This site is dedicated to the memory of Dr. Alan William Smolowe who gave birth to the creation of this database.
"Scandal is what one-half the world takes pleasure in inventing, and the other half in believing." - Paul Chatfield, pseudonym for Horace Smith
"To converse with Scandal is to play at Losing Loadum; you must lose a good name to him, before you can win it for yourself." - William Congreve
"Scandal, like a reptile crawling over a bright grass, leaves a trail and a stain." - Alexander Cunningham, 5th Earl of Glencairn
"No one loves to tell of scandal except to him who loves to hear it. Learn, then, to rebuke and check the detracting tongue by showing that you do not listen to it with pleasure." - Saint Jerome, aka Eusebius Sophronius Hieronymous, Hierom or Jerom NULL
"Enemies carry about slander, not in the form in which it took its rise... The scandal of men is everlasting; even then does it survive when you would suppose it to be dead." - Plautus, full name Titus Maccius Plautus NULL
"Scandal breeds hatred; hatred begets division; division makes faction, and faction brings ruin." - Francis Quarles
"Without the consent of the world, a scandal doth not go deep; it is only a slight stroke upon the injured party, and returneth with the greater force upon those that gave it." - George Savile, fully Sir George Savile, 1st Marquis of Halifax
"The surest method against scandal is to live it down by perseverance in well doing." - Hermann Boerhaave
"Praise undeserv'd is scandal in disguise." - Alexander Pope
"The continuous and widespread fragmentation of the church has been the scandal of the ages. It has been Satan’s master strategy. The sin of disunity probably has caused more souls to be lost than all other sins combined." - Paul Billheimer
"The art of correcting scandal is to ignore it; to combat it prejudices your own case." - Baltasar Gracián
"What a chimera is man! what a confused chaos! what a subject of contradiction! a professed judge of all things, and ;yet a feeble worm of the earth! the great depository and guardian of truth, and yet a mere huddle of uncertainty! the glory and the scandal of the universe!" - Blaise Pascal
"The only difference between a saint and a sinner is that every saint has a past, and every sinner has a future." - Oscar Wilde, pen name for Fingal O'Flahertie Wills
"We are always ready to believe a scandal." - Ovid, formally Publius Ovidius Naso NULL
"There is no scandal like rags, nor any crime so shameful as poverty." - George Farquhar
"The inception of human consciousness, the genesis of awareness, must have entailed prolonged 'condensations' around intractable nodes of wonder and terror, at the discriminations to be made between the self and the other, between being and non-being (the discovery of the scandal of death)." - George Steiner, fully Francis George Steiner
"The high rate of unemployment among teenagers, and especially black teenagers, is both a scandal and a serious source of social unrest. Yet it is largely a result of minimum wage laws. We regard the minimum wage law as one of the most, if not the most, antiblack laws on the statute books." - Milton Friedman, fully John Milton Friedman
"An honest fellow stripped of all his illusions is the ideal man. Though he may have little wit, his society is always pleasant. As nothing matters to him, he cannot be pedantic; yet is he tolerant, remembering that he too has had the illusions which still beguile his neighbor. He is trustworthy in his dealings, because of his indifference; he avoids all quarreling and scandal in his own person, and either forgets or passes over such gossip or bickering as may be directed against himself. He is more entertaining than other people because he is in a constant state of epigram against his neighbor. He dwells in truth, and smiles at the stumbling of others who grope in falsehood. He watches from a lighted place the ludicrous antics of those who walk in a dim room at random. Laughing, he breaks the false weight and measure of men and things." - Nicolas Chamfort,fully Sébastien-Roch Nicolas De Chamfort, also spelled Nicholas
"A little scandal is an excellent thing; nobody is ever brighter or happier of tongue than when he is making mischief of his neighbors." - Ouida, pseudonym of Maria Louise Ramé, preferred to be called Marie Louise de la Ramée NULL
"Slanderers are at all events economical for they make a little scandal go a great way, and rarely open their mouths except at the expense of other people." - Paul Chatfield, pseudonym for Horace Smith
"For three million years we were hunter-gatherers, and it was through the evolutionary pressures of that way of life that a brain so adaptable and so creative eventually emerged. Today we stand with the brains of hunter-gatherers in our heads, looking out on a modern world made comfortable for some by the fruits of human inventiveness, and made miserable for others by the scandal of deprivation in the midst of plenty." - Richard Leakey, fully Richard Erskine Frere Leakey
"Virtue consisted in avoiding scandal and venereal disease." - Robert Cecil, 1st Earl of Salisbury
