This site is dedicated to the memory of Dr. Alan William Smolowe who gave birth to the creation of this database.
Frédéric Bastiat, fully Claude Frédéric Bastiat
Government is the great fiction through which everybody endeavors to live at the expense of everybody else.
Weak minds make treaties with the passions they cannot overcome, and try to purchase happiness at the expense of principle; but the resolute will of a strong man scorns such means, and struggles nobly with his foe to achieve great deeds.
Should we welcome the huge growth of the military budget at the expense of health, education, the needs of children, one fifth of whom grow up in poverty? I suggest that a patriotic American who cares for his or her country might act on behalf of a different vision. Instead of being feared for our military prowess, we should want to be respected for our dedication to human rights.
Children | Dedication | Education | Growth | Health | Poverty | Prowess | Rights | Vision |
Contentment is a pearl of great price, and whoever procures it at the expense of ten thousand desires makes a wise and happy purchase.
Contentment | Happy | Price | Wise |
John Foster, fully John Watson Foster
Nothing can be more destructive to vigor of action than protracted, anxious fluctuation, through resolutions adopted, rejected, resumed, and suspended, and nothing causes a greater expense of feeling. A man without decision can never be said to belong to himself; he is as a wave of the sea, or a feather in the air which every breeze blows about as it listeneth.
Mihaly Csikszentmihalyi, native form is Csíkszentmihályi Mihály
One difficulty about achieving social improvement is that we tend to uncritically regard any advance in either differentiation or in integration as a good thing. If a new law increases freedom, it must be progress, as is a new movement that fosters the feeling of solidarity among people. yet neither of these programs is likely to improve matters without the complementary contribution of the other. Complexity requires the synergy of these dialectically opposed force; a gain in only one is likely to promote confusion and chaos. We think of social entropy as being caused by a loss of liberty or a loss of common values; but gains in either at the expense of its complement are just as dangerous.
Difficulty | Force | Freedom | Good | Improvement | Integration | Law | Liberty | People | Progress | Regard | Loss | Think |
The peril of every fine faculty is the delight of playing with it for pride. Talent is commonly developed at the expense of character, and the greater it grows, the more is the mischief. Talent is mistaken for genius, a dogma or system for truth, ambition for greatest, ingenuity for poetry, sensuality for art.
Ambition | Art | Character | Dogma | Genius | Ingenuity | Peril | Poetry | Pride | Sensuality | System | Truth | Talent | Ambition | Ingenuity |
Our expense is almost all for conformity. It is for cake that we run in debt; `tis not the intellect, not the heart, not beauty, not worship, that costs so much.
Beauty | Conformity | Debt | Heart | Worship |
Ernest Renan, aka Joseph Ernest Renan
No idea can succeed except at the expense of sacrifice; no one ever escapes without enduring strain from the struggle of life.
Struggle |
Frances Wright, known as Fanny Wright
Do we exert our own liberties without injury to others - we exert them justly; do we exert them at the expense of others - unjustly. And, in thus doing, we step from the sure platform of liberty upon the uncertain threshold of tyranny.
Liberty |
Success in life could be defined as the continued expansion of happiness and the progressive realization of worthy goals. Success is the ability to fulfill your desires with effortless ease. And yet success, including the creation of wealth, has always been considered to be a process that requires hard work and it is often considered to be at the expense of others. We need a more spiritual approach to success and to affluence which is the abundant flow of all good things to you.
Ability | Good | Life | Life | Need | Success | Work | Happiness |
It's cheaper to pardon than to resent. Forgiveness saves the expense of anger, the cost of hatred, and the waste of spirit.
Cost | Forgiveness | Pardon | Waste | Forgiveness |
Forgiveness is the economy of the heart. Forgiveness saves expense of anger, the cost of hatred, the waste of spirits.
Cost | Forgiveness | Waste | Forgiveness |
Each generation should be made to bear the burden of its own wars, instead of carrying them on, at the expense of other generations.
The word ‘slavery’ and ‘right’ are contradictory, they cancel each other out. Whether as between one man and another, or between one man and a whole people, it would always be absurd to say: "I hereby make a covenant with you which is wholly at your expense and wholly to my advantage; I will respect it so long as I please and you shall respect it as long as I wish.
Be advised that all flatterers live at the expense of those who listen to them.