This site is dedicated to the memory of Dr. Alan William Smolowe who gave birth to the creation of this database.
"In an industrial society which confuses work and productivity, the necessity of producing has always been an enemy of the desire to create." - Raoul Vaneigem
"Television is just one more facet of that considerable segment of our society that never had any standard but the soft buck." - Raymond Chandler, fully Raymond Thornton Chandler
"Throughout the history of commercial life nobody has ever quite liked the commission man. His function is too vague, his presence always seems one too many, his profit looks too easy, and even when you admit that he has a necessary function, you feel that this function is, as it were, a personification of something that in an ethical society would not need to exist. If people could deal with one another honestly, they would not need agents." - Raymond Chandler, fully Raymond Thornton Chandler
"Men must be capable of imagining and executing and insisting on social change if they are to reform or even maintain civilization, and capable too of furnishing the rebellion which is sometimes necessary if society is not to perish of immobility." - Rebecca West, pen name of Mrs. Cicily Maxwell Andrews, born Fairfield, aka Dame Rebecca West
"Now different races and nationalities cherish different ideals of society that stink in each other's nostrils with an offensiveness beyond the power of any but the most monstrous private deed." - Rebecca West, pen name of Mrs. Cicily Maxwell Andrews, born Fairfield, aka Dame Rebecca West
"Getting the goodness of light-skinned society ... Learn to live among them, learn their education, their language - all the goodness." - Red Cloud, fully Maȟpíya Lúta in Lakota NULL
"Freedom is necessary for two reasons. It's necessary for the individual, because the individual, no matter how good the society is, every individual has hopes, fears, ambitions, creative urges, that transcend the purposes of his society. Therefore we have a long history of freedom, where people try to extricate themselves from tyranny for the sake of art, for the sake of science, for the sake of religion, for the sake of the conscience of the individual " - Reinhold Niebuhr, fully Karl Paul Reinhold Niebuhr
"Not necessarily every standard that every church tries to enforce upon the society is from the society's standpoint a good standard." - Reinhold Niebuhr, fully Karl Paul Reinhold Niebuhr
"The society in which each man lives is at once the basis for, and the nemesis of, that fulness of life which each man seeks." - Reinhold Niebuhr, fully Karl Paul Reinhold Niebuhr
"The value and dignity of the individual is threatened whenever it is assumed that individual desires, hopes and ideals can be fitted with friction harmony into the collective purposes of man. The individual is not discrete. He cannot find his fulfillment outside of the community; but he also cannot find fulfillment completely within society. In so far as he finds fulfillment within society he must abate his individual ambitions. He must 'die to self' if he would truly live. In so far as he finds fulfillment beyond every historical community he lives his life in painful tension with even the best community, sometimes achieving standards of conduct which defy the standards of the community with a resolute we must obey God rather than man." - Reinhold Niebuhr, fully Karl Paul Reinhold Niebuhr
"An enlightened society is one where all people - the rich and the poor, the literate and the illiterate, the black and the white, men and women - live happily as children of the same Lord. Thus experiencing the brotherhood of men under the fatherhood of God." - Pandurang Shastri Athavale, fully Pandurang Vaijnath Shastri Athavale
"We all need to understand that personal transformation and cultural -- economic and political -- transformation are interconnected. For example, gender relationships, which are tough for people to deal with, are key to whether a society orients to domination or partnership in all its relations." - Riane Eisler, fully Riane Tennenhaus Eisler
"Revolution is a wasteful, destructive, and inhuman engine of political change. It must be allowed to happen if there is nothing better, but the great challenge to human ingenuity is to find alternative paths to economic and political reconstruction, which can bring basic changes without the massive use of violence. The societies of the- Third World can ill afford the economic and human costs of prolonged civil war. But virtually all of the thinking to date about revolutionizing underdeveloped societies through technology rather than through violence has been designed to serve the political interests of the donor country. The avoidance of revolution has been an end in itself, and very little commitment has been made to the achievement of radical political change through nonviolent means in societies needing revolution. A great nation has an inherent problem, and possibly an insoluble one, in devising a strategy for helping another society to remake its political life without injecting its own interests and values and without coming to dominate the weak." - Richard Barnet, fully Richard Jackson Barnet
