This site is dedicated to the memory of Dr. Alan William Smolowe who gave birth to the creation of this database.
"The texture of experience is prior to everything else." - Willem de Kooning
"The chief movement of modernity, Kierkegaard holds, is a drift toward mass society, which means the death of the individual as life becomes ever more collectivized and externalized. The social thinking of the present age is determined, he says, by what might be called the Law of Large Numbers: it does not matter what quality each individual has, so long as we have enough individuals to add up to a large number – that is, to a crowd or mass. And where the mass is, there is truth – so the modern world believes." - William Barrett, fully William Christopher Barrett
"Acts themselves alone are history.... Tell me the acts, o historian, and leave me to reason upon them as I please; away with your reasoning and your rubbish! All that is not action is not worth reading." - William Blake
"Ages are all equal. But genius is always above the age." - William Blake
"Cruelty has a human heart, and jealousy a human face; terror the human form divine, and secrecy the human dress. The human dress is forged iron, the human form a fiery forge, the human face a furnace seal d, the human heart its hungry gorge." - William Blake
"If a thing loves, it is infinite." - William Blake
"The record of one's life must needs prove more interesting to him who writes it than to him who reads what has been written. I have no name: I am but two days old. What shall I call thee? I happy am, joy is my name. Sweet joy befall thee!" - William Blake
"Those who restrain their desires, do so because theirs is weak enough to be restrained." - William Blake
"Without Unceasing Practice nothing can be done. Practice is Art. If you leave off you are lost." - William Blake
"General jackdaw culture, very little more than a collection of charming miscomprehensions, untargeted enthusiasms, and a general habit of skimming." - William Bolitho, pen name for Charles William Ryall
"Politically, economically and technologically, the world is changing at an unprecedented and sometimes alarming pace." - William Cohen, fully William Sebastian Cohen
"Where modesty's ill manners, 'tis but fitThat impudence and malice pass for wit." - William Congreve
"Cowper declares that the Iliad and Odyssey in Pope’s hands have no more the air of antiquity than if he had himself invented them." - William Cowper
"I am monarch of all I survey, my right there is none to dispute, from the centre all round to the sea, I am lord of the fowl and the brute. O solitude! Where are the charms that sages have seen in thy face? Better dwell in the midst of alarms, than reign in this horrible place." - William Cowper
"If we would indicate an idea which, throughout the whole course of history, has ever more and more widely extended its empire, or which, more than any other, testifies to the much-contested and still more decidedly misunderstood perfectibility of the whole human race, it is that of establishing our common humanity — of striving to remove the barriers which prejudice and limited views of every kind have erected among men, and to treat all mankind, without reference to religion, nation, or color, as one fraternity, one great community, fitted for the attainment of one object, the unrestrained development of the physical powers. This is the ultimate and highest aim of society." - Wilhelm von Humboldt, fully Friedrich Wilhelm Christian Karl Ferdinand von Humboldt
"The things of the world are ever rising and falling, and in perpetual change; and this change must be according to the will of God, as He has bestowed upon man neither the wisdom nor the power to enable him to check it. The great lesson in these things is, that man must strengthen himself doubly at such times to fulfill his duty and to do what is right, and must seek his happiness and inward peace from objects which cannot be taken away from him." - Wilhelm von Humboldt, fully Friedrich Wilhelm Christian Karl Ferdinand von Humboldt
"Books - the generous friends who met me without suspicion - the merciful master who never used me ill!" - Wilkie Collins, fully William Wilkie Collins
"The woman who first gives life, light, and form to our shadowy conceptions of beauty, fills a void in our spiritual nature that has remained unknown to us till she appeared. Sympathies that lie too deep for words, too deep almost for thoughts, are touched, at such times, by other charms than those which the senses feel and which the resources of expression can realize. The mystery which underlies the beauty of women is never raised above the reach of all expression until it has claimed kindred with the deeper mystery in our own souls." - Wilkie Collins, fully William Wilkie Collins
"I have made the great discovery that liberty is a product of order." - Will Durant, fully William James "Will" Durant
"A country can get more real joy out of just hollering for their freedom than they can if they get it." - Will Rogers, fully William Penn Adair "Will" Rogers
