This site is dedicated to the memory of Dr. Alan William Smolowe who gave birth to the creation of this database.
The firmness with which the people have withstood the late abuses of the press, the discernment they have manifested between truth and falsehood, show that they may safely be trusted to hear everything true and false, and to form a correct judgment between them.
Character | Death | Good | Law | Mercy | Murder | Object | Power | Public | Security | Time | Treason | Virtue | Virtue | Will | Murder |
The moral sense is as much a part of our constitution as that of feeling, seeing, or hearing.
Men of high learning and abilities are few in every country; and by taking in those who are not so, the able part of the body have their hands tied by the unable.
Thomas Mann, fully Paul Thomas Mann
A secret and ardent stirring within the frozen chastity of the universal.
Abstract | Achievement | Age | Ambition | Character | Eternal | Existence | Good | Impulse | Life | Life | Man | Meaning | Organic | Personality | Question | Regard | Silence | Time | Ambition |
Yet the hour of emancipation is advancing ... this enterprise is for the young; for those who can follow it up, and bear it through to its consummation. It shall have all my prayers, and these are the only weapons of an old man.
Our citizenship in the United States is our national character. Our citizenship in any particular state is only our local distinction. By the latter we are known at home, by the former to the world. Our great title is AMERICANS -- our inferior one varies with the place.
It requires but a very small glance of thought to perceive, that although laws made in one generation often continue in force through succeeding generations, yet that they continue to derive their force from the consent of the living. A law not repealed continues in force, not because it cannot be repealed, but because it is not repealed; and the non-repealing passes for consent.
Absolute | Business | Cause | Character | Children | Conscience | Evil | Heart | Individual | Kill | Life | Life | Little | Love | Man | Pardon | Principles | Rank | Reason | Smile | Soul | Strength | Time | Will | Business | Think |
The danger to which the success of revolutions is most exposed, is that of attempting them before the principles on which they proceed, and the advantages to result from them, are sufficiently seen and understood.
Antiquity | Better | Character | Era | Famous | Improvement | Literature | Rank | Science | World | Circumstance |
Man did not enter society to be worse off, or to have fewer rights, but rather to have those rights better secured
It is never to be expected in a revolution that every man is to change his opinion at the same moment. There never yet was any truth or any principle so irresistibly obvious that all men believed it at once. Time and reason must cooperate with each other to the final establishment of any principle; and therefore those who may happen to be first convinced have not a right to persecute others, on whom conviction operates more slowly. The moral principle of revolutions is to instruct, not to destroy.
The denier that ID [intelligent design] is science faces the following dilemma. Either he admits that the intervention of such a designer is possible, or he does not. If he does not, he must explain why that belief is more scientific than the belief that a designer is possible. If on the other hand he believes that a designer is possible, then he can argue that the evidence is overwhelmingly against the actions of such a designer, but he cannot say that someone who offers evidence on the other side is doing something of a fundamentally different kind. All he can say about that person is that he is scientifically mistaken.
A view or form of thought is more objective than another if it relies less on the specifics of the individual's makeup and position in the world, or on the character of the particular type of creature he is.
Character | Difficulty | Fame | Luck | Need | Opinion | Philosophy | Plenty | Position | Public | Receive | Will | Work | World | Luck | Think |
Private property is a legal convention, defined in part by the tax system; therefore, the tax system cannot be evaluated by looking at its impact on private property, conceived as something that has independent existence and validity. Taxes must be evaluated as part of the overall system of property rights that they help to create. Justice or injustice in taxation can only mean justice or injustice in the system of property rights and entitlements that result from a particular tax regime.
Character | Common Sense | Sense | Thinking |
Thomas Macaulay, fully Lord Thomas Babington Macaulay, 1st Baron Macaulay
Our judgment ripens; our imagination decays. We cannot at once enjoy the flowers of the Spring of life and the fruits of its Autumn.
Willard L. Sperry, fully Willard Learoyd Sperry
Man is not yet so transfigured that he has ceased to keep the window of his mind and heart open towards Jerusalem, Galilee, Mecca, Canterbury, or Plymouth. The abstract proposal that we worship at any place where God lets down the ladder is not yet an adequate substitute for the deep desire to go up to some central sanctuary where the religious artist vindicates a concrete universal in the realm of the spirit.
Character | Commerce | God | Heart | Magic | Man | Men | Mind | Mother | Mystery | Mystical | Peace | Question | Reality | Religion | Reverence | Right | Sacred | Soul | Spirit | Temper | Will | World | Worship | Trial | Commerce | God |
W. T. Stace, fully Walter Terence Stace
If in spite of these facts we wish to maintain that mysticism is ultimately the source and essence of all religion, we shall have on our hands a set of problems very similar to those which beset the mystical theory of ethics. We shall have to maintain that mystical consciousness is latent in all men but is in most men submerged below the surface of consciousness. Just as it throws up into the upper consciousness influences which appear in the form of ethical feelings, so must its influences appear there in the form of religious impulses. And these in turn will give rise to the intellectual constructions which are the various creeds... The general conclusion regarding the relations between mysticism on the one hand and the area of organized religions (Christian, Buddhist, etc.) on the other is that mysticism is independent of all of them in the sense that it can exist without any of them. But mysticism and organized religion tend to be associated with each other and to become linked together because both look beyond earthly horizons to the Infinite and Eternal, and because both share the emotions appropriate to the sacred and the holy.
Absolute | Birth | Character | Consciousness | Death | Despair | Effort | Era | Faith | Individual | Influence | Man | Means | Mystical | Philosophy | Position | Power | Reality | Reason | Spirit | Struggle | Thought | Truth | Will | Wonder | Thought |
Almost every house had a lonely and deserted look; for it was known that one or more beloved beings had gone out of it to the grave. A dark, heartless spirit was abroad. The whole land, in fact, mourned and nothing on which the eye could rest bore a green or thriving look or any symptom of activity, but the Churchyards, and here the digging and the delving were incessant - at the early twilight, during the gloomy noon, the dreary dusk, and the still more funereal-looking light of the midnight taper.
Character | Influence | Man | Superstition | Understand |