This site is dedicated to the memory of Dr. Alan William Smolowe who gave birth to the creation of this database.
"Grand and manifold as were its phases, there is yet no difficulty in understanding the character of Washington. He was no Veiled Prophet. He never acted a part. Simple, natural, and unaffected, his life lies before us - a fair and open manuscript. He disdained the arts which wrap power in mystery in order to magnify it. He practiced the profound diplomacy of truthful speech - the consummate tact of direct attention. Looking ever to the All-Wise Disposer of events, he relied on that Providence which helps men by giving them high hearts and hopes to help themselves with the means which their Creator has put at their service. There was no infirmity in his conduct over which charity must fling its veil; no taint of selfishness from which purity averts her gaze; no dark recess of intrigue that must be lit up with colored panegyric; no subterranean passage to be trod in trembling, lest there be stirred the ghost of a buried crime." - John W. Daniel, fully John Warwick Daniel
"Silence is the ultimate weapon of power." - Charles de Gaulle, fully Charles André Joseph Marie de Gaulle
"He is free who knows how to keep in his hands the power to decide, at each step, the course of his life and who lives in a society which does not block the exercise of that power." - Salvador de Madariaga, fully Salvador de Madariaga y Rojo
"In manners, tranquillity is the supreme power." - Madame De Maintenon, Françoise Athénaïs de Rochechouart de Mortemart, marquise of Montespan
"Man-made barriers, laws, social customs and prejudices continue to keep a majority of women in an inferior position without full control of our lives and bodies. From infancy throughout life, in personal and public relations, in the family, in the schools, in every occupation and profession, too often we find our individuality, our capabilities, our earning powers diminished by discriminatory practices and outmoded ideas of what a woman is, what a woman can do, and what a woman must be... We lack effective political and economic power We have only minor and insignificant roles in making, interpreting and enforcing our laws, in running our political parties, businesses, unions, schools and institutions, in directing the media, in governing our country, in deciding issues of war or peace. We do not seek special privileges, but we demand as a human right a full voice and role for women in determining the destiny of our world, our nation, our families and our individual lives." - Declaration of American Women NULL
"The single greatest power in the world today is the power to change... The most recklessly irresponsible thing we could do in the future would be to go on exactly as we have in the past ten or twenty years. I can imagine no more dangerous policy than the conservatism that exists today." - Karl Deutsch, fully Karl Wolfgang Deutsch
"That person lives in hell who gets what he desires too soon. Whether he finds his happiness in wealth, power, fame or women, or in a combination of all, that happiness will be meaningless if it robs him of his desire. Heaven is a country through which we are permitted to search eagerly and with hope for what we want." - Thomas Dreier
"Enthusiasm is the dynamics of your personality. Without it whatever you may possess lies dormant: and it is safe to say that nearly every man has more latent power than he ever learns to use. You may have knowledge, sound judgment, good reasoning faculties; but no one - not even yourself - will know it until you discover how to put your heart into thought and action. When a man dies, if he can pass enthusiasm along to his children he has left them an estate of incalculable value." -
"The power of little things has so often been noted that we accept it as an axiom, and yet fail to see, in each beginning, the possibility of great events." - Tyron Edwards
"True conservatism is substantial progress; it holds fast what is true and good in order to advance in both. To cast away the old is not of necessity to attain the new. To reject anything that is valuable, lessens the power of gaining more. That a thing is new does not of course commend; that it is old does not discredit. The test question is, "Is it true or good?"" - Tyron Edwards
"We should be as careful of the books we read, as of the company we keep. The dead very often have more power than the living." - Tyron Edwards
"As long as there are sovereign nations possessing great power, war is inevitable." - Albert Einstein
"It is a nationalism whose aim is not power but dignity and health. If we did not have to live among intolerant, narrow-minded and violent people, I should be the first to throw over all nationalism in favor of universal humanity." - Albert Einstein
"My religion consists of a humble admiration of the unlimitable superior who reveals Himself in the slight details we are able to perceive with our frail and feeble minds. That deeply emotional conviction of the presence of a superior reasoning power, which is revealed in the incomprehensible universe, forms my idea of God." - Albert Einstein
"The attempt to combine wisdom and power has only rarely been successful and then only for a short while." - Albert Einstein
"Happiness is not in strength, or wealth, or power, or all three. It lies in ourselves, in true freedom, in the conquest of every ignoble fear, in perfect self-government, in a power of contentment and peace, and the even flow of life, even in poverty, exile, disease, and the very valley of the shadow of death." -
"Religious faith is not a storm cellar to which men and women can flee for refuge from the storms of life. It is, instead, an inner spiritual strength which enables them to face those storms with hope and serenity. Religious faith has the miraculous power to lift ordinary human beings to greatness in seasons of stress." - Sam Ervin, fully Samuel James "Sam" Ervin, Jr.