"Solitude shows us what we should be; society shows us what we are." - Richard Cecil
"Don't think about what you want to be, but what you want to do. Keep up some kind of a minimum with other things so that society doesn't stop you from doing anything at all." - Richard Feynman, fully Richard Phillips Feynman
"Fall in love with some activity, and do it! Nobody ever figures out what life is all about, and it doesn't matter. Explore the world. Nearly everything is really interesting if you go into it deeply enough. Work as hard and as much as you want to on the things you like to do the best. Don't think about what you want to be, but what you want to do. Keep up some kind of a minimum with other things so that society doesn't stop you from doing anything at all." - Richard Feynman, fully Richard Phillips Feynman
"The remark which I read somewhere, that science is all right as long as it doesn't attack religion, was the clue I needed to understand the problem. As long as it doesn't attack religion it need not be paid attention to and nobody has to learn anything. So it can be cut off from society except for its applications, and thus be isolated. And then we have this terrible struggle to try to explain things to people who have no reason to want to know. But if they want to defend their own point of view, they will have to learn what yours is a little bit. So I suggest, maybe correctly and perhaps wrongly, that we are too polite." - Richard Feynman, fully Richard Phillips Feynman
"Conventional economics starts with certain basic premises that are clearly, unequivocally incorrect: that the environment is a subset of the economy; that resources are infinitely substitutable; and that growth in population and consumption can continue forever. In conventional economics, natural resources like fossil fuels are treated as expendable income, when in fact they should be treated as capital, since they are subject to depletion. As many alternative economists have pointed out, if economics is to stop steering society into the ditch it has to start by reexamining these assumptions." - Richard Heinberg
"A university is not a service station. Neither is it a political society, nor a meeting place for political societies. With all its limitations and failures, and they are invariably many, it is the best and most benign side of our society insofar as that society aims to cherish the human mind." - Richard Hofstadter
"Property has acquired an almost greater sacredness in our social conscience than religion: for offence against the latter there is lenience, for damage to the former no forgiveness. Since Property is deemed the base of all stability, the more's the pity that not all are owners, that in fact the greater proportion of Society comes disinherited into the world. Society is manifestly thus reduced by its own principle to such a perilous inquietude, that it is compelled to reckon all its laws for an impossible adjustment of this conflict; and protection of property " - Richard Wagner, fully Wilhelm Richard Wagner
"A society which values equality will attach a high degree of significance to differences of character and intelligence between different individuals, and a low degree of significance to economic and social differences between different groups. It will endeavor, in shaping its policy and organization, to encourage the former and to neutralize and suppress the latter, and will regard it as vulgar and childish to emphasize them when, unfortunately, they still exist." - R. H. Tawney, fully Richard Henry Tawney
"Yet we can maintain a free society only if we recognize that in a free society no one can win all the time. No one can have his own way all the time, and no one is right all the time." - Richard Nixon, fully Richard Milhous Nixon
"Every state of society is as luxurious as it can be. Men always take the best they can get. ." - Robertson Davies
"There is no nonsense so gross that society will not, at some time, make a doctrine of it and defend it with every weapon of communal stupidity." - Robertson Davies
"When a man has become a great figure in society as a physician, we must not be surprised if he regards the laws of society as the laws of Nature " - Robertson Davies
