This site is dedicated to the memory of Dr. Alan William Smolowe who gave birth to the creation of this database.
"The fact that no two major countries have done to war since they both got McDonald’s is partly due to economic integration, but it is also due to the presence of American power and America’s willingness to use that power against those who would threaten the system of globalization–from Iraq to North Korea. The hidden hand of the market will never work without a hidden fist.[...] McDonald’s cannot flourish without McDonnell Douglas, the designer of the US Air Force F-15. And the hidden fist that keeps the world safe for Silicon Valley’s technologies to flourish is called the US Army, Air Force, Navy and Marine Corps. And these fighting forces and institutions are paid for by American taxpayer dollars." - Thomas L. Friedman, fully Thomas Lauren Friedman
"It has appeared that from the inevitable laws of our nature, some human beings must suffer from want. These are the unhappy persons who, in the great lottery of life, have drawn a blank." - Thomas Malthus, fully Thomas Robert Malthus
"“To believe your own thought,” observed Emerson, “to believe that what is true for you in your private heart is true for all men – that is genius.” But to impose what you believe is true for you upon all men, indeed upon a single individual – that is despotism." - Thomas Szasz, fully Thomas Stephen Szasz
"As the true object of education is not to render the pupil the mere copy of his preceptor, it is rather to be rejoiced in, than lamented, that various reading should lead him into new trains of thinking." - William Godwin
"The illustrious archbishop of Cambray was of more worth than his chambermaid, and there are few of us that would hesitate to pronounce, if his palace were in flames, and the life of only one of them could be preserved, which of the two ought to be preferred … Supposing the chambermaid had been my wife, my mother or my benefactor. This would not alter the truth of the proposition. The life of Fenelon would still be more valuable than that of the chambermaid; and justice, pure, unadulterated justice, would still have preferred that which was most valuable. Justice would have taught me to save the life of Fenelon at the expence of the other. What magic is there in the pronoun "my", to overturn the decisions of everlasting truth?" - William Godwin
"The other reference is to the time to come; wherein though he have never so great hope of bettering himself, yet for the present he remaineth content with his present condition." - William Gouge
"If Religion has raised us into a new world, if it has filled us with new ends of life, if it has taken possession of our hearts, and altered the whole turn of our minds, if it has changed all our ideas of things, given us a new set of hopes and fears, and taught us to live by the realities of an invisible world -- then we may humbly hope that we are true followers." - William Law
"The subtle body (linga) is primeval, unconfined, constant, composed of the principles (tattvas) beginning with Intellect (mahat) and ending with the subtle elements (tanmatras). It transmigrates, free from experience, and is tinged with dispositions (bhavas)." - Ishvarakrishna, aka Iśvarakṛṣṇa NULL
"What is that which asks such a question? Is it your mind? Is it your original nature? Is it some kind of spirit or demon? Is it inside you? Outside you? Is it somewhere intermediate? Is it blue, yellow, red, or white?" - Hakuin, fully Hakuin Akaku NULL
"I have loved this disaster of a library since I was old enough to read." - Eleanor Brown, fully Nora Eleanor Louisa Hervey Brown
"The question to ask is what will satisfy you? What will bring you peace? And perhaps the answer to those is in asking yourself when you were last happy." - Eleanor Brown, fully Nora Eleanor Louisa Hervey Brown
"Another base unit and being alone are two different things, when be lonely It's easy to fool yourself and think you you are going on the right path but being alone is better for us because it means you will be alone without feeling you are single , but in the end, it is best that you are looking for one person serve as a mirror for you to remember that you cannot really see yourself, but at the heart of another person and the existence of God P inside." - Elif Safak
"Revenge has ears more deaf than adders to the voice of any true decision." - William Shakespeare
"I think he and I should get married!" - Elizabeth II, born Elizabeth Alexandra May NULL
"She says I shall now have one mouth the more to fill and two feet the more to shoe, more disturbed nights, more laborious days, and less leisure or visiting, reading, music, and drawing." - Elizabeth Payson Prentiss