"A smart state nowadays will appoint all their highway men from one place. Then one road will do all of ’em." - Will Rogers, fully William Penn Adair "Will" Rogers
"I am no believer in this “hard work, perseverance, and taking advantage of your opportunities” that these Magazines are so fond of writing some fellow up in. The successful don’t work any harder than the failures. They get what is called in baseball the breaks." - Will Rogers, fully William Penn Adair "Will" Rogers
"I have been trying my best to help (the President) and Wall Street Restore Confidence. Confidence, is one of the hardest things in the World to get restored once it gets out of bounds. I have helped restore a lot of things in my time, such as cattle back to the home range. Helped to revive interest in National Political Conventions. Even assisted the Democrats in every forlorn pilgrimage, and a host of other worthy charities. But I tell you this Restoring Confidence is the toughest drive I ever assisted in. When I took up the work two or three weeks ago, confidence was at a mighty low ebb. Wall Street had gone into one tail spin after another… I am telling (folks) that the Country as a whole is Sound, and that all those who's heads are solid are bound to get back into the market again. I tell 'em that this Country is bigger than Wall Street, and if they don't believe it, I show 'em the map." - Will Rogers, fully William Penn Adair "Will" Rogers
"I would rather be the man who bought the Brooklyn Bridge than the man who sold it." - Will Rogers, fully William Penn Adair "Will" Rogers
"Outside of traffic, there is nothing that has held this country back as much as committees." - Will Rogers, fully William Penn Adair "Will" Rogers
"See what will happen if you don’t stop biting your fingernails?" - Will Rogers, fully William Penn Adair "Will" Rogers
"The nation is prosperous on the whole, but how much prosperity is there in a hole?" - Will Rogers, fully William Penn Adair "Will" Rogers
"The Republican platform promises to do better. I don’t think they have done so bad. Everybody’s broke but them." - Will Rogers, fully William Penn Adair "Will" Rogers
"Try to live your life so that you wouldn't be afraid to sell the family parrot to the town gossip." - Will Rogers, fully William Penn Adair "Will" Rogers
"We have it on the best of our information that taxes will be relieved, but not until after your death." - Will Rogers, fully William Penn Adair "Will" Rogers
"We live in an age of 'urge'. We do nothing till somebody shoves us." - Will Rogers, fully William Penn Adair "Will" Rogers
"When people ask me if it has been a hard or easy road, I always answer with the same quotation, the end is nothing, the road is all." - Willa Cather, fully Willa Sibert Cather
"Both matter and radiation possess a remarkable duality of character, as they sometimes exhibit the properties of waves, at other times those of particles. Now it is obvious that a thing cannot be a form of wave motion and composed of particles at the same time - the two concepts are too different." - Werner Heisenberg, fully Werner Karl Heisenberg
"I remember discussions with Bohr which went through many hours till very late at night an ended almost in despair; and when at the end of the discussion I went alone for a walk in the neighbouring park I repeated to myself again and again the question: Can nature possibly be so absurd as it seemed to us in these atomic experiments?" - Werner Heisenberg, fully Werner Karl Heisenberg
"Light and matter are both single entities, and the apparent duality arises in the limitations of our language. It is not surprising that our language should be incapable of describing the processes occurring within the atoms, for, as has been remarked, it was invented to describe the experiences of daily life, and these consist only of processes involving exceedingly large numbers of atoms. Furthermore, it is very difficult to modify our language so that it will be able to describe these atomic processes, for words can only describe things of which we can form mental pictures, and this ability, too, is a result of daily experience. Fortunately, mathematics is not subject to this limitation, and it has been possible to invent a mathematical scheme - the quantum theory - which seems entirely adequate for the treatment of atomic processes; for visualization, however, we must content ourselves with two incomplete analogies - the wave picture and the corpuscular picture." - Werner Heisenberg, fully Werner Karl Heisenberg
"Yet, so strong is the hold which the insidious evil of Communism secures upon its disciples, that I could still say to someone at that time: I know that I am leaving the winning side for the losing side, but it is better to die on the losing side than to live under Communism." - Whittaker Chambers, born Jay Vivian Chambers, aka Jay David Whittaker Chambers
"The secret of greatness is simple: do better work than any other man in your field - and keep on doing it." - Wilferd Peterson, fully Wilferd Arlan Peterson
