This site is dedicated to the memory of Dr. Alan William Smolowe who gave birth to the creation of this database.
"The waste of plenty is the resource of scarcity." - Thomas Love Peacock
"The lower classes of people in Europe may at some future period be much better instructed then they are at present; they may be taught to employ the little spare time they have in many better ways than at the ale-house; they may live under better and more equal laws than they have hitherto done, perhaps, in any country; and I even conceive it possible, though not probable, that they may have more leisure; but it is not in the nature of things, that they can be awarded such a quantity of money or substance, as will allow them all to marry early, in the full confidence that they shall be able to provide with ease for a numerous family." - Thomas Malthus, fully Thomas Robert Malthus
"In ancient Boeotia brides were carried home in vehicles whose wheels were burned at the door, in token, that they would never again be needed." - Thomas Wentworth Higginson
"Lavish thousands of dollars on your baby clothes, and after all the child is prettiest when every garment is laid aside. That becoming nakedness, at least, may adorn the chubby darling of the poorest home." - Thomas Wentworth Higginson
"Such is the infatuation of self-love, that, though in the general doctrine of the vanity of the world all men agree, yet almost every one flatters himself that his own case is it to be an exception from the common rule." - Hugh Blair
"The illustrious archbishop of Cambray was of more worth than his chambermaid, and there are few of us that would hesitate to pronounce, if his palace were in flames, and the life of only one of them could be preserved, which of the two ought to be preferred … Supposing the chambermaid had been my wife, my mother or my benefactor. This would not alter the truth of the proposition. The life of Fenelon would still be more valuable than that of the chambermaid; and justice, pure, unadulterated justice, would still have preferred that which was most valuable. Justice would have taught me to save the life of Fenelon at the expence of the other. What magic is there in the pronoun "my", to overturn the decisions of everlasting truth?" - William Godwin
"The simplest rudiment of mystical experience would seem to be that deepened sense of the significance of a maxim or formula which occasionally sweeps over one." - William James
"That the principle of self-love (or, in other words, the desire of happiness) is neither an object of approbation nor of blame is sufficiently obvious. It is inseparable from the nature of man as a rational and a sensitive being." - Dugald Stewart
"War comes today as the result of one of three causes: either actual or threatened wrong by one country to another, or suspicion by one country that another intends to do it wrong ... or, from bitterness of feeling, dependent in no degree whatever upon substantial questions of difference. . . . The least of these three causes of war is actual injustice." - Elihu Root
"Enjoy it n ' is not of other wisdom do enjoy your like, it n ' is not of another virtue." - Étienne Pivert de Senancour
"Some go to prison for stealing, and others for believing that a better system can be provided and maintained than one that makes it necessary for a man to steal in order to live." - Eugene V. Debs, fully Eugene Victor Debs