This site is dedicated to the memory of Dr. Alan William Smolowe who gave birth to the creation of this database.
Property rights are not the rights of property; they are the rights of humans in regard to property.
The moment you abate anything from the full rights of men each to govern himself, and suffer any artificial positive limitation upon those rights, from that moment the whole organization of government becomes a consideration of convenience.
Consideration | Government | Men | Organization | Rights | Government | Govern |
The only way to make sure people you agree with can speak is to support the rights of people you don't agree with.
One might equate growing up with a mistrust of words. A mature person trusts his eyes more than his ears. Irrationality often manifests itself in upholding the word against the evidence of the eyes. Children, savages and true believers remember far less what they have seen than what they have heard.
It is without all controversy that learning doth make the minds of men gentle, amiable, and pliant to government; whereas ignorance makes them churlish, thwarting, and mutinous; and the evidence of time doth clear this assertion, considering that the most barbarous, rude and unlearned times have been most subject to tumults, seditions, and changes.
Assertion | Controversy | Evidence | Government | Ignorance | Learning | Men | Time |
Frederick Douglass, born Frederick Augustus Washington Bailey
I know of no rights of race superior to the rights of humanity.
Franklin D. Roosevelt, fully Franklin Delano Roosevelt, aka FDR
Democracy, the practice of self-government, is a covenant among free men to respect the rights and liberties of their fellows.
Democracy | Government | Men | Practice | Respect | Rights | Self | Respect |
Without controversy, learning doth make the mind of men gentle, generous, amiable and pliant to government; whereas ignorance makes them curlish, thwarting, and mutinous; and the evidence of time doth clear this assertion, considering that the most barbarous, rude, and unlearned times have been most subject to tumults, seditions, and changes.
Assertion | Controversy | Evidence | Government | Ignorance | Learning | Men | Mind | Time |
There is no divine right of property. Nothing is so completely a man’s own that he may do what he likes with it... Nevertheless, as it is obviously well that each man should labor without fear of being deprived of the use and enjoyment of the product of their labor - as in the nature of things he would not labor at all without some such incentive, it may be said that a man has natural right to own the product of his labor... By this natural right of the individual is still subject to all the limitations imposed by the rights of his fellows.
Enjoyment | Fear | Individual | Labor | Man | Nature | Nothing | Property | Right | Rights |
George Berkeley, also Bishop Berkeley, Bishop of Cloyne
Philosophy being nothing else but the study of wisdom and truth, it may with reason be expected that those who have spent most time and pains in it should enjoy a greater calm and serenity of mind, a greater clearness and evidence of knowledge, and be less disturbed with doubts and difficulties than other men.
Evidence | Knowledge | Men | Mind | Nothing | Philosophy | Reason | Serenity | Study | Time | Truth | Wisdom |
In the cause of freedom, we have to battle for the rights of people with whom we do not agree; and whom, in many cases, we may not like. These people test the strength of the freedoms which protect all of us. If we do not defend their rights, we endanger our own.
In the heat of speculation or of love there may come moments of equal perfection, but they are very unstable. The reason and the heart remain deeply unsatisfied. But the eye finds in nature, and in some supreme achievements of art, constant and fuller satisfaction. For the eye is quick and seems to have been more docile to the education of life than the heart or the reason of man, and able sooner to adapt itself to the reality. Beauty therefore seems to be the clearest manifestation of perfection, and the best evidence of its possibility.
Art | Beauty | Education | Evidence | Heart | Life | Life | Love | Man | Nature | Perfection | Reality | Reason | Speculation | Beauty |
The masses have never thirsted after truth. They turn aside from evidence that is not to their taste, preferring to deify error, if error seduce[s] them. Whoever can supply them with illusions is easily their master; whoever attempts to destroy their illusions is always their victim.
Henry David Thoreau, born David Henry Thoreau
Some circumstantial evidence is very strong, as when you find a trout in the milk.
Evidence |
Against the formidable array of cumulative evidence for Determinism, there is but one argument of real force: the immediate affirmation of consciousness in the moment of deliberate action.
Action | Argument | Consciousness | Evidence | Force |
Henry David Thoreau, born David Henry Thoreau
Men profess to be lovers of music, but for the most part they give no evidence in their opinions and lives that they have heard it. It would not leave them narrow-minded and bigoted.