This site is dedicated to the memory of Dr. Alan William Smolowe who gave birth to the creation of this database.
Vladimir Lenin, fully Vladimir Ilyich Lenin
There are no morals in politics; there is only expedience. A scoundrel may be of use to us just because he is a scoundrel.
John Dalberg-Acton, Lord Acton, fully John Emerich Edward Dalberg-Acton, 1st Baron Acton
Liberty becomes a question of morals more than of politics.
Question |
May Sarton, pen name of Eleanore Marie Sarton
When I speak of life and love as expanding with age, sex seems the least important thing. At any age we grow by the enlarging of consciousness, by learning a new language, or a new art or craft (gardening?) that implies a new way of looking at the universe. Love is one of the great enlargers of the person because it requires us to "take in" the stranger and to understand him, and to exercise restraint and tolerance as well as imagination to make the relationship work.
Age | Art | Imagination | Important | Learning | Life | Life | Love | Relationship | Restraint | Art | Understand |
The morals of today are the immorals of yesterday, the creeds of tomorrow.
Mahatma Gandhi, fully Mohandas Karamchand Gandhi, aka Bapu
To call woman the weaker sex is a libel; it is man's injustice to woman. If by strength is meant brute strength, then, indeed, is woman less brute than man. If by strength is meant moral power, then woman is immeasurably man's superior. Has she not greater intuition, is she not more self-sacrificing, has she not greater powers of endurance, has she not greater courage? Without her, man could not be. If nonviolence is the law of our being, the future is with woman. Who can make a more effective appeal to the heart than woman?
Future | Heart | Injustice | Injustice | Law | Man | Strength | Woman |
This is the old fear …. that truth will not prevail, that the moral structure of a nation is so fragile that it needs elaborate defences. Christians, it seems to me, have to choose between the safety of ‘morals’ and the danger of love. It is my own belief that Christ’s teaching was principally about the latter, but that if you do teach men and women to love God and love their neighbours then morals take care of themselves.
Belief | Care | Danger | Fear | God | Love | Men | Teach | Truth | Will | Danger | God | Old |
Muriel Spark, fully Dame Muriel Sarah Camberg Spark
Sex is a mystery, and I often think of it from that point of view. I wish it weren’t so much of an illusion. Sex in a relationship never lasts as long as people think, but one’s interest in sex never goes. I know a sexy man from a non-sexy man, I can tell you. I have not lost the power of sizing up. I don’t want people for myself, but there is a sexual way of looking at life and I don’t think one can not think sexually.
The ideal of romantic love stands in opposition to much of our history, as we shall see. First of all, it is individualistic. It rejects the view of human beings as interchangeable units, and it attaches the highest importance to individual differences as well as to individual choice. Romantic love is egoistic, in the philosophical, not in the petty, sense. Egoism as a philosophical doctrine holds that self-realization and personal happiness are the moral goals of life, and romantic love is motivated by the desire for personal happiness. Romantic love is secular. In its union of physical with spiritual pleasure in sex and love, as well as in its union of romance and daily life, romantic love is a passionate commitment to this earth and to the exalted happiness that life on earth can offer.
Commitment | Desire | Doctrine | Earth | Goals | Individual | Life | Life | Love | Opposition | Pleasure | Romance | Self-realization | Happiness |
These scientific developments may even affect our morals and customs. Perhaps we shall shortly get so used to this state of things that nobody will feel the slightest embarrassment while he is conscious that his skeleton and other particulars are being scrutinized by indelicate observers.
Will |
The difference between American parties is actually simple. Democrats are in favor of higher taxes to pay for greater spending, while Republicans are in favor of greater spending, for which the taxpayers will pay. In foreign policy, Republicans intend to pursue the war in Iraq but to do so with a minimal number of troops on the ground. This is not to be confused with the disastrous Bush/Cheney/Rumsfeld policy of using a minimal number of troops on the ground to pursue the war in Iraq. Democrats intend to end the war, but they don't know when. Democrats are making the 'high school sex promise': I'll pull out in time, honest!
Paramahansa Yogananda, born Mukunda Lal Ghosh
The relationship that exists between friends is the grandest of human loves. Friendly love is pure, because it is without compulsion. One freely chooses to love his friends; he is not bound by instinct. The love that manifests in friendship can exist between man and woman, woman and woman, man and man. But in the love of friendship, there is no sexual attraction. One must practice celibacy and absolutely forget sex if one wants to know divine love through friendship; then friendship nurtures the cultivation of divine love.
Cultivation | Love | Man | Practice | Relationship | Wants | Woman | Friendship | Friends |
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 |
The great secret of morals is Love; or a going out of our own nature, and an identification of ourselves with the beautiful which exists in thought, action, or person, not our own.
No mistake is more to be deplored than the conception that a system of morals and religion should derive any portion of its authority either from the circumstance of its novelty or its antiquity, that it should be judged excellent, not because it is reasonable or true, but because no person has ever thought of it before, or because it has been thought of from the beginning of time.
Authority | Beginning | Mistake | Novelty | Religion | System | Thought | Novelty | Circumstance | Thought |
All the particular moral judgments we intuitively make are likely to derive from discarded religious systems, from warped views of sex and bodily functions, or from customs necessary for the survival of the group in social and economic circumstances that now lie in the distant past.
Even in the era of AIDS, sex raises no unique moral issues at all. Decisions about sex may involve considerations about honesty, concern for others, prudence, and so on, but there is nothing special about sex in this respect, for the same could be said of decisions about driving a car. (In fact, the moral issues raised by driving a car, both from an environmental and from a safety point of view, are much more serious than those raised by sex.)
Philip Larkin, fully Philip Arthur Larkin
Sex is designed for people who like overcoming obstacles… Sex means nothing--just the moment of ecstasy, that flares and dies in minutes.
Phyllis Diller, born Phyllis Ada Driver
I admit I have a tremendous sex drive. My boyfriend lives forty miles away.