This site is dedicated to the memory of Dr. Alan William Smolowe who gave birth to the creation of this database.
"Nowadays people know the price of everything and the value of nothing." - Oscar Wilde, pen name for Fingal O'Flahertie Wills
"A person is never happy except at the price of some ignorance." - Rita Mae Brown
"The things that will destroy America are prosperity-at-any-price, peace-at-any-price, safety-first instead of duty-first, the love of soft living and the get-rich-quick theory of life." - Theodore “Teddy” Roosevelt
"There is a price which is too great to pay for peace, and that price can be put in one word. One cannot pay the price of self-respect." - Woodrow Wilson, fully Thomas Woodrow Wilson
"The cost of liberty is less than the price of repression." - W. E. B. Du Bois, fully William Edward Burghardt Du Bois
"Price is what you pay. Value is what you get." - Warren Buffett, fully Warren Edward Buffett, aka Oracle of Omaha
"Eternal vigilance is the price of liberty." - Wendell Phillips
"Brotherhood is the very price and condition of man's survival." - Carlos Peña Rómulo
"A very Faustian choice is upon us: whether to accept our corrosive and risky behavior as the unavoidable price of population and economic growth, or to take stock of ourselves and search for a new environmental ethic. " - E. O. Wilson, fully Edward Osborne "E.O." Wilson
"If human beings are ever to become free and to cease feeding industry by pathological consumption, a radical change in the economic system is necessary: we must put an end to the present situation where a healthy economy is possible only at the price of unhealthy human beings. " - Erich Fromm, fully Erich Seligmann Fromm
"The material world has only been constructed at the price of taking the self, that is, mind, out of it, removing it; mind is not part of it." - Erwin Schrödinger, fully Erwin Rudolf Josef Alexander Schrödinger
"I shall quite briefly mention here the notorious atheism of science. The theists reproach it for this again and again. Unjustly. A personal God can not be encountered in a world picture that becomes accessible only at the price that everything personal is excluded from it... We know that whenever God is experienced, it is an experience exactly as real as a direct sense impression, as real as one’s own personality. As such He must be missing from the space-time picture. ‘I do not meet with God in space and time’, so says the honest scientific thinker, and for that reason he is reproached by those in whose catechism it is nevertheless stated: ‘God is Spirit’." - Erwin Schrödinger, fully Erwin Rudolf Josef Alexander Schrödinger
"I know the price of success: dedication, hard work and an unremitting devotion to the things you want to see happen. " - Frank Lloyd Wright, born Frank Lincoln Wright
"The individual has always had to struggle to keep from being overwhelmed by the tribe. If you try it, you will be lonely often, and sometimes frightened. But no price is too high to pay for the privilege of owning yourself. " - Friedrich Nietzsche, fully Friedrich Wilhelm Nietzsche
"We are reluctant to admit that we owe our liberties to men of a type that today we hate and fear - unruly men, disturbers of the peace, men who resent and denounce what Whitman called “the insolence of elected persons” - in a word, free men... Freedom is always purchased at a great price, and even those who are willing to pay it have to admit that the price is great." - Gerald White Johnson
"Everything you want in life has a price connected to it. There's a price to pay if you want to make things better, a price to pay just for leaving things as they are, a price for everything. " - Harry Browne, fully Harry Edson Browne
"The price of eternal vigilance is indifference." - Marshall McLuhan, fully Herbert Marshall McLuhan
"Everything new endangers something old. A new machine replaces human hands; a new source of power threatens old businesses; a new trade route wipes out the supremacy of old ports and brings prosperity to new ones. This is the price that must be paid for progress and it is worth it." - Hyman George Rickover
"Despair is the price one pays for self-awareness. Look deeply into life, and you'll always find despair." - Irvin David Yalom
"If money were more important to us we would understand how it influences everything in our lives. Love and hatred, eating and sleeping, safety and danger, work and rest, marriage, children, fear, loneliness ... think of where we go, how we travel, with whom we associate ... The money factor is there, wrapped around or lodged inside everything. Money is the raw material out of which we build our lives. But because we don't take money more seriously, we have come to know the price of everything and the meaning of nothing." - Jacob Needleman
"Honor is like the eye, which cannot suffer the least impurity without damage. It is a precious stone, the price of which is lessened by a single flaw." - Jacques-Bénigne Bossuet
"No people come into possession of a culture without having paid a heavy price for it. " - James Baldwin, fully James Arthur Baldwin
"Surely there comes a time when counting the cost and paying the price aren't things to think about any more. All that matters is value - the ultimate value of what one does." - James Hilton
"Crime is the price society pays for abandoning character. " - James Q. Wilson
"The price of hating other human beings is loving one's self less." - Jean Racine, baptismal name Jean-Baptiste Racine
"The right of conquest has no foundation other than the right of the strongest. If war does not give the conqueror the right to massacre the conquered peoples, the right to enslave them cannot be based upon a right which does not exist. No one has a right to kill an enemy except when he cannot make him a slave, and the right to enslave him cannot therefore be derived from the right to kill him. It is accordingly an unfair exchange to make him buy at the price of his liberty his life, over which the victor holds no right. Is it not clear that there is a vicious circle in founding the right of life and death on the right of slavery, and the right of slavery on the right of life and death?" -
"The right of conquest has no foundation other than the right of the strongest. If war does not give the conqueror the right to massacre the conquered peoples, the right to enslave them cannot be based upon a right which does not exist. No one has a right to kill an enemy except when he cannot make him a slave, and the right to enslave him cannot therefore be derived from the right to kill him. It is accordingly an unfair exchange to make him buy at the price of his liberty his life, over which the victor holds no right. Is it not clear that there is a vicious circle in founding the right of life and death on the right of slavery, and the right of slavery on the right of life and death? " - Jean-Jacques Rousseau
