This site is dedicated to the memory of Dr. Alan William Smolowe who gave birth to the creation of this database.
Richard Jefferies, fully John Richard Jefferies
How can I adequately express my contempt for the assertion that all things occur for the best, for a wise and beneficent end, and are ordered by a human intelligence! It is the most utter falsehood and a crime against the human race.
Assertion | Contempt | Crime | Falsehood | Human race | Intelligence | Race | Wise |
Arthur Helps, fully Sir Arthur Helps
It is a good thing to believe; it is a good thing to admire. By continually looking upwards; as a man, by indulging in habits of scorn and contempt for others, is sure to descend to the level of those he despises.
To be remembered after we are dead is but a poor recompense for being treated with contempt while we are living.
Contempt | Recompense |
Whenever we pretend, on all occasions, a mighty contempt for any thing, it is a pretty clear sign that we feel ourselves very nearly on a level with it.
Contempt |
Voltaire, pen name of François-Marie Arouet NULL
In laughter there is always a kind of joyousness that is incompatible with contempt or indignation.
Contempt | Indignation | Laughter |
Friedrich Nietzsche, fully Friedrich Wilhelm Nietzsche
Man is much more sensitive to the contempt of others than to self-contempt.
Contempt |
There will be no room, here, for the smug myopia which views American civilization as the final solution to all world problems; which recommends our institutions for universal adoption and turns away with contempt from the serious study of the institutions of peoples whose civilizations may seem to us to be materially less advanced.
Civilization | Contempt | Study | Will | World |
No other profession is subject to the public contempt and derision that sometimes befalls lawyers; the bitter fruit of public incomprehension of the law itself and its dynamics.
Religious discord has lost her sting; the cumbrous weapons of theological warfare are antiquated: the field of politics supplies the alchymists of our times with materials of more fatal explosion, and the butchers of mankind no longer travel to another world for instruments of cruelty and destruction. Our age is too enlightened to contend upon topics, which concern only the interests of eternity; and men who hold in proper contempt all controversies about trifles, except such as inflame their own passions, have made it a common-place censure against your ancestors, that their zeal was enkindled by subjects of trivial importance; and that however aggrieved by the intolerance of others, they were alike intolerant themselves.
Age | Censure | Contempt | Cruelty | Intolerance | Mankind | Men | Politics | Weapons | World | Zeal | Cruelty |
Julian Huxley, fully Sir Julian Sorell Huxley
Man ... differs from all other animals in having a brain which can and largely does bring all the various elements of experience into contact, instead of keeping them in a series of wholly or largely separate compartments or channels. This not only provides the basis for conceptual thought, and so for all man's ideas and philosophic systems, ideals and works of art and creative imagination, but also for his battery of complex sentiments unknown in animals, such as reverence and religious awe, moral feelings (including hate and contempt arising from moral abhorrence), and love in its developed form.
Art | Contempt | Experience | Feelings | Hate | Ideals | Ideas | Love | Reverence | Art |
Jules Feiffer, fully Jules Ralph Feiffer
I grew up to have my father's looks, my father's speech patterns, my father's posture, my father's opinions, and my mother's contempt for my father.
It is no accident that banks resemble temples, preferably Greek, and that the supplicants who come to perform the rites of deposit and withdrawal instinctively lower their voices into the registers of awe. Even the most junior tellers acquire within weeks of their employment the officiousness of hierophants tending an eternal flame. I don't know how they become so quickly inducted into the presiding mysteries, or who instructs them in the finely articulated inflections of contempt for the laity, but somehow they learn to think of themselves as suppliers of the monetarized DNA that is the breath of life.
Louis D. Brandeis, fully Louis Dembitz Brandeis
Our government... teaches the whole people by its example. If the government becomes the lawbreaker, it breeds contempt for law; it invites every man to become a law unto himself; it invites anarchy.
Contempt | Government | Law | Man | People | Government |
Louis D. Brandeis, fully Louis Dembitz Brandeis
Decency, security, and liberty alike demand that government officials shall be subjected to the same rules of conduct that are commands to the citizen. In a government of laws, existence of the government will be imperiled if it fails to observe the law scrupulously. Our government is the potent, the omnipresent teacher. For good or for ill, it teaches the whole people by its example. Crime is contagious. If the government becomes a lawbreaker, it breeds contempt for law; it invites every man to become a law unto himself; it invites anarchy. To declare that in the administration of the criminal law the end justifies the means -- to declare that the government may commit crimes in order to secure the conviction of a private criminal -- would bring terrible retribution. Against that pernicious doctrine this court should resolutely set its face.
Administration | Conduct | Contempt | Crime | Doctrine | Existence | Good | Government | Law | Liberty | Man | Means | Order | People | Will | Government |
The contempt for law and the contempt for the human consequences of lawbreaking go from the bottom to the top of American society.
Consequences | Contempt | Law |
Nicolas Chamfort,fully Sébastien-Roch Nicolas De Chamfort, also spelled Nicholas
There are moments when society people seem ready to be assessed at their true value. I've often noticed that they appreciate those who show little regard for them, which seems a sort of invitation to express your contempt openly, providing you do it sincerely, without affectation of ignorance, and from the heart.
Affectation | Contempt | Little | People | Regard | Society | Society |