"As for keeping the attack dogs from nibbling away your courage? My theory, after decades in this business, is that you only give a few people the right to make you feel rotten. You have a handful of chits to give out, penuriously, to those you trust and respect. You don't give them to just anyone with an e-mail address and an epithet." - Ellen Goodman
"If women can sleep their way to the top, how come they aren't there?" - Ellen Goodman
"I was always sweet, at first. Oh, it's so easy to be sweet to people before you love them." - Dorothy Parker
"Peace has in it trust in the Lord, that He governs all things, provides all things, and leads to a good end." - Emanuel Swedenborg, born Emanujel Swedberg
"In a republic, that paradise of debility, the politician is a petty tyrant who obeys the laws." - Emil M. Cioran
"Hope is the thing with feathers that perches in the soul, and sings the tune without the words, and never stops at all, and sweetest in the gale is heard; and sore must be the storm that could abash the little bird that kept so many warm. I've heard it in the chilliest land and on the strangest sea; yet, never, in extremity, it asked a crumb of me." - Emily Dickinson, fully Emily Elizabeth Dickinson
"What can your kids teach you?' Well, I believe something different about kids. We don't own them, they have their own knowledge. From the start you have to make the choice to listen." - Faye Wattleton
"Graduation day is tough for adults. They go to the ceremony as parents. They come home as contemporaries. After twenty-two years of child-raising, they are unemployed." - Erma Bombeck, fully Erma Louise Bombeck, born Erma Fiste
"It seemed rather incongruous that in a society of super-sophisticated communication, we often suffer from a shortage of listeners." - Erma Bombeck, fully Erma Louise Bombeck, born Erma Fiste
"Thanks to my mother, not a single cardboard box has found its way back into society. We receive gifts in boxes from stores that went out of business twenty years ago." - Erma Bombeck, fully Erma Louise Bombeck, born Erma Fiste
"And so, the question for the science of mental health must beÂcome an absolutely new and revolutionary one, yet one that reÂflects the essence of the human condition: On what level of illusion does one live? We will see the import of this at the close of this chapter, but right now we must remind ourselves that when we talk about the need for illusion we are not being cynical. True, there is a great deal of falseness and self-deception in the cultural causa-sui project, but there is also the necessity of this project. Man needs a "second" world, a world of humanly created meaning, a new reality that he can live, dramatize, nourish himself in. "Illusion" means creative play at its highest level. Cultural illusion is a necessary ideology of self-justification, a heroic dimension that is life itself to the symbolic animal. To lose the security of heroic cultural illusion is to die—that is what "deculturation" of primitives means and what it does. It kills them or reduces them to the animal level of chronic fighting and fornication. Life becomes possible only in a continual alcoholic stupor. Many of the older American Indians were relieved when the Big Chiefs in Ottawa and Washington took control and prevented them from warring and feuding. It was a relief from the constant anxiety of death for their loved ones, if not for themselves. But they also knew, with a heavy heart, that this eclipse of their traditional hero-systems at the same time left them as good as dead." - Ernest Becker
"There is the type of man who has great contempt for "imÂmediacy," who tries to cultivate his interiority, base his pride on something deeper and inner, create a distance between himself and the average man. Kierkegaard calls this type of man the "introvert." He is a little more concerned with what it means to be a person, with individuality and uniqueness. He enjoys solitude and withÂdraws periodically to reflect, perhaps to nurse ideas about his secret self, what it might be. This, after all is said and done, is the only real problem of life, the only worthwhile preoccupation of man: What is one's true talent, his secret gift, his authentic vocation? In what way is one truly unique, and how can he express this uniqueÂness, give it form, dedicate it to something beyond himself? How can the person take his private inner being, the great mystery that he feels at the heart of himself, his emotions, his yearnings and use them to live more distinctively, to enrich both himself and manÂkind with the peculiar quality of his talent? In adolescence, most of us throb with this dilemma, expressing it either with words and thoughts or with simple numb pain and longing. But usually life suck us up into standardized activities. The social hero-system into which we are born marks out paths for our heroism, paths to which we conform, to which we shape ourselves so that we can please others, become what they expect us to be. And instead of working our inner secret we gradually cover it over and forget it, while we become purely external men, playing successfully the standardized hero-game into which we happen to fall by accident, by family connection, by reflex patriotism, or by the simple need to eat and the urge to procreate." - Ernest Becker
