This site is dedicated to the memory of Dr. Alan William Smolowe who gave birth to the creation of this database.
What institution of government could tend so much to promote the happiness of mankind as the general prevalence of wisdom and virtue? All government is but an imperfect remedy for the deficiency of these.
Government | Mankind | Virtue | Virtue | Wisdom | Government | Happiness |
Alexander Solzhenitsyn, fully Aleksandr Isayevich Solzhenitsyn
The salvation of mankind lies only in making everything the concern of all.
Periods of tranquility are seldom prolific of creative achievement. Mankind has to be stirred up.
Achievement | Mankind |
It is not possessions but the desires of mankind which require to be equalized.
Mankind | Possessions |
Every state is a community of some kind, and every community is established with a view to some good; for mankind always act in order to obtain that which they think good. But, if all communities aim at some good, the state or political community, which is the highest of all, and which embraces all the rest, aims at good in a greater degree than any other, and at the highest good.
It is not the possessions but the desires of mankind which require to be equalized.
Mankind | Possessions |
Arnold J. Toynbee, fully Arnold Joseph Toynbee
If mankind cannot now bring itself at last to live as one family, the penalty, in our new situation, must be genocide sooner or later.
One man is more concerned with the impression he makes on the rest of mankind, another with the impression the rest of mankind makes on him. The disposition of the first is subjective, of the second objective. The one is, in the whole of his existence, more in the nature of an idea which is merely presented, the other more of the being who presents it.
Benjamin Disraeli, 1st Earl of Beaconsfield
A man can know nothing of mankind without knowing something of himself. Self-knowledge is the property of that man whose passions have their full play, but who ponders over their results.
Knowing | Knowledge | Man | Mankind | Nothing | Play | Property | Self | Self-knowledge |
Bahya ben Joseph ibn Pakuda NULL
He who trusts in God is able to remove his attention from worldly anxieties and devote it entirely to doing what is right. For in the peace of his soul and liberty of his mind, and in the disappearance of his anxieties about worldly matters, he is like an alchemist who knows how to turn tin into silver and silver into gold.
Attention | God | Gold | Liberty | Mind | Peace | Right | Soul | God |