This site is dedicated to the memory of Dr. Alan William Smolowe who gave birth to the creation of this database.
"I live and feel only my own nature. So my inner location, whatever and wherever it may be, is the only factor that determines whether I'm going to be happy or unhappy, free or chained." - Vernon Howard, fully Vernon Linwood Howard
"Lose something before you get it and you will not fear losing it." - Vernon Howard, fully Vernon Linwood Howard
"Foppery is the egotism of clothes." - Victor Hugo
"It is a peculiarity of man that he can only live by looking to the future - sub specie aeternitatis. And this is his salvation in the most difficult moments of his existence, although he sometimes has to force his mind to the task." - Viktor Frankl, fully Viktor Emil Frankl
"The point is not what we expect from life, but rather what life expects from us." - Viktor Frankl, fully Viktor Emil Frankl
"What will it matter to him if he notices that he is growing old? Has he any reason to envy the young people whom he sees or wax nostalgic over his own lost youth? What reasons has he to envy a young person? For the possibilities that a young person has, the future which is in store for him? "No, thank you," he will think. "Instead of possibilities, I have realities in my past, not only the reality of work done and love loved, but of sufferings bravely suffered. These sufferings are even the things of which I am most proud, though these things are things that cannot inspire envy." - Viktor Frankl, fully Viktor Emil Frankl
"We speak here to all the gods that hold to their agreements, promote the order (of the universe), together with all their wives, they shall deliver us from calamity." - Atharva Veda, or Atharvaveda
"I discover that hardly a week passes that someone does not start a new cult, or revive an old one; if I had a hundred life-times I could not know all the creeds and ceremonies, the services and rituals, the litanies and liturgies, the hymns, anthems and offertories of Bootstrap-lifting." - Upton Sinclair, fully Upton Beall Sinclair, Jr.
"As soon as man began considering himself the source of the highest meaning in the world and the measure of everything, the world began to lose its human dimension and man began to lose control of it." - Václav Havel
"It is as if many have again ignored the fact that an attack on the freedom of individuals threatens the freedom of all." - Václav Havel
"A person gives hope to another who requests for money or other material thing or to one who had helped that person in the past. Having given them hope, if that person disappoints them by not keeping his promise, then he is the worst kind of person in this world." - Valmiki NULL
"The responsibility for the creation of new scientific knowledge — and for most of its application — rests on that small body of men and women who understand the fundamental laws of nature and are skilled in the techniques of scientific research. We shall have rapid or slow advance on any scientific frontier depending on the number of highly qualified and trained scientists exploring it." - Vannevar Bush
"Although the Buddhadharma has not perished, the Sangha itself has. Morality and virtue should be cultivated, but are not. The honest and sincere ones invite ridicule, While the false and scheming ones enjoy praise. In the world of the five turbidities, pure people are rare. Living beings never awaken from the three kinds of intoxication.I have some earnest words of exhortation for the young generation of the Sangha: The revival of our religion depends on you Bhikshus." - Hsuan Hua, aka An Tzu and Tu Lun
"This is my hope for modern Buddhism." - Hsuan Hua, aka An Tzu and Tu Lun
"All books can be indecent books, though recent books are bolder. For filth, I'm glad to say, is in the mind of the beholder. When correctly viewed, everything is lewd. I could tell you things about Peter Pan, and the Wizard of OZ, there's a dirty old man!" - Tom Lehrer, fully Thomas Andrew Lehrer
"I feel that if any songs are gonna come out of World War III, we'd better start writing them now." - Tom Lehrer, fully Thomas Andrew Lehrer
"Design must reflect the practical and aesthetic in business but above all... good design must primarily serve people." - Thomas J. Watson, fully Thomas John Watson, Sr.
