This site is dedicated to the memory of Dr. Alan William Smolowe who gave birth to the creation of this database.
"Many prophets of the major religions were themselves remarkably open-minded. Jesus Christ surrounded himself with society's outcasts. Often it has been the followers of the prophets who, to consolidate power, honed the sharp sword of intolerance." - Charles Panati
"I am very doubtful whether history shows us one example of a man who, having stepped outside traditional morality and attained power, has used that power benevolently." - C. S. Lewis, fully Clive Staples "C.S." Lewis, called "Jack" by his family
"In season of tumult and discord bad men have most power; mental and moral excellence require peace and quietness." - Tacitus, fully Publius (or Gaius) Cornelius Tacitus NULL
"Lust of power is the most flagrant of all passions." - Tacitus, fully Publius (or Gaius) Cornelius Tacitus NULL
"The power of the soul for good is in proportion to the strength of passion." - Coventry Patmore, fully Coventry Kersey Dighton Patmore
"Is not beauty created at every encounter between a man and life, in which he repays his debt by focusing on the living moment all the power which life has given him as an obligation? Beauty - for the one who pays his debt. For others, too, perhaps." - Dag Hammarskjöld
"When we hate our enemies, we are giving them power over us: power over our sleep, our appetites, our blood pressure, our health, and our happiness. Our enemies would dance with joy if only they knew how they were worrying us, lacerating us, and getting even with us! Our hate is not hurting them at all, but our hate is turning our own days and nights into a hellish turmoil." - Dale Carnegie, originally spelled Dale Carnegey
"You have it easily in your power to increase the sum total of this world's happiness now. How? By giving a few words of sincere appreciation to someone who is lonely and discouraged. Perhaps you will forget tomorrow the kind words you say today, but the recipient may cherish them over a lifetime" - Dale Carnegie, originally spelled Dale Carnegey
"This metaphor of a mountain path allows us to reconcile an ancient paradox about whether we truly have free will or whether our life is somehow predestined. At the moment of birth we are each given a specific inner mountain to climb, reflecting the force of predestination. How we climb and the time we take are up to us, reflecting the power of free will. In other words, we're given the playing field, but we choose how to play the game. We always have the power of choice, discipline, responsibility and commitment. No life path is harder or easier, better or worse, than any other, except to the degree we make it so." - Dan Millman, born Daniel Jay Millman
"You have to turn might into duty and right into obligation. In effect, societies are ruled either by coercion or manipulation, by deceit, cheating, ideology, or by power. How do you get to normative order that avoids the excesses of things? That is the basic problem." - Daniel Bell
"Cheating thrives where unfairness reigns, along with economic anxiety. It thrives where government is the weak captive of wealthy interests and lacks the will to do justice impartially. It thrives where money and success are king, and winners are fawned over whatever their daily abuses of power." - David Callahan
"The final test of science is not whether it adds to our comfort, knowledge and power, but whether it adds to our dignity as men, our sense of truth." - David Sarnoff
"Happiness is in action, and every power is intended for action; human happiness, therefore, can only be complete as all the powers have their full and legitimate play." - David Thomas
"Pleasure is a shadow, wealth is vanity, and power a pageant; but knowledge is ecstatic in enjoyment, perennial in fame, unlimited in space, and infinite in duration. In the performance of its sacred offices, it fears no danger, spares no expense, looks in the volcano, dives into the ocean, perforates the earth, wings its flight into the skies, explores sea and land, contemplates the distant, examines the minute, comprehends the great, ascends to the sublime - no place too remote for its grasp, no height too exalted for its reach." - DeWitt Clinton
"If you do not desire much, little will seem much to you, for small wants give poverty the power of wealth." - Democritus NULL
"It is not possible to found a lasting power upon injustice, perjury, and treachery." - Demosthenes NULL
"Love is man's natural endowment, but he doesn't know how to use it. He refuses to recognize the power of love because of his love of power." - Dick Gregory
"There are two kinds of crimes: those committed by people who are caught and convicted, and those committed by people who are not. Which category a particular crime falls into is directly related to the wealth, power, and prestige of the criminal. The former category includes such crimes as purse snatching, mugging, armed robbery and breaking and entering. The latter category includes war atrocities, embezzlement, most political actions, and budget appropriations." - Dick Gregory
"Courage, it would seem, is nothing less than the power to overcome danger, misfortune, fear, injustice, while continuing to affirm inwardly that life with all its sorrows is good; that everything is meaningful even if in a sense beyond our understanding; and that there is always tomorrow." - Dorothy Thompson
"We have more power that will; and it is often by way of excuse to ourselves that we fancy things are impossible." - François de La Rochefoucauld, François VI, Duc de La Rochefoucauld, Prince de Marcillac, Francois A. F. Rochefoucauld-Liancourt
"The potential for the disastrous rise of misplaced power exists and will persist." - Dwight Eisenhower, fully Dwight David "Ike" Eisenhower
"This is what I found out about religion. It gives you courage to make the decisions you must make in a crisis, and then the confidence to leave the result to Higher Power. Only by trust in God can a man carrying responsibility find repose." - Dwight Eisenhower, fully Dwight David "Ike" Eisenhower
"Power, in whatever hands, is rarely guilty of too strict limitations on itself." - Edmund Burke
