This site is dedicated to the memory of Dr. Alan William Smolowe who gave birth to the creation of this database.
Mahatma Gandhi, fully Mohandas Karamchand Gandhi, aka Bapu
They can’t take away our self-respect if we do not give it to them.
Character: the willingness to accept responsibility for one's own life – is the source from which self-respect springs.
Self-reliance and self-respect are about as valuable commodities as we can carry in our pack through life.
Life | Life | Respect | Self | Self-reliance |
When Descartes said, “I think, therefore I am,” he uttered a very profound thought. But there are times in the history of peoples when thought alone does not prove their existence. A people may “think”: and yet its sons, with their thoughts and in spite of them, may be turned into a herd of slaves - or into soap. There are times when everything in you cries out: your very self-respect as a human being lies in your resistance to evil. We fight, therefore we are!
Evil | Existence | History | People | Respect | Self | Thought | Thought |
We cannot achieve self-respect if we are afraid of self-knowledge.
Knowledge | Respect | Self | Self-knowledge | Afraid |
Fyodor Dostoevsky, fully Fyodor Mikhaylovich Dostoevsky or Feodor Mikhailovich Dostoevski
If you want to be respected by others the great thing is to respect yourself. Only by that, only by self-respect will you compel others to respect you.
George Marshall, fully George Catlett Marshall, Jr.
We must present democracy as a force holding within itself the seeds of unlimited progress by the human race. By our actions we should make it clear that such a democracy is a means to a better way of life, together with a better understanding among nations. Tyranny inevitably must retire before the tremendous moral strength of the gospel of freedom and self-respect for the individual, but we have to recognize that these democratic principles do not flourish on empty stomachs, and that people turn to false promises of dictators because they are hopeless and anything promises something better than the miserable existence that they endure. However, material assistance alone is not sufficient. The most important thing for the world today in my opinion is a spiritual regeneration which would reestablish a feeling of good faith among men generally. Discouraged people are in sore need of the inspiration of great principles. Such leadership can be the rallying point against intolerance, against distrust, against that fatal insecurity that leads to war. It is to be hoped that the democratic nations can provide the necessary leadership.
Better | Democracy | Existence | Faith | Force | Freedom | Good | Important | Insecurity | Inspiration | Means | Men | Nations | Need | Opinion | People | Present | Principles | Progress | Strength | Tyranny | Understanding | World | Leadership |
The willingness to accept responsibility for one's own life is the source from which self-respect springs.
Life | Life | Responsibility |
Eldridge Cleaver, fully Leroy Eldridge Cleaver
There is no calamity which a great nation can invite which equals that which follows a supine submission to wrong and injustice and the consequent loss of national self-respect and honor, beneath which are shielded and defended a people's safety and greatness.
Calamity | Injustice | Injustice | Submission | Wrong | Calamity | Loss |
In a culture whose media extols thinness as the great panacea that will bring happiness, sexuality, self-respect and social acceptance, they are blind to the insidious lies of the false goddess. Possessed by their own damaged instincts, and ironically driven by the same desire for power that their parents used in raising them, some children wolf down food, or reject it, or vomit it out. Whether that rejection of life is concretized in 200 pounds of armor, or 90 pounds of bone, or vomit in the toilet, the surest way out of the neurosis is to try to understand what food symbolizes in the individual psyche and why the energy is pulled in that direction.
Children | Culture | Desire | Energy | Individual | Life | Life | Parents | Power | Will | Understand |
What is opportunity, and when does it knock? It never knocks. You can wait a whole lifetime, listening, hoping, and you will hear no knocking. None at all. You are opportunity, and you must knock on the door leading to your destiny. You prepare yourself to recognize opportunity, to pursue and seize opportunity as you develop the strength of your personality, and build a self-image with which you are able to live / with your self-respect alive and growing
Opportunity | Strength | Will |
Mahatma Gandhi, fully Mohandas Karamchand Gandhi, aka Bapu
Man does not live by bread alone. Many prefer self-respect to food.
Mahatma Gandhi, fully Mohandas Karamchand Gandhi, aka Bapu
My work will be finished if I succeed in carrying conviction to the human family that every man or woman, however weak in body, is the guardian of his or her self-respect and liberty, and that this defence prevails though the world be against the individual resister.