"By ‘flat’ I did not mean that the world is getting equal. I said that more people in more places can now compete, connect and collaborate with equal power and equal tools than ever before. That’s why an Indian in Bangalore can take care of the office work of American doctors or read the X-rays of German hospitals." - Thomas L. Friedman, fully Thomas Lauren Friedman
"There is an experience of the love of God which, when it comes upon us, and enfolds us, and bathes us, and warms us, is so utterly new that we can hardly identify it with the old phrase, God is love. Can this be the love of God, this burning, tender, wooing, wounding pain of love that pierces the marrow of my bones and burns out old loves and ambitions - God experienced is a vast surprise." - Thomas R. Kelly, fully Thomas Raymond Kelly
"Thought is deeper than all speech; feeling deeper than all thought; soul to souls can never teach what unto themselves was taught." - Christopher Cranch, fully Christopher Pearse Cranch
"The monkeys solved the puzzle simply because they found it gratifying to solve puzzles. They enjoyed it. The joy of the task was its own reward." - Dan Pink, fully Daniel H. Pink
"There are some oddities in the perspective with which we see the world. The fact that we live at the bottom of a deep gravity well, on the surface of a gas covered planet going around a nuclear fireball 90 million miles away and think this to be normal is obviously some indication of how skewed our perspective tends to be, but we have done various things over intellectual history to slowly correct some of our misapprehensions." - Douglas Adams, fully Douglas Noel Adams
"This was the very limit beyond which none of them had ever speculated, or even known that there was any speculation to be done." - Douglas Adams, fully Douglas Noel Adams
"I don't need time, I need a deadline." - Duke Ellington, fully Edward Kennedy "Duke" Ellington
"Continuing the same state is impossible." - Egyptian Proverbs
"Seek peacefully, you will find." - Egyptian Proverbs
"The man a bald woman got will be easily seduced by a woman with beautiful hair." - Egyptian Proverbs
"I have not been animated in my life to fight against race and sex discrimination simply because of my own identity. That would mean that one must be South African to fight apartheid, or a poor white in Appalachia to fight poverty, or Jewish to fight anti-Semitism. And I just reject that conception of how struggles should be waged." - Eleanor Holmes Norton
"We need to fix the Bush prescription drug plan that subsidizes big pharmaceutical companies at the expense of senior citizens. We need to stop the oil companies from obscene profiteering, which reduces the standard of living for so many Americans. As usual, this Administration prescribes the same quack medicine for all our ailments: tax breaks for the richest Americans and the largest, most profitable corporations." - Eli Pariser
"One of the problems of contemporary culture is that life moves at such a quick pace, we usually don't give ourselves time to feel and listen deeply. You may have to take deliberate action to nurture the soul. If you want to increase your soul's bank account, you may have to seek out the unfamiliar and do things that at first could feel uncomfortable. Give yourself time as you experiment. How will you know if you're on the right track? I like Rumi's counsel: 'When you do something from your soul, you feel a river moving in you, a joy.'" - Elizabeth Lesser
"So please forgive me when I say that everything that happens to us in life is a blessing — whether it comes as a gift wrapped in happy times or as a heartbreak, a loss, or a tragedy. It is true: There is meaning hidden in the small changes of everyday life, and wisdom to be found in the shards of your most broken moments. At the end of a dark night of the soul is the beginning of a new life." - Elizabeth Lesser
"A poor original is better than a good imitation." - Ella Wheeler Wilcox
"For a long time - always, in fact - I have known that life here on earth is not what I needed and that I wasn't able to deal with it; for this reason and for this reason alone, I have acquired a touch of spiritual pride, so that my existence seems to me the degradation and the erosion of a psalm." - Emil M. Cioran
"The conscious discovery by you that you have this Power within you, and your determination to make use of it, is the birth of the child. And it is easy to see how very apt the symbol is, for the infant that is born in consciousness is just such a weak, feeble entity as any new-born child, and it calls for the same careful nursing and guarding that any infant does in its earliest days. After a time, however, as the weeks go by, the child grows stronger and bigger, until a time comes when it can well take care of itself; and then it grows and grows in wisdom and stature until, no longer leaning on the mother’s care, the child, now arrived at man’s estate, turns the tables, and repays its debt by taking over the care of its mother. So your ability to contact the mystic Power within yourself, frail and feeble at first, will gradually develop until you find yourself permitting that Power to take your whole life into its care." - Emmet Fox
