This site is dedicated to the memory of Dr. Alan William Smolowe who gave birth to the creation of this database.
Compassion is the root of religion; pride the root of sin.
Compassion | Pride | Religion | Sin |
To put the temporal in the place of God, when done with full deliberation, is the sin of pride in all its gravity.
Deliberation | God | Pride | Sin |
Angus Wilson, fully Sir Angus Frank Johnstone Wilson
All the seven deadly sins are self destroying, morbid appetites, but in their early stages at least, lust and gluttony, avarice and sloth know some gratification, while anger and pride have power, even though that power eventually destroys itself. Envy is impotent, numbed with fear, never ceasing in its appetite, and it knows no gratification, but endless self torment. It has the ugliness of a trapped rat, which gnaws its own foot in an effort to escape.
Anger | Appetite | Avarice | Effort | Envy | Fear | Gluttony | Lust | Power | Pride | Self | Sloth |
Americans often pride themselves on being members of the largest, most enduring, and most successful democracy in the world. Yet their lives, to a great degree, are channeled, shaped, and determined by the decisions of a very few people sitting in the board rooms and executive suites of the giant corporations, over whom they exercise little control.
Arthur Meier Schlesinger, Jr., born Arthur Bancroft Schlesinger
The sin of racial pride still represents the most basic challenge to the American conscience. We cannot dodge this challenge without renouncing our highest moral pretentions.
Challenge | Conscience | Pride | Sin |
Ayn Rand, born Alisa Zinovyevna Rosenbaum
Productive work is the central purpose of a rational man's life, the central value that integrates and determines the hierarchy of all his other values. Reason is the source, the precondition of his productive work - pride is the result.
Life | Life | Man | Pride | Purpose | Purpose | Reason | Work | Value |
Pride counterbalances all our miseries, for it either hides them, or, if it discloses them, boasts of that disclosure. Pride has such a thorough possession of us, even in the midst of our miseries and faults, that we are prepared to sacrifice life with joy, if it may be talked of.
What a chimera, then, is man!... the pride and refuse of the universe!
Love may exist without jealousy, although this is rare: but jealousy may exist without love, and this is common; for jealousy can feed on that which is bitter no less than on that which is sweet, and is sustained by; pride as often as by affection.
There is a diabolical trio existing in the natural man, implacable, inextinguishable, co-operative and consentaneous, pride, envy, and hate; pride that makes us fancy we deserve all the goods that others possess; envy that some should be admired while we are overlooked; and hate, because all that is bestowed on others, diminishes the sum we think due to ourselves.
To know a man, observe how he wins his object, rather than how he loses it; for when we fail, our pride supports; when we succeed, it betrays us.