This site is dedicated to the memory of Dr. Alan William Smolowe who gave birth to the creation of this database.
"The first rule of holes is when you’re in one, stop digging. When you’re in three, bring a lot of shovels." - Thomas L. Friedman, fully Thomas Lauren Friedman
"We reward risk taking. Our university system is competitive and experimental." - Thomas L. Friedman, fully Thomas Lauren Friedman
"Yes, the world is now flat for publishing as well." - Thomas L. Friedman, fully Thomas Lauren Friedman
"But whatever the earthly history of this moment of charm, this vision of an absolutely holy life is, I am convinced, the invading, urging, inviting, persuading work of the Eternal One. It is curious that modern psychology cannot account wholly for flashes of insight of any kind, sacred or secular. It is as if a fountain of creative Mind were welling up, bubbling to expression within prepared spirits. There is an infinite fountain of lifting power, pressing within us, luring us by dazzling visions, and we can only say, The creative God comes into our souls. An increment of infinity is about us. Holy is imagination, the gateway of Reality into our hearts. The Hound of Heaven is on our track, the God of Love is wooing us to His Holy Life. Once having the vision, the second step to holy obedience is this: Begin where you are. Obey now. Use what little obedience you are capable of, even if it be like a grain of mustard seed. Begin where you are. Live this present moment, this present hour as you now sit in your seats, in utter, utter submission and openness toward Him. Listen outwardly to these words, but within, behind the scenes, in the deeper levels of your lives where you are all alone with God the Loving Eternal One, keep up a silent prayer, "Open Thou my life. Guide my thoughts where I dare not let them go. But Thou darest. Thy will be done." Walk on the streets and chat with your friends. But every moment behind the scenes be in prayer, offering yourselves in continuous obedience. I find this internal continuous prayer life absolutely essential. It can be carried on day and night, in the thick of business, in home and school. Such prayer of submission can be so simple. It is well to use a single sentence, repeated over and over and over again, such as this: "Be Thou my will. Be Thou my will," or "I open all before Thee. I open all before Thee," or "See earth through heaven, See earth through heaven." This hidden prayer life can pass, in time, beyond words and phrases into mere ejaculations, "My God, my God, my Holy One, my Love," or into the adoration of the Upanishad, "O Wonderful, O Wonderful, O Wonderful." Words may cease and one stands and walks and sits and lies in wordless attitudes of adoration and submission and rejoicing and exultation and glory." - Thomas R. Kelly, fully Thomas Raymond Kelly
"Few persons will leave their families, connections, friends, and native land, to seek a settlement in untried foreign climes, without some strong subsisting causes of uneasiness where they are, or the hope of some great advantages in the place to which they are going." - 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
"We need to become national, not by any conscious effort, such as implies attitudinizing and constraint, but by simply accepting our own life. It is not desirable to go out of one’s way to be original, but it is to be hoped that it may lie in one’s way. Originality is simply a fresh pair of eyes. If you want to astonish the whole world, said Rahel, tell the simple truth. It is easier to excuse a thousand defects in the literary man who proceeds on this faith, than to forgive the one great defect of imitation in the purist who seeks only to be English. As Wasson has said, “The Englishman is undoubtedly a wholesome figure to the mental eye; but will not twenty million copies of him do, for the present?” We must pardon something to the spirit of liberty. We must run some risks, as all immature creatures do, in the effort to use our own limbs. Professor Edward Channing used to say that it was a bad sing for a college boy to write too well; there should be exuberances and inequalities. A nation which has but just begun to create a literature must sow some wild oats. The most tiresome vaingloriousness may be more hopeful than hypercriticism and spleen. The follies of the absurdest spread-eagle orator may be far more promising, because they smack more of the soil, than the neat Londonism of the city editor who dissects him." - Thomas Wentworth Higginson
"I believe in Democracy because it releases the energies of every human being." - Woodrow Wilson, fully Thomas Woodrow Wilson
"I come from the South and I know what war is, for I have seen its terrible wreckage and ruin. It is easy for me as President to declare war. I do not have to fight, and neither do the gentlemen on the Hill who now clamor for it. It is some poor farmer's boy, or the son of some poor widow - who will have to do the fighting and dying." - Woodrow Wilson, fully Thomas Woodrow Wilson
"I fancy that it is just as hard to do your duty when men are sneering at you as when they are shooting at you." - Woodrow Wilson, fully Thomas Woodrow Wilson
"If I am to speak ten minutes, I need a week for preparation; if fifteen minutes, three days; if half an hour, two days; if an hour, I am ready now." - Woodrow Wilson, fully Thomas Woodrow Wilson