"God's children are neither madmen nor fools; it is but a scandal cast upon them by the madmen of the world. They are the only wise men if it be well considered. First, they make the highest end their aim, which is to be children of God here, and saints hereafter in heaven. Secondly, they aim to be found wise men at their death, and therefore are always making their accounts ready. Thirdly, they labor to live answerable to the rule; they observe the rule of the Word to be governed continually by it. Fourthly, they improve all advantages to advance their grand end; they labor to grow better by blessings and crosses, and to make a sanctified use of all things. Fifthly, they swim against the stream of the times and though they eat and drink and sleep as other men, yet (like the stars) they have a secret settled course of their own which the world cannot discern; therefore a man must be changed and set in a higher rank before he can have a sanctified judgment of the ways of God." - Richard Sibbes (or Sibbs)
"Lord of the world, O hear my psalm, And as sweet incense take my plea. My heart hath set its love on Thee And finds in speech its only balm. This thought forever haunts my mind, Some day to Thee I must return, From Thee I came and backward yearn My very fount and source to find. Not mine the merit that I stand Before Thee thus, since all is Thine, The glorious work of force divine, No product of my heart or hand. My soul to Thee was humbly bent Even before she had her birth, Before upon the sphere of earth Her heav’nly greatness made descent." - Salomon ibn Gabirol, aka Solomon ben Judah or Avicebron
"To the extent that you pray with all your soul for the person who slanders you, God will make the truth known to those who have been scandalized by the slander." - Saint Maximus the Confessor NULL
"I thank God for having given the Company subjects who belong more to Him than to themselves, and who serve the neighbor at the risk of their lives! They are like unrefined gold, which becomes visible in fire and which would otherwise remain hidden under ordinary actions and sometimes under faults and failings." - Saint Vincent de Paul
"If the feminine issue is so absurd, it is because the male's arrogance made it a discussion." - Simone de Beauvoir, fully Simone-Ernestine-Lucie-Marie Bertrand de Beauvoir
"Each people can do justice to itself only if it does justice to others; but each people can do its part in the world movement for all only if it first does its duty within its own household. The good citizen must be a good citizen of his own country first before he can with advantage be a citizen of the world at large." - Theodore “Teddy” Roosevelt
"The biological clock is responsive to light at certain times... Bright light in the morning will tend to advance the clock. In other words, alertness will occur earlier and sleep will occur earlier." - William Dement, fully William Charles Dement
"When the British warrior queen, bleeding from the Roman rods, sought, with an indignant mien, counsel of her country's gods." - William Cowper
"He suggested I play golf, but finally agreed to give me something that, he said, would really work; and going to a cabinet, he produced a vial of violet-blue capsules banded with dark purple at one end, which, he said, had just been placed on the market and were intended not for neurotics whom a draft of water could calm if properly administered, but only for great sleepless artists who had to die for a few hours in order to live for centuries." - Vladimir Nabokov, fully Vladimir Vladimirovich Nabokov
"That charm which causes the gods not to disagree, and not to hate one another, that do we prepare in your house, as a means of agreement for your folk." - Atharva Veda, or Atharvaveda
"Worst of any, however, were the fertilizer men, and those who served in the cooking rooms. These people could not be shown to the visitor,--for the odor of a fertilizer man would scare any ordinary visitor at a hundred yards, and as for the other men, who worked in tank rooms full of steam, and in some of which there were open vats near the level of the floor, their peculiar trouble was that they fell into the vats; and when they were fished out, there was never enough of them left to be worth exhibiting,--sometimes they would be overlooked for days, till all but the bones of them had gone out to the world as Durham's Pure Leaf Lard!" - Upton Sinclair, fully Upton Beall Sinclair, Jr.
"Modern war is so expensive that we feel trade to be a better avenue to plunder; but modern man inherits all the innate pugnacity and all the love of glory of his ancestors." - William James
"How sad would be November if we had no knowledge of the spring!" - Edwin Way Teale
"It is a natural virtue incident to our sex to be pitiful of those that are afflicted." - Elizabeth II, born Elizabeth Alexandra May NULL
"A human being has so many skins inside, covering the depths of the heart. We know so many things, but we don't know ourselves! Why, thirty or forty skins or hides, as thick and hard as an ox's or bear's, cover the soul. Go into your own ground and learn to know yourself there." - Emanuel Swedenborg, born Emanujel Swedberg