This site is dedicated to the memory of Dr. Alan William Smolowe who gave birth to the creation of this database.
"Progress is what happens when inevitability yields to necessity. And it is an article of the democratic faith that progress is a basic law of life." - Adlai Ewing Stevenson
"The might of necessity brooks no resistance." - Aeschylus NULL
"Modern science has imposed on humanity the necessity of wandering." - Alfred North Whitehead
"Necessity never made a good bargain." - American Proverbs
"The greatest injustices proceed from those who pursue excess, not by those who are driven by necessity." - Aristotle NULL
"The greatest crimes are caused by excess and not by necessity." - Aristotle NULL
"Only through a harmonization of human wills, in a compact freely entered into in the light of divine necessity, can peace prevail among men." - Arnold J. Toynbee, fully Arnold Joseph Toynbee
"I’m convinced that time has no existence in the mind at all. We partition time out of necessity, so that if I say I will be somewhere at 1 o’clock, we agree on what 1 o’clock is. Civilization couldn’t function otherwise. But our minds are a swirling mass of images and recollections that are connected, and it’s the connections that count." - Arthur Asher Miller
"The necessity of getting reconciled with the idea of his possible extinction may breed a new humility and may rid man of that biological jingoism which made him regard himself as the crown of creation." - Arthur Koestler
"The most potent force in the world is an idea which, when organized into a body of concepts, becomes a culture and way of life. Concepts are psychological lenses focusing our experiences. Our physical eyes bring their reports but our conceptual lenses interpret them. If we would “know ourselves” it is a paramount necessity that we should examine critically and impartially our conceptual heritage and endeavor to discover why we accept or reject it." - Arthur W Osborn
"Vacation used to be a luxury, however, in today's world, it has become a necessity." - Author Unknown NULL
"For the victor, there is no necessity for explanations." - Baltasar Gracián
"Ignorance lies at the bottom of all human knowledge, and the deeper we penetrate the nearer we arrive unto it. For what we truly know, or what can we clearly affirm, of any one of those important things upon which all our reasonings must of necessity be built - time and space, life and earth, matter and mind?" - Charles Caleb Colton
"Virtue does not of necessity go hand in hand with primitive plumbing, and nobility can be found in a skyscraper no less than in a log cabin." - David Sarnoff
"All things happen by virtue of necessity." - Democritus NULL
"Necessity is stronger than human nature." - Dionysius of Halicarnassus NULL
"We should manage our fortune as we do our health - enjoy it when good, be patient when it is bad, and never apply violent remedies except in an extreme necessity." - François de La Rochefoucauld, François VI, Duc de La Rochefoucauld, Prince de Marcillac, Francois A. F. Rochefoucauld-Liancourt
"The use of force alone is but temporary. It may subdue for a moment; but it does not remove the necessity of subduing again: and a nation is not governed, which is perpetually to be conquered." - Edmund Burke
"If a man should transfer caution to those things in which the will may be exercised and the acts of the will, he will immediately, by willing to be cautious, have also the power of avoiding what he chooses: but if he transfer it to the things which are not in his power and will, and attempt to avoid the things which are in the power of others, he will of necessity fear, he will be unstable, he will be disturbed. For death or pain is not formidable, but the fear of pain or death." - Epictetus "the Stoic" NULL
"Some men think that the gratification of curiosity is the end of knowledge; some the love of fame; some the pleasure of dispute; some the necessity of supporting themselves by their knowledge; but the real use of all knowledge is this, that we should dedicate that reason which was given us by God to the use and advantage of man." - Francis Bacon
"Freedom to learn is the first necessity of guaranteeing that man himself shall be self-reliant enough to be free." - Franklin D. Roosevelt, fully Franklin Delano Roosevelt, aka FDR
"Life as a sum of ends has a right against abstract right. If for example it is only by stealing bread that the wolf can be kept from the door, the action is of course an encroachment on someone’s property, but it would be wrong to treat this action as an ordinary theft. To refuse to allow a man in jeopardy of his life to take such steps for self-preservation would be to stigmatize him as without rights, and since he would be deprived of his life, his freedom would be annulled altogether. Many diverse details have a bearing on the preservation of life, and when we have our eyes on the future we have to engage ourselves in these details. But the only thing that is necessary is to live now, the future is not absolute but ever exposed to accident. Hence it is only the necessity of the immediate present which can justify a wrong action, because not to do the action would in turn be to cause not to do the action would in turn be to commit an offense, indeed the most wrong of all offenses, namely the complete destruction of the embodiment of freedom." - Georg Hegel, fully Georg Wilhelm Friedrich Hegel
"Only that will which obeys law is free; for it obeys itself - it is independent and so free. When the state or our country constitutes a community of existence; when the subjective will of man submits to laws - the contradiction between liberty and necessity vanishes." - Georg Hegel, fully Georg Wilhelm Friedrich Hegel