"I read library books as fast as I could go, rushing them home in the basket of my bicycle. From the minute I reached our house, I started to read. Every book I seized on, from "Bunny Brown and His Sister Sue at Camp Rest-a-While" to "Twenty Thousand Leagues Under the Sea," stood for the devouring wish to read being instantly granted. I knew this was bliss, knew it at the time. Taste isn't nearly so important; it comes in its own time." - Eudora Welty
"That's why I tell stories: to create readiness, to nudge the people toward receptive insight. In their present state they can stare till doomsday and not see it, listen till they're blue in the face and not get it." - Eugene Peterson
"As one gets older, litigation replaces sex." - Gore Vidal, fully Eugene Luther Gore Vidal
"Nothing is hopeless; we must hope for everything." - Euripedes NULL
"Don't you think, said Father Rothschild gently, that perhaps it is all in some way historical? I don't think people ever want to lose their faith either in religion or anything else. I know very few young people, but it seems to me that they are all possessed with an almost fatal hunger for permanence. I think all these divorces show that. People aren't content just to muddle along nowadays ... And this word bogus they all use ... They won't make the best of a bad job nowadays. My private schoolmaster used to say, If a thing's worth doing at all, it's worth doing well. My Church has taught that in different words for several centuries. But these young people have got hold of another end of the stick, and for all we know it may be the right one. They say, If a thing's not worth doing well, it's not worth doing at all. It makes everything very difficult for them." - Evelyn Waugh, fully Evelyn Arthur St. John Waugh
"As we cleanse the inner vessel, there will have to be changes made in our own personal lives, in our families, and in the Church. The proud do not change to improve, but defend their position by rationalizing. Repentance means change, and it takes a humble person to change. But we can do it." - Ezra Taft Benson
"One good yardstick as to whether a person might be the right one for you is this: in her presence, do you think your noblest thoughts, do you aspire to your finest deeds, do you wish you were better than you are?" - Ezra Taft Benson
"In a health-care situation, you see humanity at its most basic, and you realize there are no simple yes-or-no, right-or-wrong answers." - Faye Wattleton
"The concept of congruence in Euclidean geometry is not exactly the same as that in non-Euclidean geometry... "Congruent" means in Euclidean geometry the same as "determining parallelism," a meaning which it does not have in non-Euclidean geometry." - Hans Reichenbach
"Never refuse a good offer." - Italian Proverbs
"Trouble shared is trouble halved." - Italian Proverbs
"The greatest writers of this age... are aware of the mystery of our existence." - J. B. Priestly, fully John Boynton Priestly
"And as the captains gazed south to the Land of Mordor, it seemed to them that, black against the pall of cloud, there rose a huge shape of shadow, impenetrable, lightning-crowned, filling all the sky. Enormous it reared above the world, and stretched out towards them a vast threatening hand, terrible but impotent: for even as it leaned over them, a great wind took it, and it was all blown away, and passed; and then a hush fell." - J. R. R. Tolkien, fully John Ronald Reuel Tolkien
"And they passed in thought out to regions where pain and delight flow together and tears are the very wine of blessedness." - J. R. R. Tolkien, fully John Ronald Reuel Tolkien
"At last Fingon stood alone with his guard dead about him; and he fought with Gothmog, until another Balrog came behind and cast a thong of fire about him. Then Gothmog hewed him with his black axe, and a white flame sprang up from the helm of Fingon as it was cloven. Thus fell the High King of the Noldor; and they beat him into the dust with their maces; and his banner, blue and silver, they trod into the mire of his blood." - J. R. R. Tolkien, fully John Ronald Reuel Tolkien
"But it may be the hard part of a friend to rebuke a friend's folly." - J. R. R. Tolkien, fully John Ronald Reuel Tolkien
"But no living man am I You look upon a woman. Owyn I am, Omunds daughter. You stand between me and my lord and kin. Begone, if you be not deathless For living or dark undead, I will smite you, if you touch him." - J. R. R. Tolkien, fully John Ronald Reuel Tolkien