This site is dedicated to the memory of Dr. Alan William Smolowe who gave birth to the creation of this database.
A private man has always the liberty (because thought is free) to believe or not believe in his heart those acts that have been given out for miracles, according as he shall see what benefits can accrue by men's belief, to those that pretend, or countenance them, and thereby conjecture whether they be miracles or lies.
Conscience | Judgment |
Appetite with an opinion of attaining is called hope; the same without such opinion despair.
Conscience | Doctrine | Good | Judgment | Man | Presumption |
The most noble and profitable invention of all other, was that of speech, consisting of names or appellations, and their connections; whereby men register their thoughts; recall them when they are past; and also declare them one to another for mutual utility and conversation; without which, there had been amongst men, neither commonwealth, nor society, nor contract, nor peace, no more than amongst lions, bears, and wolves.
Accident | Battle | Cause | Circumstances | Conscience | Fear | Life | Life | Man | Think |
For all laws are general judgments, or sentences of the legislator; as also every particular judgment is a law to him whose case is judged.
Conscience | Judgment |
Do it now. It is not safe to leave a generous feeling to the cooling influences of the world.
Conscience | Day | Glory | Light | Looks | Tenderness |
All, too, will bear in mind this sacred principle, that though the will of the majority is in all cases to prevail, that will to be rightful must be reasonable; that the minority possess their equal rights, which equal law must protect, and to violate would be oppression. Let us, then, fellow-citizens, unite with one heart and one mind. Let us restore to social intercourse that harmony and affection without which liberty and even life itself are but dreary things.
Conscience | Good | People | Tyranny |
The evidence of [the] natural right [of expatriation], like that of our right to life, liberty, the use of our faculties, the pursuit of happiness, is not left to the feeble and sophistical investigations of reason, but is impressed on the sense of every man. We do not claim these under the charters of kings or legislators, but under the King of Kings.
Authority | Coercion | Conscience | Error | Government | Rights | Government |
No race of kings has ever presented above one man of common sense in twenty generations.
Conscience | Man | Rights |
Thomas Mann, fully Paul Thomas Mann
A writer is a person for whom writing is more difficult than it is for other people.
Thomas Mann, fully Paul Thomas Mann
He was all for catharsis and purification, he dreamed of an aesthetic consecration that should cleanse society of luxury, the greed of gold and all unloveliness.
Conscience | Life | Life | Longing | Mind | Thought | Intellect | Thought |
I detest pornography. I utterly loathe writing that seeks to work on the passions and to exploit them, instead of releasing them in a healthy form : laughter … The utterly sick and subhuman reduction of ‘thought’ to nothingness: to something that appears to be sensual but is not even that.
Beginning | Conscience | Danger | Mind | Peace | People | Reason | Truth | Work | Absurdity | Danger |
Our willingness to take an alternative approach to a problem will perhaps relax the obsessive fixation of the adversary on his view, which he believes is the only reasonable possibility and which he is determined to impose on everyone else by coercion…This mission of humility in social life is not merely to edify, but to keep minds open to many alternatives. The rigidity of a certain type of thought has seriously impaired this capacity, which nonviolence must recover.
Attention | Bible | Cost | Fidelity | God | Labor | Means | Mystery | Reality | Responsibility | Risk | Sacrifice | Sorrow | Truth | Work | God | Bible |
One of the first things to learn if you want to be a contemplative is to mind your own business. Nothing is more suspicious, in a man who seems holy, than an impatient desire to reform other men.
Ambition | Fidelity | Grace | Humility | Means | Need | Pleasure | Prejudice | Reality | Sin | Sincerity | Ambition |
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 |
There are days when I am convinced that Heaven starts already, now, in this ordinary life just as it is, in all its incompleteness, yet, this is where Heaven starts… see within yourself, if you can find it. I walked through the field in front of the house, lots of swallows flying, everywhere! Some very near me… it was magical. We are already one, yet we know it not.
Conscience | Evil | Individual | People | Price | Sense | Solitude |
The whole idea of compassion is based on a keen awareness of the interdependence of all these living beings, which are all part of one another, and all involved in one another