"Nothing, indeed, but the possession of some power can with any certainty discover what at the bottom is the true character of any man." - Edmund Burke
"Men love to hear of their power, but have an extreme disrelish to be told their duty." - Edmund Burke
"I know of nothing sublime which is not some modification of power." - Edmund Burke
"All persons possessing any portion of power ought to be strongly and awfully impressed with an idea that they act in trust, and that they are to account for their conduct in that trust to the one great Master, Author, and founder of society." - Edmund Burke
"Power gradually extirpates from the mind every humane and gentle virtue." - Edmund Burke
"The power of perpetuating our property in our families is one of the most valuable and interesting circumstances belonging to it, and that which tends the most to perpetuation of society itself. It makes our weakness subservient to our virtue; it grafts benevolence even upon avarice. The possession of family wealth and of the distinction which attends hereditary possessions (as most concerned into it), are the natural securities for this transmission." - Edmund Burke
"As wealth is power, so all power will infallibly draw wealth to itself by some means or other." - Edmund Burke
"The heart of the art of diplomacy is to grant graciously what you no longer have the power to withhold." - Edmund Burke
"The power of perpetuating our property in our families is one of the most valuable and interesting circumstances belonging to it, and that which tends the most to the perpetuation of society itself. It makes our weakness subservient to our virtue; it grafts benevolence even upon avarice." - Edmund Burke
"To complain of the age we live in, to murmur at the present possessors of power, to lament the past, to conceive extravagant hopes of the future, are the common dispositions of the greatest part of mankind." - Edmund Burke
"Most of the crimes which disturb the internal peace of society are produced by the restraints which the necessary, but unequal, laws of property have imposed on the appetites of mankind, by confining to a few the possession of those objects that are coveted by many. Of all our passions and appetites, the love of power is of the most imperious and unsociable nature, since the pride of one man requires the submission of the multitude. In the tumult of civil discord, the laws of society lose their force, and their place is seldom supplied by those of humanity. The ardor of contention, the pride of victory, the despair of success, the memory of past injuries, and the fear of future dangers, all contribute to inflame the mind, and to silence the voice of pity. From such motives almost every page of history has been stained with civil blood." - Edward Gibbon
"If we could have ended the war by showing the power of science without killing a single person, all of us would be much happier, more reasonable, and much safer." - Edward Teller
"Genius is only the power of making continuous efforts. The line between failure and success is so fine that we scarcely know when we pass it: so fine that we are often on the line and do not know it.... There is no failure except from within, no really insurmountable barrier save our own inherent weakness of purpose." - Elbert Green Hubbard
"A grateful person is a powerful person, for gratitude generates power. All abundance is based on being grateful for what we have." - Elisabeth Kübler-Ross
"Consciously or not, we are all on a quest for answers, trying to learn the lessons of life. We grapple with fear and guilt. We search for meaning, love, and power. We try to understand fear, loss, and time. We seek to discover who we are and how we can become truly happy… Not all of these lessons are enjoyable to learn, but everyone finds that they enrich the texture of life." - Elisabeth Kübler-Ross
"Life hands us lessons, universal truths teaching us the basics about love, fear, time, power, loss, happiness, relationships, (guilt, anger, forgiveness, surrender, patience, play, loss) and authenticity. We are not unhappy today because of the complexities of life. We are unhappy because we miss its underlying simplicities." - Elisabeth Kübler-Ross
"Love… is the only truly real and lasting experience in life. It is the opposite of fear, the essence of relationships, the core of creativity, the grace of power, an intricate part of who we are. It is the source of happiness, the energy that connects us and that lives within us… It is elusive... We are afraid that we will never have it, that if we find it, we will lose it or take it for granted, fearing it will not last." - Elisabeth Kübler-Ross
"Our power comes from knowing that everything is all right and everyone is unfolding exactly as they are supposed to." - Elisabeth Kübler-Ross
"Relationships offer us the biggest opportunities for learning lessons in life, for discovering who we are, what we fear, where our power comes from, and the meaning of true love." - Elisabeth Kübler-Ross
"Man, the individual, has always been and, necessarily is the sole source and motive power of evolution and progress." - Emma Goldman
"Education is the learning how... to distinguish that of things some are in our power, but others are not; in our power are will and all acts which depend on the will; things not in our power are the body, the parts of the body, possessions, parents, brothers, children, country, and, generally, all with whom we live in society." - Epictetus "the Stoic" NULL
"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
"There is only one way to happiness and that is to cease worrying about things which are beyond the power of our will." - Epictetus "the Stoic" NULL
"Power corrupts the few, while weakness corrupts the many." - Eric Hoffer
"The only way to predict the future is to have power to shape the future. Those in possession of absolute power can not only prophesy and make their prophecies come true, but they can also lie and make their lies come true." - Eric Hoffer
"Our sense of power is more vivid when we break a man’s spirit than when we win his heart. For we can win a man’s heart one day and lose it the next. But when we break a proud spirit, we achieve something that is final and absolute." - Eric Hoffer