This site is dedicated to the memory of Dr. Alan William Smolowe who gave birth to the creation of this database.
Extremism in the defense of liberty is no vice. And moderation in the pursuit of justice is no virtue.
Defense | Justice | Liberty | Moderation | Virtue | Virtue | Moderation |
Arthur Ponsonby, 1st Baron Ponsonby of Shulbrede
Anger is not only inevitable, it is necessary. Its absence means indifference - the most disastrous of all human failings.
Absence | Anger | Indifference | Inevitable | Means |
Love confronts hate in the one way hate cannot comprehend, with something beyond itself - with compassion. Hate cannot go beyond itself. It draws its strength from the self's defense of self. Love lives to go beyond itself, drawing strength from that very act. Love can thus comprehend hate, integrating it into something larger. Slowly, hate is defeated as a grain of salt dissolves into the sweetness of a pond.
Human beings seek a prior meaning in everything as a defense against doubts about the importance of anything, including man's existence ... To affirm that there is a supreme meaning of life is to give the intellect an opportunity to escape the disquieting conclusion that nothing people do can possibly have more than slight importance.
Defense | Existence | Life | Life | Man | Meaning | Nothing | Opportunity | People | Intellect |
The absence of evidence is not evidence of absence ... Simply because you do not have evidence that something exists does not mean that you have evidence that it doesn't exist.
Civil government, so far as it is instituted for the security of property, is in reality instituted for the defense of the rich against the poor, or of those who have some property against those who have none at all.
Defense | Government | Property | Reality | Security |
The total absence of humor from the Bible is one of the most singular things in all literature.
Absence | Bible | Humor | Literature | Bible |
Antonio Machado, fully Antonio Cipriano José María y Francisco de Santa Ana Machado y Ruiz
The absence of vices adds so little to the sum of one's virtues.
How much happier would the religious history of the world been if the different religions and sects had seen their role as contributors to a common stream of seeking for the Ultimate, which always escapes the conceptual net, yet perennially inspires the search. Actually many in the modern world are becoming tolerant toward religion in the wrong way. Their tolerance is not a product of understanding but is bred of indifference. They see the conventional forms in which religion is practiced as empty shells although they excite in their defense belligerent intolerance.
Defense | History | Indifference | Intolerance | Religion | Search | Understanding | World | Wrong |
The widespread modern rejection of ritual in religion is depriving people of powerful aids for spiritual development and for defense against evil... Action cannot lead beyond action, and therefore no ritual can produce Liberation... But there are many who do not specifically seek Liberation but simply greater purity, greater devotion, general spiritual betterment, or who seek Liberation as the still unseen goal of a winding path; and it is for such as these that the appropriate ritual would be a powerful armament for progress and defense.
Action | Defense | Devotion | Evil | People | Progress | Purity | Religion |