This site is dedicated to the memory of Dr. Alan William Smolowe who gave birth to the creation of this database.
Bertrand Russell, fully Bertrand Arthur William Russell, 3rd Earl Russell
From childhood upwards, everything is done to make the minds of men and women conventional and sterile. And if, by misadventure, some spark of imagination remains, its unfortunate possessor is considered unsound and dangerous, worthy only of contempt in time of peace and of prison or a traitor’s death in time of war.
Childhood | Contempt | Death | Imagination | Men | Peace | Prison | Time | Traitor | War |
A drunken man who falls out of a cart, though he may suffer, does not die. His bones are the same as other people’s; but he meets his accident in a different way. His spirit is in a condition of security. He is not conscious of riding in the cart; neither is he conscious of falling out of it. Ideas of life, death, fear and the like cannot penetrate his breast; and so he does not suffer from contact with objective existence. If such security; is to be got from wine, how much more is it to be got from God?
Accident | Death | Existence | Fear | God | Ideas | Life | Life | Man | People | Security | Spirit |
Too much idleness, I have observed, fills up a man's time much more completely, and leaves him less his own master, than any sort of employment whatsoever.
Seek not proud wealth; but such as thou mayest get justly, use soberly, distribute cheerfully, and leave contently, yet have not any abstract or friarly contempt of it.
Society itself is an accident to the spirit, and if society in any of its forms is to be justified morally it must be justified at the bar of the individual.
Accident | Individual | Society | Spirit | Society |
We have employment assigned to us for every circumstance in life. When we are alone, we have our thoughts to watch; in the family, our tempers; and in company, our tongues.
Family | Life | Life | Circumstance |
To be infatuated with the power of one’s own intellect is an accident which seldom happens but to those who are remarkable for the want of intellectual power. Whenever Nature leaves a hole in a person’s mind, she generally plasters it over with a thick coat of self-conceit.
There is a principle that is guaranteed to keep man in everlasting ignorance. That principle is contempt prior to investigation.
To diminish envy, let us consider not what others possess, but what they enjoy; mere riches may be the gift of lucky accident or blind chance, but happiness must be the result of prudent preference and rational design; the highest happiness then can have no other foundation than the deepest wisdom; and the happiest fool is only as happy as he knows how to be.
Accident | Chance | Design | Envy | Happy | Preference | Riches | Wisdom | Riches | Happiness |
[On children] Train them to virtue; habituate them to industry, activity, and spirit. Make them consider every vice as shameful and unmanly. Fire them with ambition to be useful. Make them disdain to be destitute of any useful knowledge. Fix their ambition upon great and solid objects, and their contempt upon little, frivolous, and useless ones.
Ambition | Children | Contempt | Disdain | Industry | Knowledge | Little | Spirit | Virtue | Virtue | Ambition | Vice |
Louis D. Brandeis, fully Louis Dembitz Brandeis
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.
Administration | Anarchy | Contempt | Crime | Government | Law | Man | Means | Order | Government |
Lord Chesterfield, Philip Dormer Stanhope, 4th Earl of Chesterfield
It is often more necessary to conceal contempt than resentment; the former is never forgiven, but the latter is sometimes forgotten.
Contempt | Resentment |
Cicero, fully Marcus Tullius Cicero, anglicized as Tully NULL
The altogether courageous and great spirit has, above all, two characteristics. First, he is indifferent to outward circumstances. Such a person is convinced that nothing but moral goodness and propriety are worth admiring and striving for. He knows he ought not be subject to any person, passion, or accident of fortune. His second characteristic is that when his soul has been disciplined in this way, he should do things that are not only great and highly useful, but also deeds that are arduous, laborious and fraught with danger to life and to those things that make life worthwhile.
Accident | Circumstances | Danger | Deeds | Fortune | Life | Life | Nothing | Passion | Soul | Spirit | Worth | Deeds | Danger |
The mark of the man of the world is absence of pretension. He does not make a speech; he takes a low business tone, avoids all brag, is nobody, dresses plainly, promises not at all, performs much, speaks in monosyllables, hugs his fact. He calls his employment by its lowest name and so takes from evil tongues their sharpest weapon.
Absence | Business | Evil | Man | Speech | World | Business |
Every heroic act measures itself by its contempt of some external good. But it finds its own success at last, and then the prudent also extol.