"It has never been natural, it has seldom been possible, in this country for learning to seek a place apart and hold aloof from affairs. It is only when society is old, long settled to its ways, confident in habit, and without self-questioning upon any vital point of conduct, that study can affect seclusion and despise the passing interests of the day." - Woodrow Wilson, fully Thomas Woodrow Wilson
"One cool judgment is worth a thousand hasty councils. The thing to do is to supply light and not heat. At any rate, if it is heat it ought to be white heat and not sputter, because sputtering heat is apt to spread the fire. There ought, if there is any heat at all, to be that warmth of the heart which makes every man thrust aside his own personal feeling, his own personal interest, and take thought of the welfare and benefit of others." - Woodrow Wilson, fully Thomas Woodrow Wilson
"The only reason I read a book is because I cannot see and converse with the man who wrote it." - Woodrow Wilson, fully Thomas Woodrow Wilson
"The seed of revolution is repression." - Woodrow Wilson, fully Thomas Woodrow Wilson
"Too much law was too much government; and too much government was too little individual privilege,- as too much individual privilege in its turn was selfish license" - Woodrow Wilson, fully Thomas Woodrow Wilson
"We are glad, now that we see the facts with no veil of false pretense about them, to fight thus for the ultimate peace of the world and for the liberation of its peoples, the German peoples included; for the rights of nations great and small and the privilege of men everywhere to choose their way of life and of obedience. The world must be made safe for democracy....It is a fearful thing to lead this great peaceful people into war, into the most terrible and disastrous of all wars, civilization itself seeming to be in the balance. But the right is more precious than peace, and we shall fight for the things which we have always carried nearest our hearts." - Woodrow Wilson, fully Thomas Woodrow Wilson
"It is frequently a misfortune to have very brilliant men in charge of affairs. They expect too much of ordinary men." - Thucydides NULL
"Justice will not come to Athens until those who are not injured are as indignant as those who are injured." - Thucydides NULL
"Right or community of blood was not the bond of union between them, so much as interest or compulsion as the case may be." - Thucydides NULL
"The absence of romance in my history will, I fear, detract somewhat from its interest, but if it is judged worthy by those inquirers who desire an exact knowledge of the past as an aid to the understanding of the future, which in the course of human things must resemble if it does not reflect it, I shall be content." - Thucydides NULL
"The freaks of chance are not determinable by calculation." - Thucydides NULL
"The Nation that makes a great distinction between its scholars and its warriors will have its thinking done by cowards and its fighting done by fools." - Thucydides NULL
"The state that separates its scholars from its warriors will have its thinking done by cowards, and its fighting by fools." - Thucydides NULL
"But there is something seriously problematic about radicals and progressives in American politics. Some say it's the two-party system that squashes third parties. Some say that it's the potentiality or expanse of the middle class that marginalizes people that want to reform the system itself. Some make a sort of psychological analysis, that the left doesn't want to win, that success means co-optation. All of those things have some merit." - Tom Hayden, fully Thomas Emmet "Tom" Hayden
"Imagine a nineteenth-century Jane Fonda visiting the Oglala Sioux in the Black Hills before the battle at Little Big Horn. Imagine her examining Crazy Horse's arrows or climbing upon Sitting Bull's horse. Such behavior by a well-known actress no doubt would have infuriated Gen. George Armstrong Custer, but what would the rest of us feel today" - Tom Hayden, fully Thomas Emmet "Tom" Hayden
"Protest politics has been vibrant against Bush and the war in Iraq, but it's been intergenerational. This doesn't seem to be a resurgence of student activism." - Tom Hayden, fully Thomas Emmet "Tom" Hayden
"Protest, even more than property, is a sacred resource of American society. It begins with radical minorities at the margins, eventually marching into the mainstream, where their views become the majority sentiment. Prophetic minorities instigated the American Revolution, ended slavery, achieved the vote for women, made trade unions possible, and saved our rivers from becoming sewers." - Tom Hayden, fully Thomas Emmet "Tom" Hayden
"There is a power to the street that's part of the democratic process when all else has failed," - Tom Hayden, fully Thomas Emmet "Tom" Hayden
"But whether unripe years did want conceit, or he refused to take her figured proffer, the tender nibbler would not touch the bait, but smile and jest at every gentle offer. The Passionate Pilgrim" - William Shakespeare
"Come, our stomachs will make what's homely savory." - William Shakespeare
"Dead shepherd, now I find thy saw of might, who ever lov'd that lov'd not at first sight? As You Like It, act vi, Scene 3" - William Shakespeare
"I do indeed disbelieve that we or any other mortal men can attain on a given day to absolutely incorrigible and unimprovable truth about such matters of fact as those with which religions deal. But I reject this dogmatic ideal not out of a perverse delight in intellectual instability. I am no lover of disorder and doubt as such. Rather do I fear to lose truth by this pretension to possess it already wholly." - William James
