This site is dedicated to the memory of Dr. Alan William Smolowe who gave birth to the creation of this database.
"It has become clear that the legacy of the past decades we have to cope with is even worse than we anticipated or could anticipate in the joyful atmosphere of those first weeks of freedom. New problems are emerging day by day, and we can see how interconnected they are, how long it takes to solve them, and how difficult it is to establish priorities." - Václav Havel
"It is the beginning of the worst moment. All of the flood barriers are at their maximum level." - Václav Havel
"There are no exact directions. There are probably no directions at all. The only things that I am able to recommend at this moment are: a sense of humor; an ability to see the ridiculous and the absurd dimensions of things; an ability to laugh about others as well as about ourselves; a sense of irony; and, of everything that invites parody in this world. In other words: rising above things, or looking at them from a distance; sensibility to the hidden presence of all the more dangerous types of conceit in others, as well as in ourselves; good cheer; an unostentatious certainty of the meaning of things; gratitude for the gift of life and courage to assume responsibility for it; and, a vigilant mind." - Václav Havel
"Today's world, as we all know, is faced with multiple threats. From whichever angle I look at this menace, I always come to the conclusion that salvation can only come through a profound awakening of man to his own personal responsibility, which is at the same time a global responsibility. Thus, the only way to save our world, as I see it, lies in a democracy that recalls its ancient Greek roots: democracy based on an integral human personality personally answering for the fate of the community." - Václav Havel
"We must not be afraid of dreaming the seemingly impossible if we want the seemingly impossible to become a reality." - Václav Havel
"What I am about to say may sound provocative, but I feel more and more strongly that even these ideas are not enough, that we must go farther and deeper." - Václav Havel
"When a man has his heart in the right place and good taste, he can not only do well in politics but is even predetermined for it. If someone is modest and does not yearn for power, he is certainly not ill-equipped to engage in politics; on the contrary, he belongs there. What is needed in politics is not the ability to lie but rather the sensibility to know when, where, how and to whom to say things." - Václav Havel
"In my opinion such a thing is impossible for many years... People have been talking about a 3000 miles high-angle rocket shot from one continent to another, carrying an atomic bomb and so directed as to be a precise weapon... I think we can leave that out of our thinking." - Vannevar Bush
"A friend is one soul in two bodies." - Turkish Proverbs
"A little group of willful men, representing no opinion but their own, have rendered the great Government of the United States helpless and contemptible." - Woodrow Wilson, fully Thomas Woodrow Wilson
"Is there any man, is there any woman, let me say any child here that does not know that the seed of war in the modern world is industrial and commercial rivalry?" - Woodrow Wilson, fully Thomas Woodrow Wilson
"The most conservative persons I ever met are college undergraduates. The radicals are the men past middle life." - Woodrow Wilson, fully Thomas Woodrow Wilson
"It’s when you’re safe at home that you wish you were having an adventure. When you’re having an adventure you wish you were safe at home." - Thornton Wilder, fully Thornton Niven Wilder
"When you're safe at home you wish you were having an adventure; when you're having an adventure you wish you were safe at home." - Thornton Wilder, fully Thornton Niven Wilder
"The bravest are surely those who have the clearest vision of what is before them, glory and danger alike, and yet notwithstanding, go out to meet it." - Thucydides NULL
"Muslim women do not regard Islam as an obstacle to their progress; indeed, many may see it as a crucial component of that progress." - Dalia Mogahed
"It is absurd to expect the inclinations and wishes of two human beings to coincide, through any long period of time. To oblige them to act and live together is to subject them to some inevitable potion of thwarting, bickering, and unhappiness." - William Godwin
"Nor is there any reason to believe that sound conviction will be less permanent in its influence than sophistry and error." - William Godwin
"Once annihilate the quackery of government, and the most homebred understanding might be strong enough to detect the artifices of the state juggler that would mislead him." - William Godwin
"One of the prerogatives by which man is eminently distinguished from all other living beings inhabiting this globe of earth, consists in the gift of reason." - William Godwin
"I would employ the word noetic to express all those cognitions which originate in the mind itself." - William Hamilton, fully Sir William Hamilton, 9th Baronet
"Every man who possibly can should force himself to a holiday of a full month in a year, whether he feels like taking it or not." - William James
"To suggest personal will and effort to one all sicklied o'er with the sense of irremediable impotence is to suggest the most impossible of things. What he craves is to be consoled in his very powerlessness, to feel that the spirit of the universe recognizes and secures him, all decaying and failing as he is." - William James
"What matters it that a soldier has a sword of dazzling finish, of the keenest edge, and finest temper, if he has never learned the art of fence." - William Matthews
"A man of wit would often be much embarrassed without the company of fools." - François de La Rochefoucauld, François VI, Duc de La Rochefoucauld, Prince de Marcillac, Francois A. F. Rochefoucauld-Liancourt
"Gratitude is like the good faith of traders--it maintains commerce; and we often pay, not because it is just to discharge our debts, but that we may more readily find people to trust us." - François de La Rochefoucauld, François VI, Duc de La Rochefoucauld, Prince de Marcillac, Francois A. F. Rochefoucauld-Liancourt
