This site is dedicated to the memory of Dr. Alan William Smolowe who gave birth to the creation of this database.
From whatever aspect we regard the question, the right of slavery is null and void, not only as being illegitimate, but also because it is absurd and meaningless. The words slave and right contradict each other, and are mutually exclusive. It will always be equally foolish for a man to say to a man or to a people: “I make with you a convention wholly at your expense and wholly to my advantage; I shall keep it as long as I like, and you will keep it as long as I like.”
Absurd | Convention | Man | Regard | Right | Slavery | Will | Words |
Be not so bigoted to any custom as to worship it at the expense of truth.
John F. Kennedy, fully John Fitzgerald "Jack" Kennedy
The path we have chosen for the present is full of hazards, as all paths are; but it is one of the most consistent with our character and our courage as a nation and our commitments around the world. The cost of freedom is always high — but Americans have always paid it. And one path we shall never choose, and this is the path of surrender or submission. Our goal is not victory of might but the vindication of right — not peace at the expense of freedom, but both peace and freedom, here in this hemisphere and, we hope, around the world. God willing, that goal will be achieved.
Character | Cost | Courage | Freedom | God | Peace | Present | Right | Surrender | Will | God |
Milton Friedman, fully John Milton Friedman
When unions get higher wages for their members by restricting entry into an occupation, those higher wages are at the expense of other workers who find their opportunities reduced. When government pays its employees higher wages, those higher wages are at the expense of the taxpayer. But when workers get higher wages and better working conditions through the free market, when they get raises by firm competing with one another for the best workers, by workers competing with one another for the best jobs, those higher wages are at nobody's expense. They can only come from higher productivity, greater capital investment, more widely diffused skills. The whole pie is bigger - there's more for the worker, but there's also more for the employer, the investor, the consumer, and even the tax collector.
Better | Government | Government |
Society is always engaged in a vast conspiracy to preserve itself -- at the expense of the new demands of each new generation.
Lao Tzu, ne Li Urh, also Laotse, Lao Tse, Lao Tse, Lao Zi, Laozi, Lao Zi, La-tsze
The principles of music and wood carving are alike -- when a wood carving is finished, it has been created at the expense of all the wood that has been carved away. Only the music of nature is complete and undiminished.
Music | Nature | Principles |
Lord Chesterfield, Philip Dormer Stanhope, 4th Earl of Chesterfield
Sex: the pleasure is momentary, the position ridiculous, and the expense damnable.
And there's no getting around the fact that all life lives at the expense of another life.
Ecology's implications for capitalism are too momentous for the capitalist to contemplate. [The plutocrats] are more wedded to their wealth than to the Earth upon which they live, more concerned with the fate of their fortunes than with the fate of humanity. The present ecological crisis has been created by the few at the expense of the many. In other words, the struggle over environmentalism is part of the class struggle itself, a fact that seems to have escaped many environmentalists but is well understood by the plutocrats---which is why they are unsparing in their derision and denunciations of the 'eco-terrorists' and 'tree huggers.'
Capitalism | Earth | Fate | Present | Struggle | Wealth | Fate | Crisis |
Milton Friedman, fully John Milton Friedman
Most economic fallacies derive - from the tendency to assume that there is a fixed pie, that one party can gain only at the expense of another.
War grows out of desire of the individual to gain advantage at the expense of his fellow man.
Desire | Individual |
Paul Chatfield, pseudonym for Horace Smith
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.
Paramahansa Yogananda, born Mukunda Lal Ghosh
Lust applies to the abuse of any or all of the senses in the pursuit of pleasure or gratification. Through the sense of sight man may lust after material objects; through the sense of hearing, he craves the sweet, slow poison of flattery, and vibratory sounds as of voices and music that rouse his material nature; through the lustful pleasure of smell he is enticed toward wrong environments and actions; lust for food and drink causes him to please his taste at the expense of health; through the sense of touch he lusts after inordinate physical comfort and abuses the creative sex impulse. Lust also seeks gratification in wealth, status, power, domination—all that satisfies the "I, me, mine" in the egotistical man. Lustful desire is egotism, the lowest rung of the ladder of human character evolution. By the force of its insatiable passion, karma loves to destroy one's happiness, health, brain power, clarity of thought, memory, and discriminative judgment.
Abuse | Character | Comfort | Desire | Destroy | Force | Lust | Man | Music | Pleasure | Sense | Taste | Wrong |
Pat Buchanan, fully Patrick Joseph "Pat" Buchanan
We have accepted today the existence in perpetuity of a permanent underclass of scores of millions who cannot cope and must be carried by society — fed, clothed, housed, tutored, medicated at taxpayer’s expense their entire lives. We have a dependent nation the size of Spain in our independent America. We have a new division in our country, those who pay a double or triple fare, and those who ride forever free.
Peter Kropotkin, fully Prince Pyotr Alexeyevich Kropotkin
The very essence of the present economic system is, that the worker can never enjoy the well-being he has produced, and that the number of those who live at his expense will always augment. The more a country is advanced in industry, the more this number grows. Inevitably, industry is directed, and will have to be directed, not towards what is needed to satisfy the needs of all, but towards that which, at a given moment, brings in the greatest temporary profit to a few. Of necessity, the abundance of some will be based on the poverty of others, and the straitened circumstances of the greater number will have to be maintained at all costs, that there may be hands to sell themselves for a part only of that which they are capable of producing; without which, private accumulation of capital is impossible!
Abundance | Circumstances | Industry | Poverty | Present | System | Will |
Plautus, full name Titus Maccius Plautus NULL
That man is wise to some purpose who gains his wisdom at the expense and form the experience of another.
Pliny the Elder, full name Casus Plinius Secundus NULL
Wine maketh the band quivering, the eye watery, the night unquiet, lewd dreams, a stinking breath in the morning, and an utter forgetfulness of all things... Wine takes away reason, engenders insanity, leads to thousands of crimes, and imposes such an enormous expense on nations.
Buckminster Fuller, fully Richard Buckminster "Bucky" Fuller
Take the initiative. Go to work, and above all co-operate and don't hold back on one another or try to gain at the expense of another. Any success in such lopsidedness will be increasingly short-lived. These are the synergetic rules that evolution is employing and trying to make clear to us. They are not man-made laws. They are the infinitely accommodative laws of the intellectual integrity governing universe.
Quintilian, fully Marcus Fabius Quintilianus, also Quintillian and Quinctilian NULL
A laugh costs too much when bought at the expense of virtue. [A laugh, if purchased at the expense of propriety, costs too much.]