This site is dedicated to the memory of Dr. Alan William Smolowe who gave birth to the creation of this database.
Take not from the mouth of labor the bread it as earned.
The firmness with which the people have withstood the late abuses of the press, the discernment they have manifested between truth and falsehood, show that they may safely be trusted to hear everything true and false, and to form a correct judgment between them.
Character | Death | Good | Law | Mercy | Murder | Object | Power | Public | Security | Time | Treason | Virtue | Virtue | Will | Murder |
Shake off all fears of servile prejudices, under which weak minds are servilely crouched. Fix reason firmly in her seat, and call on her tribunal for every fact, every opinion. Question with boldness even the existence of a God, because, if there be one, he must more approve of the homage of reason than that of blindfolded fear.
Nature intended me for the tranquil pursuits of science, by rendering them my supreme delight. But the enormities of the times in which I have lived have forced me to commit myself on the boisterous ocean of political passions.
There is also an artificial aristocracy founded on wealth and birth, without either virtue or talents... The artificial aristocracy is a mischievous ingredient in government, and provisions should be made to prevent its ascendancy.
There is no act, however virtuous, for which ingenuity may not find some bad motive.
They (religions) dread the advance of science as witches do the approach of daylight and scowl on the fatal harbinger announcing the subversions of the duperies on which they live.
Thomas Mann, fully Paul Thomas Mann
I must tell you that we artists cannot tread the path of Beauty without Eros keeping company with us and appointing himself as our guide.
Art | Enlightenment | Intolerance | Literature | Mankind | Passion | Reason | Rhetoric | Service | Slander | Virtue | Virtue | Slander | Art | Intellect |
I believe the defenders of intelligent design deserve our gratitude for challenging a scientific world view that owes some of the passion displayed by its adherents precisely to the fact that it is thought to liberate us from religion. That world view is ripe for displacement....
They boldly will usurp Moses chair, without any study or preparation. They would have their mouths reverenced as the mouths of the Sybils, who spoke nothing but was registered; yet nothing comes from their mouths but gross, full-stomached tautology. They sweat, they blunder, they bounce and plunge in the pulpit, but all is voice and no substance; they deaf men's ears, but not edify. Scripture peradventure they come off thick and threefold with, but it is so ugly daubed, plastered and patched on, so peevishly specked and applied, as if a botcher with a number of satin and velvet shreds should clout and mend leather doublets and cloth breeches.
We must begin by frankly admitting that the first place in which to go looking for the world is not outside us but in ourselves. We are the world. In the deepest ground of our being we remain in metaphysical contact with the whole of that creation in which we are only small parts. Through our senses and our minds, our loves, needs, and desires, we are implicated, without possibility of evasion, in this world of matter and of men, of things and of persons, which not only affect us and change our lives but are also affected and changed by us…The question, then, is not to speculate about how we are to contact the world – as if we were somehow in outer space – but how to validate our relationship, give it a fully honest and human significance, and make it truly productive and worthwhile for our world.
Acceptance | Charity | Grace | Humility | Love | Truth | Virtue | Virtue |
Let them call me rebel and welcome, I feel no concern from it; but I should suffer the misery of devils, were I to make a whore of my soul by swearing allegiance to one whose character is that of a sottish, stupid, stubborn, worthless, brutish man.
Day | Evil | Faith | Future | God | Hope | Life | Life | Nothing | Rank | Virtue | Virtue | Will | God |
In thinking about these questions I have been stimulated by criticisms of the prevailing scientific world picture from a very different direction: the attack on Darwinism mounted in recent years from a religious perspective by the defenders of intelligent design. Even though writers like Michael Behe and Stephen Meyer are motivated at least in part by their religious beliefs, the empirical arguments they offer against the likelihood that the origin of life and its evolutionary history can be fully explained by physics and chemistry are of great interest in themselves. Another skeptic, David Berlinski, has brought out these problems vividly without reference to the design inference. Even if one is not drawn to the alternative of an explanation by the actions of a designer, the problems that these iconoclasts pose for the orthodox scientific consensus should be taken seriously. They do not deserve the scorn with which they are commonly met. It is manifestly unfair.
Acceptance | Association | Atheism | Fear | God | Hope | People | Religion | Right | Superstition | Talking | Universe | Virtue | Virtue | Association | God |
We fight not to enslave, but to set a country free, and to make room upon the earth for honest men to live in.
William P. Montague, fully William Pepperell Montague
Realism holds that things known may continue to exist unaltered when they are not known, or that things may pass in and out of the cognitive relation without prejudice to their reality, or that the existence of a thing is not correlated with or dependent upon the fact that anybody experiences it, perceives it, conceives it, or is in any way aware of it.
Difficulty | Meaning | Virtue | Virtue |
I love the jocund dance, The softly breathing song, Where innocent eyes do glance, And where lisps the maiden’s tongue. I love the laughing vale, I love the echoing hill, Where mirth does never fail, And the jolly swain laughs his fill. I love the pleasant cot, I love the innocent bow’r, Where white and brown is our lot, Or fruit in the mid-day hour. I love the oaken seat, Beneath the oaken tree, Where all the old villagers meet, And laugh our sports to see. I love our neighbours all, But, Kitty, I better love thee; And love them I ever shall; But thou art all to me.
Truly, my Satan, thou art but a dunce, And dost not know the garment from the man; Every harlot was a virgin once, Nor canst thou ever change Kate into Nan. Tho’ thou art worship’d by the names divine Of Jesus and Jehovah, thou art still The Son of Morn in weary Night’s decline, The lost traveller’s dream under the hill.
Darkness | Death | Doubt | Dreams | Eternal | Evil | Father | Good | Haste | Ignorance | Man | Shame | Virtue | Virtue |
Grief walks upon the heels of pleasure married in haste, we repent at leisure.