"Our manners and customs go for more in life than our qualities.—The price we pay for our civilization is the fine yet impassible differentiation of these." - Jeremiah Brown Howell
"For anything worth having one must pay the price; and the price is always work, patience, love, self-sacrifice - no paper currency, no promises to pay, but the gold of real service." - John Burroughs
"One who lacks a sense of justice lacks certain fundamental attitudes and capacities included under the notion of humanity. Now the moral feelings are admittedly unpleasant, in some extended sense of unpleasant; but there is no way for us to avoid a liability to them without disfiguring ourselves. This liability is the price of love and trust, of friendship and affection, and of devotion to institutions and traditions from which we have benefited and which serve the general interests of mankind…by understanding what it would be like not to have a sense of justice–that it would be to lack part of our humanity too–we are led to accept our having this sense." - John Rawls, fully John Bordley Rawls
"I value all things only by the price they shall gain in eternity." - John Wesley
"We pay a heavy price for our fear of failure. It is a powerful obstacle to growth. It assures the progressive narrowing of the personality and prevents exploration and experimentation. There is no learning without some difficulty and fumbling. If you want to keep on learning, you must keep on risking failure all your life." - John W. Gardner, fully John William Gardner
"Nothing so obstinately stands in the way of all sorts of progress, as price of opinion; while nothing is so foolish and baseless. " - Josiah Gilbert Holland, also Joshua Gilbert Holland
"The price of seeking to force our beliefs on others is that someday they might force their beliefs on us." - Mario Cuomo
"Few and precious are the words which the lips of Wisdom utter. To what shall their rarity be likened? What price shall count their worth? Perfect and much to be desired, and giving joy with riches, no lovely thing on earth can picture all their beauty." - Martin Tupper, fully Martin Farquhar Tupper
"Laughter, whether reconciled or terrible, always accompanies the moment when a fear is ended. It indicates a release, whether from physical danger or from the grip of logic. Reconciled laughter resounds with an echo of esc ape from power; wrong laughter copes with fear by defecting the agencies which inspire it…In wrong society laughter is a sickness infecting happiness and drawing into societie’s worthless totality…What is infernal about wrong laughter is that it compellingly parodies what is best…The culture industry replaces pain, which is present in ecstacy no less than in asceticism, with jovial denial. Its supreme law is that its consumers shall at no price be given what they desire." - Max Horkheimer
"Greed is not defined by what something costs; it is measured by what it costs you. If anything costs you your faith or your family, the price is too high. " - Max Lucado
"The price of inaction is far greater than the cost of making a mistake." - Meister Eckhart, formally Meister von Hochheim
"What you have become is the price you paid to get what you used to want." - Mignon McLaughlin
"Albert Einstein when asked what he considered to be the most powerful force in the universe answered: Compound interest! What you have become is the price you paid to get what you used to want." - Mignon McLaughlin
"Pay any price to stay in the presence of extraordinary people." - Mike Murdock
"I do believe that every individual should be free to own, buy, and sell gold. If under those circumstances a private gold standard emerged, fine—although I make a scientific prediction that it’s very unlikely. But I think those people who say they believe in a gold standard are fundamentally being very anti-libertarian because what they mean by a gold standard is a governmentally fixed price for gold." - Milton Friedman, fully John Milton Friedman
"The stock of money, prices and output was decidedly more unstable after the establishment of the Reserve System than before. The most dramatic period of instability in output was, of course, the period between the two wars, which includes the severe (monetary) contractions of 1920-1, 1929-33, and 1937-8. No other 20 year period in American history contains as many as three such severe contractions. This evidence persuades me that at least a third of the price rise during and just after World War I is attributable to the establishment of the Federal Reserve System and that the severity of each of the major contractions—1920-1, 1929-33 and 1937-8 is directly attributable to acts of commission and omission by the Reserve authorities. Any system which gives so much power and so much discretion to a few men, so that mistakes—excusable or not—can have such far reaching effects, is a bad system. It is a bad system to believers in freedom just because it gives a few men such power without any effective check by the body politic—this is the key political argument against an independent central bank. To paraphrase Clemenceau, money is much too serious a matter to be left to the central bankers." - Milton Friedman, fully John Milton Friedman
"Government has appropriately financed general education for citizenship, but in the process it has been led also to administer most of the schools that provide such education. Yet, as we have seen, the administration of schools is neither required by the financing of education, nor justifiable in its own right in a predominantly free enterprise society. Government has appropriately been concerned with widening the opportunity of young men and women to get professional and technical training, but it has sought to further this objective by the inappropriate means of subsidizing such education, largely in the form of making it available free or at a low price at governmentally operated schools." - Milton Friedman, fully John Milton Friedman
"The cause of liberty becomes a mockery if the price to be paid is the wholesale destruction of those who are to enjoy liberty." - Mahatma Gandhi, fully Mohandas Karamchand Gandhi, aka Bapu
"Unwearied ceaseless effort is the price that must be paid for turning faith into a rich infallible experience." - Mahatma Gandhi, fully Mohandas Karamchand Gandhi, aka Bapu
"We could not guard every water pipeline from being blown up and every tree from being uprooted. We could not prevent every murder of a worker in an orchard or a family in their beds. But it was in our power to set high price for our blood, a price too high for the Arab community, the Arab army, or the Arab governments to think it worth paying. . . It was in our power to cause the Arab governments to renounce 'the policy of strength' toward Israel by turning it into a demonstration of weakness." - Moshe Dayan
"It was in our power to set high price for our blood, a price too high for the Arab community, the Arab army, or the Arab governments to think it worth paying. " - Moshe Dayan