"I now perceive one immense omission in my psychology -- the deepest principle of Human Nature is the craving to be appreciated." - William James
"I wished by treating Psychology like a natural science, to help her become one." - William James
"In my individual heart I fully believe my faith is as robust as yours. The trouble with your robust and full bodied faiths, however, is, that they begin to cut eachothers’ throats too soon, and for getting on in the world and establishing amodus vivendi these pestilential refinements and reasonablenesses and moderations have to creep in." - William James
"Man lives for science as well as bread." - William James
"Regarding mutual tolerance: It is negative in one sense, but positive in another. It absolutely forbids us to be forward in pronouncing on the meaninglessness of forms of existence other than our own; and it commands us to tolerate, respect, and indulge those whom we see harmlessly interested and happy in their own ways, however unintelligible these may be to us. Hands off . . . ." - William James
"So I am against all big organizations as such, national ones first and foremost; against all big successes and big results; and in favor of the eternal forces of truth which always work in the individual and immediately unsuccessful way, under-dogs always, till history comes, after they are long dead, and puts them on top." - William James
"Take the happiest man, the one most envied by the world, and in nine cases out of ten his inmost consciousness is one of failure. Either his ideals in the line of his achievements are pitched far higher than the achievements themselves, or else he has secret ideals of which the world knows nothing, and in regard to which he inwardly knows himself to be found wanting." - William James
"The mind, in short, works on the data it receives very much as a sculptor works on his block of stone. In a sense the statue stood there from eternity. But there were a thousand different ones beside it, and the sculptor alone is to thank for having extricated this one from the rest." - William James
"The war-party is assuredly right in affirming and reaffirming that the martial virtues, although originally gained by the race through war, are absolute and permanent human goods. Patriotic pride and ambition in their military form are, after all, only specifications of a more general competitive passion. They are its first form, but that is no reason for supposing them to be its last form. Men are now proud of belonging to a conquering nation, and without a murmur they lay down their persons and their wealth, if by so doing they may fend off subjection. But who can be sure that other aspects of one's country may not, with time and education and suggestion enough, come to be regarded with similarly effective feelings of pride and shame? Why should men not someday feel that is it worth a blood-tax to belong to a collectivity superior in any respect? Why should they not blush with indignant shame if the community that owns them is vile in any way whatsoever? Individuals, daily more numerous, now feel this civic passion. It is only a question of blowing on the spark until the whole population gets incandescent, and on the ruins of the old morals of military honor, a stable system of morals of civic honor builds itself up. What the whole community comes to believe in grasps the individual as in a vise. The war-function has grasped us so far; but the constructive interests may someday seem no less imperative, and impose on the individual a hardly lighter burden." - William James
"We keep unaltered as much of our old knowledge, as many of our old prejudices and beliefs, as we can." - William James
"It is much more possible for the sun to give out darkness than for God to do or be, or give out anything but blessing and goodness." - William Law
"I know a little garden close Set thick with lily and red rose, where I would wander if I might from dewy dawn to dewy night. And have one with me wandering." - William Morris
"One was there who left all his friends behind; who going inland ever more and more, and being left quite alone, at last did find a lonely valley sheltered from the wind, wherein, amidst an ancient cypress wood, a long-deserted ruined castle stood." - William Morris
"We're not obsessed by anything, you see, insisted Ford...And that's the deciding factor. We can't win against obsession. They care, we don't. They win. I care about lots of things, said Slartibartfast, his voice trembling partly with annoyance, but partly also with uncertainty. Such as? Well, said the old man, life, the Universe. Everything, really. Fjords. Would you die for them? Fjords? blinked Slartibartfast in surprise. No. Well then. Wouldn't see the point, to be honest." - Douglas Adams, fully Douglas Noel Adams
"Great men should not have great faults." - François de La Rochefoucauld, François VI, Duc de La Rochefoucauld, Prince de Marcillac, Francois A. F. Rochefoucauld-Liancourt
"Now for the tea of our host Now for the rollicking bun, Now for the muffin and toast, Now for the gay Sally Lunn!" - William Shakespeare
"Now it is the time of night That the graves, all gaping wide, Every one lets forth his sprite, In the churchway paths to glide. A Midsummer Night's Dream (Puck at V, i)" - William Shakespeare