"A society deadened by a smothering network of laws while finding release in moral chaos is not likely to be either happy or stable." - Robert Bork, fully Robert Heron Bork
"Modernity, the child of the Enlightenment, failed when it became apparent that the good society cannot be achieved by unaided reason." - Robert Bork, fully Robert Heron Bork
"I believe however that peace is attainable regardless of the Arabs mentality, society or government." - Yitzhak Shamir, born Icchak Jaziernicki
"Journalism has already come to be the first power in the land." - Samuel Bowles III
"Millions for defence, but not one cent for tribute." - Silvio Pellico
"Think not, Sultan, that in the sequestered vale alone dwells virtue, and her sweet companion, with attentive eye, mild, affable benevolence! No, the first great gift we can bestow on others is a good example." - James Ridley, fully James Kenneth Ridley, wrote under pen name Sir Charles Morell
"Dreams became issues of East versus West. Hopes became political rhetoric. Progress became a search for power and domination. Somewhere the truth was lost that people don't make war, governments do." - Ronald Reagan, fully Ronald Wilson Reagan
"The West will not contain communism, it will transcend communism. We will not bother to denounce it, we'll dismiss it as a sad, bizarre chapter in human history whose last pages are even now being written." - Ronald Reagan, fully Ronald Wilson Reagan
"We need you, we need your youth, your strength, and your idealism, to help us make right what is wrong." - Ronald Reagan, fully Ronald Wilson Reagan
"Our communion with this inner world is not through contemplation but through books. We have passed from intuition into intellectualism." - Rudolf Steiner, fully Rudolf Joseph Lorenz Steiner
"A state in which an individual or a small group are able to dominate the wills of their fellows without check is a despotism, whether it is called monarchical or aristocratic or democratic." - Russell Kirk
"I did not love cold harmony and perfect regularity of organization; what I sought was variety, mystery, tradition, the venerable, the awful. I despised sophisters and calculators; I was groping for faith, honor, and prescriptive loyalties. I would have given any number of neo-classical pediments for one poor battered gargoyle." - Russell Kirk
"The only true forms of equality are equality at the Last Judgment and equality before a just court of law; all other attempts at leveling must lead, at best, to social stagnation." - Russell Kirk
"A lady is nothing very specific. One man's lady is another man's woman; sometimes, one man's lady is another man's wife. Definitions overlap but they almost never coincide." - Russell Lynes, fully Joseph Russell Lynes, Jr.
"The real difficulty is with the vast wealth and power in the hands of the few and the unscrupulous who represent or control capital. Hundreds of laws of Congress and the state legislatures are in the interest of these men and against the interests of workingmen. These need to be exposed and repealed. All laws on corporations, on taxation, on trusts, wills, descent, and the like, need examination and extensive change. This is a government of the people, by the people, and for the people no longer. It is a government of corporations, by corporations, and for corporations. — How is this?" - Rutherford B. Hayes, fully Rutherford Birchard Hayes
"Little children do not lie until they are taught to do so." - Sa'di (or Saadi), pen name of Abū-Muḥammad Muṣliḥ al-Dīn bin Abdallāh Shīrāzī, born Muslih-uddin NULL
"Where your pleasure is, there is your treasure where your treasure, there your heart where your heart, there your happiness." - Saint Augustine, aka Augustine of Hippo, St. Austin, Bishop of Hippo NULL
"Every truth we see is one to give to the world, not to keep to ourselves alone" - Saint Elizabeth Ann Seton, fully Elizabeth Ann Bayley Seton
"I know but one freedom, and that is the freedom of the mind." - Charles Augustin Sainte-Veuve
"Literature is where I go to explore the highest and lowest places in human society and in the human spirit, where I hope to find not absolute truth but the truth of the tale, of the imagination of the heart." - Salman Rushdie, fully Sir Ahmed Salman Rushdie
"Live on, survive, for the earth gives forth wonders. It may swallow your heart, but the wonders keep on coming. You stand before them bareheaded, shriven. What is expected of you is attention." - Salman Rushdie, fully Sir Ahmed Salman Rushdie
"Vertigo is the conflict between the fear of falling and the desire to fall." - Salman Rushdie, fully Sir Ahmed Salman Rushdie