This site is dedicated to the memory of Dr. Alan William Smolowe who gave birth to the creation of this database.
Humor is an affirmation of dignity, a declaration of man's superiority to all that befalls him.
Dignity | Humor | Man | Superiority | Wisdom |
R. D. Laing, fully Ronald David Laing
We are effectively destroying ourselves by violence masquerading as love.
Now, I say to you today my friends, even though we face the difficulties of today and tomorrow, I still have a dream. It is a dream deeply rooted in the American dream. I have a dream that one day this nation will rise up and live out the true meaning of its creed; -'We hold these truths to be self-evident, that all men are created equal.' I have a dream that one day on the red hills of Georgia the sons of former slaves and the sons of former slave owners will be able to sit down together at the table of brotherhood. I have a dream that one day even the state of Mississippi, a state sweltering with the people's injustice, sweltering with the heat of oppression, will be transformed into an oasis of freedom and justice. I have a dream that my four little children will one day live in a nation where they will not be judged by the color of their skin but by the content of their character. The choice today is not between violence and non-violence. It is either non-violence or non-existence...Segregation is the offspring of an illicit intercourse between injustice and immorality.
Brotherhood | Character | Children | Choice | Creed | Day | Existence | Freedom | Injustice | Injustice | Justice | Little | Meaning | Men | Non-existence | Oppression | People | Self | Tomorrow | Will | Wisdom | Truths |
Pope Pius XI, born Ambrogio Damiano Achille Ratti NULL
Salvation and justice are not to be found in revolution, but in evolution through concord. Violence has ever achieved only destruction, not construction; the kindling of passions, not their pacification; the accumulation of hate and destruction, not the reconciliation of the contending parties; and it has reduced men and parties to the difficult task of building slowly after sad experience on the ruins of discord.
Evolution | Experience | Hate | Justice | Men | Reconciliation | Revolution | Salvation | Wisdom |
Nobody can, even for the sake of unity, do violence to his conscience and to truth itself. Whoever in conscience feels obliged to understand the Word of God in a certain way cannot and may not declare he understands it otherwise.
Conscience | God | Truth | Unity | God | Understand |
Henri Bergson, aka Henri-Louis Bergson
It is… by the superiority of its morality that a religion wins over souls and reveals them to a certain conception of things.
Morality | Religion | Superiority |
E. B. White, fully Elwyn Brooks White
Nationalism has two fatal charms for its devotees: it presupposes local self-sufficiency, which is a pleasant and desirable condition, and it suggests, very subtly, a certain personal superiority by reason of one's belonging to a place which is definable and familiar, as against a place which is strange, remote.
Reason | Self | Self-sufficiency | Superiority | Wisdom |
Mahatma Gandhi, fully Mohandas Karamchand Gandhi, aka Bapu
It is better to be violent, if there is violence in our hearts, than to put on a cloak of non-violence to cover impotence.
Better |
Mahatma Gandhi, fully Mohandas Karamchand Gandhi, aka Bapu
I object to violence because when it appears to do good, the good is only temporary; the evil it does is permanent.
Erich Fromm, fully Erich Seligmann Fromm
There is perhaps no phenomenon which contains so much destructive feeling as “moral indignation,” which permits envy or hate to be acted out under the guise of virtue. The “indignant” person has for once the satisfaction of despising and treating a creature as “inferior,” coupled with the feeling of his own superiority and rightness.
Envy | Hate | Indignation | Superiority | Virtue | Virtue |
Living life at its best means keeping on speaking terms with my conscience, to do nothing to outrage it or to inflict pain upon it. When my acts do violence to my moral or ethical standards, I sustain a loss for which no pleasure or material gain can compensate me, for I shrink in moral stature. When I keep my friendship with the best in me, I achieve a serenity which cloaks life with gentle beauty.
Beauty | Conscience | Life | Life | Means | Nothing | Pain | Pleasure | Serenity | Friendship | Loss |
Reverence for God is shown in our reverence for man. The fear you must feel for offending or hurting a human being must be as ultimate as your fear of God. An act of violence is an act of desecration. To be arrogant toward man is to be blasphemous toward God.
Any attempt to replace the personal conscience by a collective conscience does violence to the individual and is the first step toward totalitarianism.
Conscience | Individual |
Nonviolence is the answer to the crucial political and moral questions of our time; the need for mankind to overcome oppression and violence without resorting to oppression and violence. Mankind must evolve for all human conflict a method which rejects revenge, aggression, and retaliation. The foundation of such a method is love.
Aggression | Love | Mankind | Method | Need | Oppression | Retaliation | Revenge | Time |