"Leisure, though the propertied classes give its name to their own idleness, is not idleness. It is not even a luxury: it is a necessity, and a necessity of the first importance. Some of the most valuable work done in the world has been done at leisure, and never paid for in cash or kind. Leisure any be described as free activity, labor as compulsory activity. Leisure does what it likes: labor does what it must, the compulsion being that of Nature, which in these latitudes leaves men no choice between labor and starvation." - George Bernard Shaw
"The brute necessity of believing something so long as life lasts does not justify any belief in particular." - George Santayana
"Man cannot be free if he does not know that he is subject to necessity, because his freedom is always won in his never wholly successful attempts to liberate himself from necessity" - Hannah Arendt
"Must love be ever treated with profaneness as a mere illusion? or with coarseness as a mere impulse? or with fear as a mere disease? or with shame as a mere weakness? or with levity as a mere accident? whereas it is a great mystery and a great necessity, lying at the foundation of human existence, morality, and happiness - mysterious, universal, inevitable as death." - Harriet Martineau
"Two centuries ago, the philosopher Kant predicted that perpetual peace would come about eventually – either as the creation of man’s moral aspirations or as the consequence of physical necessity. What seemed utopian then looms as tomorrow’s reality; soon there will be no alternative." - Henry Kissinger, fully Henry Alfred Kissinger
"The vision of a world community based on justice, not power, is the necessity of our age." - Henry Kissinger, fully Henry Alfred Kissinger
"Money is not required to buy one necessity of the soul." - Henry David Thoreau, born David Henry Thoreau
"If spring came but once in a century, instead of once a year, or burst forth with the sound of an earthquake, and not in silence, what wonder and expectation there would be in all hearts to behold the miraculous change! But now the silent succession suggests nothing but necessity. To most men only the cessation of the miracle would be miraculous, and the perpetual exercise of God’s power seems less wonderful than its withdrawal would be." - Henry Wadsworth Longfellow
"If spring came but once in a century, instead of once a year, or burst forth with the sound of an earthquake, and not in silence, what wonder and expectation there would be in all hearts to behold the miraculous change! But now the silent succession suggests nothing but necessity. To most men only the cessation of the miracle would be miraculous, and the perpetual existence of God's power seems less wonderful than its withdrawal would be." - Henry Wadsworth Longfellow
"Progress, therefore, is not an accident but a necessity; it is a part of nature." - Herbert Spencer
"The two great gods, Persuasion and Necessity." - Herodotus NULL
"Relaxation is a physical and moral necessity." - Horace Greeley
"Democracy is not just a counting up of votes – it is a counting up of actions. Without those on the bottom acting out there desires for justice – as the government acts out its needs, and those with power and privilege act out theirs – the scales of democracy will be off. That is why civil disobedience is not just to be tolerated – if we are to have a truly democratic society it is a necessity." - Howard Zinn
"Philosophy must then assume that no real contradiction will be found between freedom and physical necessity of the same human actions, for it cannot give up the conception of nature any more than that of freedom." - Immanuel Kant
"Duty is the necessity of acting out of respect for the law... An action from duty must eliminate entirely the influence of inclinations and thus every object of the will." - Immanuel Kant
"[Existence has] neither cause nor reason nor necessity." - Jean-Paul Sartre
"Where there is much desire to learn, there of necessity will be much arguing, much writing, many opinions; for opinion in good men is but knowledge in the making." - John Milton
"God made thee perfect, not immutable; and good he made thee, but to persevere he left it in thy power, ordained thy will by nature free, not over-rul’d by Fate inextricable, or strict necessity; our voluntarie service he requires, not our necessitated, such with him findes no acceptance, nor can find, for how can hearts, not free, be tri’d whether they serve willing or not, who will but what they must by Destinie, and can no other choose?" - John Milton
"Justice is a name for certain moral requirements, which, regarded collectively, stand higher in the scale of social utility, and are therefore of more paramount obligation, than any others; though particular cases may occur in which some other social duty is so important, as to overrule any one of the general maxims of justice. Thus, to save a life, it may not only be allowable, but a duty, to steal, or take by force, the necessary food or medicine, or to kidnap, and compel to officiate, the only qualified medical practitioner. In such cases, as we do not call anything justice which is not a virtue, we usually say, not that justice must give way to some other moral principle, but that what is just in ordinary case is, by reason of that other principle, not just in the particular case. By this useful accommodation of language, the character of indefeasibility attributed to justice is kept up, and we are saved from the necessity of maintaining that there can be laudable injustice." - John Stuart Mill