This site is dedicated to the memory of Dr. Alan William Smolowe who gave birth to the creation of this database.
"The fact that every perpetrator was once a victim himself does not necessary mean that each person who was himself abused is bound later to become the abuser of his own children. This is not inevitable if, during childhood, he had the chance – be it only once – to encounter someone who offered him something other than pedagogy and cruelty: a teacher, an aunt, a neighbor, a sister, a brother." - Alice Miller, née Rostovski
"In an age when man has forgotten his origins and is blind even to his most essential needs for survival, water along with other resources has become the victim of his indifference." - Rachel Carson, fully Rachel Louise Carson
"Until we have the courage to recognize cruelty for what it is -- whether its victim is human or animal -- we cannot expect things to be much better in this world. We cannot have peace among men whose hearts delight in killing any living creature. By every act that glorifies or even tolerates such moronic" - Rachel Carson, fully Rachel Louise Carson
"Man is the individualized expression or reflection of God imaged forth and made manifest in bodily form. How is it, then, I hear it asked, that man has the limitations that he has, that he is subject to fears and forebodings, that he is liable to sin and error, that he is the victim of disease and suffering? There is but one reason. He is not living, except in rare cases here and there, in the conscious realization of his own true Being, and hence of his own true Self." - Ralph Waldo Trine
"I don't withdraw a word of my initial statement. But I do now think it may have been incomplete. There is perhaps a fifth category, which may belong under insane but which can be more sympathetically characterized by a word like tormented, bullied, or brainwashed. Sincere people who are not ignorant, not stupid, and not wicked can be cruelly torn, almost in two, between the massive evidence of science on the one hand, and their understanding of what their holy book tells them on the other. I think this is one of the truly bad things religion can do to a human mind. There is wickedness here, but it is the wickedness of the institution and what it does to a believing victim, not wickedness on the part of the victim himself." - Richard Dawkins
"Like computer viruses, successful mind viruses will tend to be hard for their victims to detect. If you are the victim of one, the chances are that you won't know it, and may even vigorously deny it. Accepting that a virus might be difficult to detect in your own mind, what tell-tale signs might you look out for? I shall answer by imaging how a medical textbook might describe the typical symptoms of a sufferer (arbitrarily assumed to be male)." - Richard Dawkins
"It must feel wonderfully strange when, like Manette, one stands there, the only witness to a vanished world." - Simone de Beauvoir, fully Simone-Ernestine-Lucie-Marie Bertrand de Beauvoir
"We went back to the Ritz bar and Scriassine ordered two whiskies. I liked the taste; it was something different. And as for Scriassine, he, too, had the advantage of being new to me. The whole evening had been unexpected, and it seemed to emit an ancient fragrance of youth. Long ago there had been nights that were unlike others; you would meet unknown people who would say unexpected thing. And, occasionally, something would happen. So many things had happened in the last five years - to the world, to France, to Paris, to others. But not to me. Would nothing ever happen to me again?" - Simone de Beauvoir, fully Simone-Ernestine-Lucie-Marie Bertrand de Beauvoir
"True Charity consists in bearing with all the defects of our neighbor, in not being surprised at his failings, and in being edified by his least virtues; Charity must not remain shut up in the depths of the heart, for no man lighteth a candle and putteth it under a bushel, but upon a candlestick, that it may shine to all that are in the house. It seems to me that this candle represents the Charity which ought to enlighten and make joyful, not only those who are dearest to me, but all who are in the house." - Thérèse de Lisieux, fully Saint Thérèse of Lisieux. born Marie-Françoise-Thérèse Martin NULL
"After a long spell of prayer, do not say that nothing has been gained, for you have already achieved something. After all, what higher good is there than to cling to the Lord and to persevere in unceasing union with Him?" - John Climacus, fully Saint John Climacus, aka John of the Ladder, John Scholasticus and John Sinaites
"Natural selection can only produce adaptation to immediately surrounding (and changing) environments. No feature of such local adaptation should yield any expectation of general progress (however such a vague term be defined). Local adaptation may as well lead to anatomical simplification as to greater complexity. As an adult, the famous parasite Sacculina, a barnacle by ancestry, looks like a formless bag of reproductive tissue attached to the underbelly of its crab host (with ‘roots’ of equally formless tissue anchored within the body of the crab itself)—a devilish device to be sure (at least by our aesthetic standards), but surely less anatomically complex than a barnacle on the bottom of your boat, waving its legs through the water in search of food." - Stephan Jay Gould
"When we recognize that, just like the glass, our body is already broken, that indeed we are already dead, then life becomes precious, and we open to it just as it is, in the moment it is occurring. When we understand that all our loved ones are already dead — our children, our mates, our friends — how precious they become. How little fear can interpose; how little doubt can estrange us. When you live your life as though you're already dead, life takes on new meaning. Each moment becomes a whole lifetime, a universe unto itself." - Stephen Levine