"Whatever you experience in your life is really but the out-picturing of your own thoughts and beliefs. Now, you can change these thoughts and beliefs, and then the outer picture must change too. The outer picture cannot change until you change your thought. Your real heartfelt conviction is what you out-picture or demonstrate, not your mere pious opinions or formal assents. Convictions cannot be adopted arbitrarily just because you want a healing. They are built up by the thoughts you think and the feelings you entertain day after day as you go through life. So, it is your habitual mental conduct that weaves the pattern of your destiny for you, and is not this just as it should be? So no one else can keep you out of your kingdom - or put you into it either. The story of your life is really the story of the relations between yourself and God." - Emmet Fox
"The Chinese government keeps installing video cameras in its most troubling cities. Not only do such cameras remind passersby about the panopticon they inhabit, they also supply the secret police with useful clues[...]. Such revolution in video surveillance did not happen without some involvement from Western partners. Researchers at the University of California at Los Angeles, funded in part by the Chinese government, have managed to build surveillance software that can automatically annotate and comment on what it sees, generating text files that can later be searched by humans, obviating the need to watch hours of video footage in search of one particular frame. (To make that possible, the researchers had to recruit twenty graduates of local art colleges in China to annotate and classify a library of more than two million images.) Such automation systems help surveillance to achieve the much needed scale, for as long as the content produced by surveillance cameras can be indexed and searched, one can continue installing new surveillance cameras. [...] The face-recognition industry is so lucrative that even giants like Google can’t resist getting into the game, feeling the growing pressure from saller players like Face.com, a popular tool that allows users to find and automatically annotate unique faces that apepar throughout their photo collections. In 2009 Face.com launched a Facebook application that first asks users to identify a Facebook friend of theirs ina photo and then proceeds to search the social networking site for other pictures in which that friend appears. By early 2010, the company boasted of scanning 9 billion pictures and identifying 52 million individuals. This is the kind of productivity that would make the KGB envious." - Evgeny Morozov
"Movies are immortal art - the first new art since Greek drama." - Eric Allen Johnston
"In early 1993, a hostile observer might have had grounds for thinking that the Unix story was almost played out, and with it the fortunes of the hacker tribe." - Eric S. Raymond
"The first thing we have to do with heroism is to lay bare its underÂside, show what gives human heroics its specific nature and impetus. Here we introduce directly one of the great rediscoveries of modern thought: that of all things that move man, one of the principal ones is his terror of death. After Darwin the problem of death as an evolutionary one came to the fore, and many thinkers immediately saw that it was a major psychological problem for man.2 They also very quickly saw what real heroism was about, as Shaler wrote just at the turn of the century:3 heroism is first and foremost a reflex of the terror of death. We admire most the courage to face death; we give such valor our highest and most constant adoration; it moves us deeply in our hearts because we have doubts about how brave we ourselves would be. When we see a man bravely facing his own extinction we rehearse the greatest victory we can imagine. And so the hero has been the center of human honor and acclaim since probably the beginning of specifically human evolution. But even before that our primate ancestors deferred to others who were extrapowerful and courageous and ignored those who were cowardly. Man has elevated animal courage into a cult." - Ernest Becker
"The irony of man's condition is that the deepest need is to be free of the anxiety of death and annihilation; but it is life itself which awakens it, and so we must shrink from being fully alive" - Ernest Becker
"Do you have bad luck with all games? With everything and with women. He smiled again, showing his bad teeth. Truly? –Truly. And what is there to do? -Continue, slowly, and wait for luck to change." - Ernest Hemingway, fully Ernest Miller Hemingway
"To hell with them. Nothing hurts if you don't let it." - Ernest Hemingway, fully Ernest Miller Hemingway
"When the winter began, the rain became permanent, and the rain came the cholera. But it was dominated, and only killed seven thousand men of the army." - Ernest Hemingway, fully Ernest Miller Hemingway
"The revolution is made through human beings, but individuals must forge their revolutionary spirit day by day." - Che Guevara, fully Ernesto “Che” Guevara
"If our intellectual leaders treat work as nothing but a necessary evil soon to be abolished as far as the majority is concerned, the urge to minimize it right away is hardly a surprising reaction, and the problem of motivation becomes insoluble." - E. F. Schumacher, fully Ernst Friedrich "Fritz" Schumacher
"The cultivation and expansion of needs is the antithesis of wisdom. It is also the antithesis of freedom and peace. Every increase in needs tends to increase one's dependence on outside forces over which one cannot have control, and therefore increases existential fear. Only by a reduction of needs can one promote a genuine reduction in those tensions which are the ultimate causes of strife and war." - E. F. Schumacher, fully Ernst Friedrich "Fritz" Schumacher
"The way in which we experience and interpret the world obviously depends very much indeed on the kind of ideas that fill our minds." - E. F. Schumacher, fully Ernst Friedrich "Fritz" Schumacher