"Some weak people are so sensible of their weakness as to be able to make a good use of it." - François de La Rochefoucauld, François VI, Duc de La Rochefoucauld, Prince de Marcillac, Francois A. F. Rochefoucauld-Liancourt
"Is there still a possibility of public truth? The prime condition for that would be that you pose your own questions, not just answer them. The questions of others have a distorting influence, one adapts to them, accepts words and concepts that should be avoided at all costs. Ideally, you should use only words which you have filled with new meaning." - Elias Canetti
"No matter who, what part of the world we live, live, until a sense of a lack of deep down we are moving. It's a basic thing we are afraid of not getting lost it in the back. Bilenimizde what is missing very little indeed." - Elif Safak
"I observe that there are two entirely different theories according to which individual men seek to get on in the world. One theory leads a man to pull down everybody around him in order to climb up on them to a higher place. The other leads a man to help everybody around him in order that he may go up with them." - Elihu Root
"My friend Kate once went to a concert of Mongolian throat singers who were traveling through New York City on a rare world tour. Although she couldn't understand the words to their songs, she found the music almost unbearably sad. After the concert, Kate approached the lead Mongolian singer and asked, What are your songs about? He replied, Our songs are about the same things that everyone else's songs are about: lost love, and somebody stole your fastest horse." - Elizabeth Gilbert
"What time has ever been a simple time for those who are living it?" - Elizabeth Gilbert
"Kindness is an inner desire that makes us want to do good things even if we do not get anything in return. It is the joy of our life to do them. When we do good things from this inner desire, there is kindness in everything we think, say, want and do." - Emanuel Swedenborg, born Emanujel Swedberg
"So far any one shuns evils, so far as he does good." - Emanuel Swedenborg, born Emanujel Swedberg
"Sin is not offense against God, but against our humanity. It is not a state which came to us and which we cannot throw off; it is an act of our own. Sin is anti-social conduct, due to the want of resistance on our part to the influences of the animal world behind us, selfishness, or to the legacy of a phase of civilization over which and beyond which we should have passed on." - Emil G. Hirsch, fully Emil Gustav Hirsch
"And the Truth turns out to be nothing less than the amazing but undeniable fact that the whole outer world -whether it be the physical body, the common things of life, the winds and the rain, the clouds, the earth itself -is amenable to man's thought, and that he had dominion over it when he knows it." - Emmet Fox
"God comes through the wound': Our very imperfections—what religion labels our 'sins,' what therapy calls our 'sickness,' what philosophy terms our 'errors'—are precisely what bring us closer to the reality that no matter how hard we try to deny it, we are not the ones in control here. And this realization, inevitably and joyously, brings us closer to 'God'." - Ernest Kurtz and Katherine Ketcham
"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
"And so, the question for the science of mental health must beÂcome an absolutely new and revolutionary one, yet one that reÂflects the essence of the human condition: On what level of illusion does one live? We will see the import of this at the close of this chapter, but right now we must remind ourselves that when we talk about the need for illusion we are not being cynical. True, there is a great deal of falseness and self-deception in the cultural causa-sui project, but there is also the necessity of this project. Man needs a "second" world, a world of humanly created meaning, a new reality that he can live, dramatize, nourish himself in. "Illusion" means creative play at its highest level. Cultural illusion is a necessary ideology of self-justification, a heroic dimension that is life itself to the symbolic animal. To lose the security of heroic cultural illusion is to die—that is what "deculturation" of primitives means and what it does. It kills them or reduces them to the animal level of chronic fighting and fornication. Life becomes possible only in a continual alcoholic stupor. Many of the older American Indians were relieved when the Big Chiefs in Ottawa and Washington took control and prevented them from warring and feuding. It was a relief from the constant anxiety of death for their loved ones, if not for themselves. But they also knew, with a heavy heart, that this eclipse of their traditional hero-systems at the same time left them as good as dead." - 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
"When you love you wish to do things for. You wish to sacrifice for. You wish to serve." - Ernest Hemingway, fully Ernest Miller Hemingway
"If your heart vibrate looking Resist oppression then silence is a form of treason because" - Che Guevara, fully Ernesto “Che” Guevara
"We brought ten thousand head of cattle to the Sierra one day and said to the peasants, simply, "Eat". And the peasants, for the first time in years and years, some for the first time in their lives, ate beef." - Che Guevara, fully Ernesto “Che” Guevara
"I care how I feel and it is my desire to feel good." - Ester and Jerry Hicks
"There is no better way to earn money than to do the things that you love to do. Money can flow into your experience through endless avenues. It is not the choice of the craft that limits the money that flows - but only your attitude toward money." - Ester and Jerry Hicks
"Instead of asking, “Why does this happen Why do I feel left in the lurch” we can ask “How does it happen that there are people who sing with such confidence, ‘God’s strong name is our help’”" - Eugene Peterson
"We survive in the way of faith not because we have extraordinary stamina but because God sticks with us." - Eugene Peterson
"You don't make your words true by embellishing them with religious lace. In making your speech sound more religious, it becomes less true." - Eugene Peterson
"Scotellaro could leave us a hundred poems that remain some of the most significant of our time ... in him the dough between the vein and the vein that I would say international folk have found happiness unusual accent." - Eugenio Montale