that our vocation, our true vocation, was to move for eternity along the roads and seas of the world. Always curious, looking into everything that came before our eyes, sniffing out each corner but only ever faintly - not setting down roots in any land or staying long enough to see the substratum of things; the outer limits would suffice." - Che Guevara, fully Ernesto “Che” Guevara
"Comparative psychology teaches us to recognize a very long series of successive steps in the development of soul in the animal kingdom. But it is only in the most highly developed vertebrates-birds and mammals--that we discern the first beginnings of reason, the first traces of religious and ethical conduct. In them we find not only the social virtues common to all the higher socially-living animals,--neighborly love, friendship, fidelity, self-sacrifice, etc.,--but also consciousness, sense of duty, and conscience; in relation to man their lord, the same obedience, the same submissiveness, and the same craving for protection, which primitive man in his turn shows towards his "gods."" - Ernst Haeckel, full name Ernst Heinrich Phillip August Haeckel
"Oxford, in those days, was still a city of aquatint. In her spacious and quiet streets men walked and spoke as they had done in Newman's day; her autumnal mists, her grey springtime, and the rare glory of her summer days - such as that day - when the chestnut was in flower and the bells rang out high and clear over her gables and cupolas, exhaled the soft airs of centuries of youth. It was this cloistral hush which gave our laughter its resonance, and carried it still, joyously, over the intervening clamor." - Evelyn Waugh, fully Evelyn Arthur St. John Waugh
"The Founding Fathers understood the principle that “righteousness exalteth a nation”, and helped to bring about one of the greatest systems ever used to govern men. But unless we continue to seek righteousness and preserve the liberties entrusted to us, we shall lose the blessings of heaven. Thomas Jefferson said, “The price of freedom is eternal vigilance.” The price of freedom is also to live in accordance with the commandments of God. The early Founding Fathers thanked the Lord for His intervention in their behalf. They saw His hand in their victories in battle and believed strongly that He watched over them." - Ezra Taft Benson
"The War that began in heaven is not yet over. The conflict continues on the battlefield of mortality. And one of Lucifer’s primary strategies has been to restrict our agency through the power of earthly governments... We must appreciate that we live in one of history’s most exceptional moments — in a nation and a time of unprecedented freedom. Freedom as we know it has been experienced by perhaps less than one percent of the human family." - Ezra Taft Benson
"The moral order never is, but is ever becoming. It grows with our growth." - Felix Adler
"The joy is about enabling other people's stories to be heard at the same time." - Itay Talgam
"And then all the host of Rohan burst into song, and they sang as they slew, for the joy of battle was on them, and the sound of their singing that was fair and terrible came even to the City." - J. R. R. Tolkien, fully John Ronald Reuel Tolkien