"As regards to its use on the coinage we have actual experience by which to go. In all my life I have never heard any human being speak reverently of this motto on the coins or show any sign of having appealed to any high emotion in him. But I have literally hundreds of times heard it used as an occasion of, and incitement to, the sneering ridicule which it is above all things undesirable that so beautiful and exalted a phrase should excite. For example, throughout the long contest, extending over several decades, on the free [silver] coinage question, the existence of this motto on the coins was a constant source of jest and ridicule; and this was unavoidable. Everyone must remember the innumerable cartoons and articles based on phrases like 'In God we trust for the other eight cents'; 'In God we trust for the short weight'; 'In god we trust for the thirty-seven cents we do not pay'; and so forth and so forth. Surely I am well within bounds when I say that a use of the phrase which invites constant levity of this type is most undesirable." - Theodore “Teddy” Roosevelt
"But sad as angels for the good man's sin, weep to record, and blush to give it in." - Thomas Campbell
"One evening of late summer, before the nineteenth century had reached one-third of its span, a young man and woman, the latter carrying a child, were approaching the large village of Weydon-Priors, in Upper Wessex, on foot. They were plainly but not ill clad, though the thick hoar of dust which had accumulated on their shoes and garments from an obviously long journey lent a disadvantageous shabbiness to their appearance just now." - Thomas Hardy
"Men in bowlers and dark suits with their rolled-up umbrellas. Men full of propriety, calm and proud, neat and noble." - Thomas Merton
"A traveler must have the back of an ass to bear all, a tongue like the tail of a dog to flatter all, the mouth of a hog to eat what is set before him, the ear of a merchant to hear all and say nothing." - Thomas Nashe
"That their several histories, individually already complex, can be understood, and indeed can be understood better, and in the end can be understood only, in terms of each other: as strands in a still more complex whole. What they have in common is that the history of each has been what it has been in significant part because the history of the others has been what it has been. This truth is newly discovered; yet truth it is, truth it has throughout been. Things proceeded in this interrelated way for many centuries without humanity’s being aware of it; certainly not fully aware of it. A new, and itself interconnected, development is that currently humankind is becoming aware of it, in various communities." - Wilfred Cantwell Smith
"Unless we proceed cautiously, there might well arise a few generations of mystics who conceive of the orgone metaphysically, divorced from non-living nature and who do not comprehend it from the standpoint of natural science. And it seems to me that we have more than enough mysticism as it is." - Wilhelm Reich
"Abundance is about looking at life and knowing that you have everything you need for complete happiness, and then being able to celebrate each and every moment on earth." - Wayne Dyer, fully Wayne Walter Dyer
"Lay your sleeping head, my love, human on my faithless arm; time and fevers burn away individual beauty from thoughtful children, and the grave proves the child ephemeral; but in my arms till break of day let the living creature lie: mortal, guilty, but to me the entirely beautiful." - W. H. Auden, fully Wystan Hugh Auden
"In those days I seemed to have had two muses: the essential, hysterical, genuine one, who tortured me with elusive snatches of imagery and wrung her hands over my inability to appropriate the magic and madness offered me; and her apprentice, her palette girl and stand-in, a little logician, who stuffed the torn gaps left by her mistress with explanatory or meter-mending fillers which became more and more numerous the further I moved away from the initial, evanescent, savage perfection." - Vladimir Nabokov, fully Vladimir Vladimirovich Nabokov
"Meditation is meeting eternity in the present moment. It is resolving every problem as it comes. It is resolving every tension as it creeps in. It is facing the challenges of life in a non-fearful way." - Vimala Thakar
"There is not a single untruth, no -but after ten lines Truth shrieks, she runs distraught and disheveled through her temple's corridors; she does not know herself. 'I can endure lies,' she cries. 'I cannot survive this stifling verisimilitude" - Thornton Wilder, fully Thornton Niven Wilder
"Study with desire is real activity; without desire it is but the semblance and mockery of activity." - William Godwin
"For you, I am even willing to suffer. Whatever pain happens to us in the future, I accept it already, just for the pleasure of being with you now. Let’s enjoy this time. It’s marvelous." - Elizabeth Gilbert
"I have far more enthusiasm in life than I have actual energy. In my excitement, I routinely take on more that I can physically or emotionally handle, which causes me to break down in quite predictable displays of dramatic exhaustion. You will be the one burdened with the job of mopping me up every time I've overextended myself and then fallen apart. This will be unbelievably tedious. I apologize in advance." - Elizabeth Gilbert
"So long as women are slaves, men will be knaves." - Elizabeth Cady Stanton
"Élodie, who was rising fifteen, lifted her anaemic, puffy, virginal face with its wispy hair; she was so thin-blooded that good country air seemed only to make her more sickly." - Emile Zola
"I have little concern for beauty or perfection ... I do worry that life, struggle, fever." - Emile Zola
"If rain drops were kisses, I'd send you showers. If hugs were seas, I'd send you oceans. And if love was a person I'd send you me! Whatever our souls are made of, his and mine are the same." - Emily Brontë, fully Emily Jane Brontë, aka pseudonym Ellis Bell
"For myself, I want no advantage over my fellow man, and if he is weaker than I, all the more is it my duty to help him." - Eugene V. Debs, fully Eugene Victor Debs
"You do not remember the house of the customs officers from the upward overhanging the cliff: desolate awaits you from the night when entered it the swarm of your thoughts restless and stopped there." - Eugenio Montale
"If there is one word that describes the meaning of character, it is the word honor. Without honor, civilization would not long exist. Without honor, there could be no dependable contracts, no lasting marriages, no trust or happiness. What does the word honor mean to you? To me, honor is summarized in this expression by the poet Tennyson, "Man's word [of honor] is God in man."" - Ezra Taft Benson
"If Muslims curse the Christians, then the Christians will curse the Muslims. And people will curse Allah, and Allah will hold us responsible for that." - Feisal Abdul Rauf