"Schools exploit you because they tap your power and use it to perpetuate society’s trip, while they teach you not to respect your own... Schools petrify society because their method, characterized by coercion from the top down, works against any substantial social change... Schools petrify society because students, through them, learn to adjust unquestioningly to institutions." - Jerry Farber
"“Knowledge, without common sense," says Lee, "is folly; without method, it is waste; without kindness, is it death." But with common sense, it is wisdom; with method, it is power; with charity, it is beneficence; with religion, it is virtue and life and peace." - Austin Madsen Farrer
"No human power can force the intrenchments of the human mind: compulsion never persuades; it only makes hypocrites." - François Fénelon, fully Francois de Salignac de la Mothe-Fénelon
"Men who accomplish great things in the industrial world are the ones who have faith in the money producing power of ideas." - Charles Sherlock Fillmore
"Education... should concern itself primarily... with the liberation, organization, and direction of power and intelligence, with the development of taste, with culture." - Abraham Flexner
"There are two fools in this world. One is the millionaire who thinks that by hoarding money he can somehow accumulate real power, and the other is the penniless reformer who thinks that if only he can take the money from one class and give it to another, all the world's ills will be cured." - Henry Ford
"No one can get inner peace by pouncing on it, by vigorously willing to have it. Peace is a margin of power around our daily need. Peace is a consciousness of springs too deep for earthly droughts to dry up. Peace is an awareness of reserves from beyond ourselves, so that our power is not so much in us as through us." - Harry Emerson Fosdick
"Truth isn’t outside power, or lacking in power: contrary to a myth whose history and functions would repay further study, truth isn’t the reward of free spirits, the child of protracted solitude, nor the privilege of those who have succeeded in liberating themselves. Truth is a thing of this world: it is produced only by virtue of multiple forms of constraint. And it induces regular effects of power. Each society has its regime of truth, its ‘general politics’ of truth: that is, the types of discourse which it accepts and makes function as true; the mechanisms and instances which enable one to distinguish true and false statements, the means by which each is sanctions; the techniques and procedures accorded value in the acquisition of truth; the status of those who are charged with saying what counts as true." - Michel Foucault
"All political power is a trust." - Charles James Fox
"To be sure, if it is the purpose of educators to stifle the child’s power of independent thought as early as possible, in order to produce that ‘good behavior’ which is so highly prized, they cannot do better than deceive children in sexual matters and intimidate them by religious means. The stronger characters will, it is true, withstand these influences; they will become rebels against the authority of their parents and later against every other form of authority. When children do not receive the explanations for which they turn to their elders, they go on tormenting themselves in secret with the problem, and produce attempts at solution in which the truth they have guessed is mixed up in the most extraordinary way with grotesque inventions; or else they whisper confidences to each other which, because of the sense of guilt in the youthful inquirers, stamp everything sexual as horrible and disgusting." - Sigmund Freud, born Sigismund Schlomo Freud
"The power to do good is also the power to do harm; those who control the power today may not tomorrow; and, more important, what one man regards as good, another may regard as harm." - Milton Friedman, fully John Milton Friedman
"We try to evade the question [of existence] with property, prestige, power, production, fun, and, ultimately, by trying to forget that we - that I - exist. No matter how often he thinks of God or goes to church, or how much he believes in religious ideas, if he, the whole man, is deaf to the question of existence, if he does not have an answer to it, he is marking time, and he lives and dies like of the million things he produces. He thinks of God, instead of experiencing God." -
"Science had radically changed the conditions of human life on earth. It has expanded our knowledge and our power but not capacity to use them with wisdom." - James William Fulbright
"What is the true end and aim of science but the discovery of the ultimate power - a seeking after God through the study of his ways." - William Henry Furness
"The power of words is immense. A well-chosen word has often sufficed to stop a flying army, to change defeat into victory, and to save an empire." - Madame Émile de Girardin, Delphine de Girardin, née Gay
"We look forward to the time when the Power of Love will replace the Love of Power. Then will our world know the blessing of Peace." - William Ewart Gladstone
"Whatever you can do or dream you can, begin it. Boldness has genius, power and magic in it. Begin it now." - Johann Wolfgang von Goethe
"Nothing can stand against success and yet keep fresh. Nations as well as individuals feel its vulgarizing power." - R. B. Cunninghame Graham, fully Robert Bontine Cunninghame Graham
"It is not in the power of man to devise any form of government free from imperfections and dangers." - Hugo Grotius, also known as Huig de Groot, Hugo Grocio or Hugo de Groot
"This art of resting the mind and the power of dismissing from it all care and worry is probably one of the secrets of energy in our great men." - James Hadfield, fully Captain James Arthur Hadfield
"Power may justly be compared to a great river; while kept within its bounds it is both beautiful and useful, but when it overflows its banks, it brings destruction and desolation to all in its way." - Andrew Hamilton, fully Andrew Jackson Hamilton
"One of the most melancholy things in the world is the enormous power for evil of the dead over things living. There is hardly a great painter or writer, or a man who had achieved greatness in any direction, whose name has not been used to repress rising genius." - John Alexander Hammerton, fully Sir John Alexander Hammerton
"He that acts unjustly is the worst rebel to himself; and though now ambition’s trumpet and drum of power may drown the sound, yet conscience with one day speak loudly to him." - William Havard
"Dreaming is an act of pure imagination, attesting in all men a creative power which, if it were available in waking, would make every man a Dante or a Shakespeare." - Frederick Henry Hedge
"Never underestimate the power of human stupidity." - Robert A. Heinlein, fully Robert Anson Heinlein, pen name for Anson MacDonald
"Democracy is predicated not on faith in man but on the conviction... that no man is good enough or wise enough to be entrusted with irresponsible power over his fellow-men." - Will Herberg
"God then, is the source of all things; the Aeon is the power of God; and the work of the Aeon is the Kosmos which never came into being, but is ever coming into being, by the action of the Aeon, and that which olds the universe together is the Aeon." - Hermetica NULL
"The expansion of human power has hardly begun, and what we are going to do with our power may either save or destroy the planet. The earth may be of small significance within the infinite universe. But if it is of some significance, we hold the key to it. In our own age we have been force into the realization that there will be either one world, or no world." - Abraham Joshua Heschel