"It is interesting to notice that in discussing the mechanism of psychoanalysis in liberating the ‘abnormal’ patient from his symptoms, Freud repeatedly lays stress on the fact that the efficient factor in the process is not the actual introduction of the suppressed experiences into the conscious field, but the overcoming of the resistances to such an endeavor. I have attempted to show that these resistances or counter-impulses are of environmental origin, and owe their strength to the specific sensitiveness of the gregarious mind. Resistances of similar type and identical origin are responsible for the formation of the so-called normal type of mind. It is a principal thesis of an earlier essay in this book that this normal type is far from being psychologically healthy, is far from rendering available the full capacity of the mind for foresight and progress, and being in exclusive command of directing power in the world, is a danger to civilization." - Wilfred Trotter, fully Wilfred Batten Lewis Trotter
"The first [quality] to be named must always be the power of attention, of giving one's whole mind to the patient without the interposition of anything of oneself. It sounds simple but only the very greatest doctors ever fully attain it. ... The second thing to be striven for is intuition. This sounds an impossibility, for who can control that small quiet monitor? But intuition is only interference from experience stored and not actively recalled. ... The last aptitude I shall mention that must be attained by the good physician is that of handling the sick man's mind." - Wilfred Trotter, fully Wilfred Batten Lewis Trotter
"If the psychic energies of the average mass of people watching a football game or a musical comedy could be diverted into the rational channels of a freedom movement, they would be invincible." - Wilhelm Reich
"It is obvious that the fascist mass pestilence, with its background of thousands of years, cannot be mastered with social measures corresponding to the past three hundred years. The discovery of the natural biological work democracy in international human intercourse is the answer to fascism. This will be no less true even if not one of the living sex-economists, orgone biophysicists or work democrats should live to see its general functioning and its victory over the irrationalism in social life." - Wilhelm Reich
"Psychic disturbances are the consequences of the sexual chaos of society. For thousands of years, this chaos has had the function of psychically subjecting man to the prevailing conditions of existence, of internalizing the external mechanization of life. It has served to bring about the psychic anchoring of a mechanized and authoritarian civilization by making man incapable of functioning independently." - Wilhelm Reich
"EPCOT will be an experimental prototype community of tomorrow that will take its cue from the new ideas and new technologies that are now emerging from the creative centers of American industry. It will be a community of tomorrow that will never be completed, but will always be introducing and testing and demonstrating new materials and systems. And EPCOT will always be a showcase to the world for the ingenuity and imagination of American free enterprise." - Walt Disney, fully Walter Elias "Walt" Disney
"The Now is alive with a curious life which defies the descriptive powers of such divers as swim ahead of the swine in search of pearls." - Walt Kelley, fully Walter Crawford "Walt" Kelly, Jr.
"One species on the planet, and one species only, has reached the point of being able to have an impact on the evolutionary fortunes of all other species and upon the functioning of all ecosystems. We also have, in a way that is not true for any other species, a relationship to the planet as a whole and to the future. We live with all life." - Walter Anderson, fully Walter Truett Anderson
"The beginning of civilization is marked by an intense legality; that legality is the very condition of its existence, the bond which ties it together; but that legality - that tendency to impose a settled customary yoke upon all men and all actions -" - Walter Bagehot
"The caucus is a sort of representative meeting which sits voting and voting till they have cut out all the known men against whom much is to be said, and agreed on some unknown man against whom there is nothing known, and therefore nothing to be alleged." - Walter Bagehot
"The Sovereign has, under a constitutional monarchy such as ours, three rights -- the right to be consulted, the right to encourage, the right to warn. And a king of great sense and sagacity would want no others." - Walter Bagehot
"You may say you are already doing this; you see and hear nothing of worldly ways, you do not employ your bodily senses more than is necessary. If indeed you are doing this you have closed a large window in this image, but you are not yet safe, because you have not closed the hidden openings of your imagination. So if you deliberately allow yourself to consider the vanities of this world, or to think of comfort and ease, then, although your soul may remain in you as far as the bodily senses are concerned, it is in fact being lured away by these vain fancies." - Walter Hilton