This site is dedicated to the memory of Dr. Alan William Smolowe who gave birth to the creation of this database.
Christ: I dislike him very much. Still, I can stand him. What I cannot stand is the wretched band of people whose profession is to hoodwink us about him.
Samuel Johnson, aka Doctor Johnson
An age that melts with unperceiv'd decay, And glides in modest innocence away.
Day | Indignation | Men | Rank | Will |
Samuel Johnson, aka Doctor Johnson
That kind of life is most happy which affords us most opportunities of gaining our own esteem.
Conversation | Quiet |
Simone de Beauvoir, fully Simone-Ernestine-Lucie-Marie Bertrand de Beauvoir
I think I understand how it can make you. We tried to build our love beyond the moment, but only moments are sure. For the rest we need faith, and faith, is it courage or laziness?
Contemplation | Effort | Experience | Quiet | Contemplation | Think |
Arthur Helps, fully Sir Arthur Helps
We often err by contemplating an individual solely in his relation and behaviour to us, and generalizing from that with more rapidity than wisdom. We might as well argue that the moon has no rotation about her axis, because the same hemisphere is always presented to our view.
Arthur Conan Doyle, fully Sir Arthur Ignatius Conan Doyle
I did not know the woman soul, that crowning gift of Providence to man, which, if we do not ourselves degrade it, will set an edge to all that is good in us. I did not know how the love of a woman will tinge a man's whole life and every action with unselfishness. I did not know how easy it is to be noble when someone else takes it for granted that one will be so; or how wide and interesting life becomes when viewed by four eyes instead of two.
Stephen Leacock, fully Stephen Butler Leacock
And then, as he comes in from the storm to the still room, the climax breaks. A man staggers into the room in oilskins, drenched, wet, breathless. (They all staggered in these plays, and in the new drama they walk, and the effect is feebleness itself.) He points to the sea. “A boat! A boat upon the reef! With a woman in it.”
We who have been hunted through the rapids of life, torn from our former roots, always driven to the end and obliged to begin again, victims and yet also the willing servants of unknown mysterious powers, we for whom comfort has become an old legend and security, a childish dream, have felt tension from pole to pole of our being, the terror of something always new in every fibre. Every hour of our years was linked to the fate of the world. In sorrow and in joy we have lived through time and history far beyond our own small lives, while they knew nothing beyond themselves. Every one of us, therefore, even the least of the human race, knows a thousand times more about reality today than the wisest of our forebears. But nothing was given to us freely; we paid the price in full.
A heavy progressive tax upon a very large fortune is in no way such a tax upon thrift or industry as a like would be on a small fortune. No advantage comes either to the country as a whole or to the individuals inheriting the money by permitting the transmission in their entirety of the enormous fortunes which would be affected by such a tax; and as an incident to its function of revenue raising, such a tax would help to preserve a measurable equality of opportunity for the people of the generations growing to manhood. We have not the slightest sympathy with that socialistic idea which would try to put laziness, thriftlessness and inefficiency on a par with industry, thrift and efficiency; which would strive to break up not merely private property, but what is far more important, the home, the chief prop upon which our whole civilization stands. Such a theory, if ever adopted, would mean the ruin of the entire country — a ruin which would bear heaviest upon the weakest, upon those least able to shift for themselves. But proposals for legislation such as this herein advocated are directly opposed to this class of socialistic theories. Our aim is to recognize what Lincoln pointed out: The fact that there are some respects in which men are obviously not equal; but also to insist that there should be an equality of self-respect and of mutual respect, an equality of rights before the law, and at least an approximate equality in the conditions under which each man obtains the chance to show the stuff that is in him when compared to his fellows.
Contempt | Good | Indignation | Right |
Friends, I will disown and repudiate any man of my party who attacks with such foul slander and abuse any opponent of any other party.
Kill | Quiet | Understand |
It is our duty to look to God's commands, and not to His decrees; to our own duty, and not to His purposes. The decrees of God are a vast ocean, into which many possibly have curiously pried to their own horror and despair; but few or none have ever pried into them to their own profit and satisfaction.
Democracy is 51% of the people taking away the rights of the other 49%.
Indignation | Pleasure |
God has formed us moral agents... that we may promote the happiness of those with whom He has placed us in society, by acting honestly towards all, benevolently to those who fall within our way, respecting sacredly their rights, bodily and mental, and cherishing especially their freedom of conscience, as we value our own.
Death | Liberty | Pardon | People | Public | Quiet | Right | Spirit | Time | Will | Wrong |
We have the greatest opportunity the world has ever seen, as long as we remain honest -- which will be as long as we can keep the attention of our people alive. If they once become inattentive to public affairs, you and I, and Congress and Assemblies, judges and governors would all become wolves.
Comfort | Convictions | Freedom of religion | Freedom | Obedience | Order | Principles | Question | Quiet | Religion |