This site is dedicated to the memory of Dr. Alan William Smolowe who gave birth to the creation of this database.
Robert Kennedy, fully Robert Francis "Bobby" Kennedy
Some believe there is nothing one man or one woman can do against the enormous array of the world's ills -- against misery, against ignorance, or injustice and violence. Yet many of the world's great movements, of thought and action, have flowed from the work of a single man. A young monk began the Protestant reformation, a young general extended an empire from Macedonia to the borders of the earth, and a young woman reclaimed the territory of France. It was a young Italian explorer who discovered the New World, and 32 year old Thomas Jefferson who proclaimed that all men are created equal. ‘Give me a place to stand,’ said Archimedes, ‘and I will move the world.’ These men moved the world, and so can we all.
Action | Earth | Ignorance | Injustice | Injustice | Man | Men | Nothing | Thought | Will | Woman | Work | World | Old | Thought |
Salomon ibn Gabirol, aka Solomon ben Judah or Avicebron
It was asked of the sage, In what one virtue are all the rest comprised? Patience, was his answer. And in what single vice are all the others concentrated? Vindictiveness.
The vice of envy is… always a confession of inferiority.
Envy | Inferiority | Vice |
As virtue is its own reward, so vice is its own punishment.
Punishment | Reward | Virtue | Virtue | Vice |
There is no vice so simple, but assumes some mark of virtue on its outward parts.
There is a heroism in crime as well as in virtue. Vice and infamy have their altars and their religion. This makes nothing in their favor, but is a proud compliment to man’s nature. Whatever he is or does, he cannot entirely efface the stamp of the divinity on him. Let him strive ever so, he cannot divest himself of his natural sublimity of thought and affection, however he may pervert or deprave it to ill.
Crime | Divinity | Infamy | Man | Nature | Nothing | Religion | Thought | Virtue | Virtue | Thought | Vice |
People do not persist in their vices because they are not weary of them, but because they cannot leave them off. It is the nature of vice to leave us no resource but itself.
Envy is the most universal passion. We only pride ourselves on the qualities owe possess, or think we possess; but we envy the pretensions we have, and those which we have not, and do not even wish for. We envy the greatest qualities and every trifling advantage. We envy the most ridiculous appearance or affectation of superiority. We envy folly and conceit; nay, we go so far as to envy whatever confers distinction of notoriety, even vice and infamy.
Affectation | Appearance | Distinction | Envy | Folly | Infamy | Passion | Pride | Qualities | Superiority | Think | Vice |
Voltaire, pen name of François-Marie Arouet NULL
Work banishes those three great evils: Boredom, vice and poverty.
The only vice that cannot be forgiven is hypocrisy. The repentance of a hypocrite is itself hypocrisy.
Hypocrisy | Repentance | Vice |
Voltaire, pen name of François-Marie Arouet NULL
The real vice of a civilized republic is in the Turkish fable of the dragon with man heads and the dragon with many tails. The many heads hurt each other, and the many tails obey a single head which wants to devour everything.
Will Durant, fully William James "Will" Durant
Every vice was once a virtue, and may become respectable again, just as hatred becomes respectable in wartime.
David Bohm, fully David Joseph Bohm
The subtle is what is basic and the manifest is its result. The subtler has power to transform the gross but not vice versa.
Edith Sitwell, fully Dame Edith Louisa Sitwell
Good taste is the worst vice ever invented.
Eugène Ionesco, born Eugen Ionescu
No society has been able to abolish human sadness, no political system can deliver us from the pain of living, from our fear of death, our thirst for the absolute. It is the human condition that directs the social condition, not vice versa.
Fidel Castro, fully Fidel Alejandro Castro Ruz
With what moral authority can they speak of human rights — the rulers of a nation in which the millionaire and beggar coexist; the Indian is exterminated; the black man is discriminated against; the woman is prostituted; and the great masses of Chicanos, Puerto Ricans, and Latin Americans are scorned, exploited, and humiliated? How can they do this — the bosses of an empire where the mafia, gambling, and child prostitution are imposed; where the CIA organizes plans of global subversion and espionage, and the Pentagon creates neutron bombs capable of preserving material assets and wiping out human beings; an empire that supports reaction and counter-revolution all over the world; that protects and promotes the exploitation by monopolies of the wealth and the human resources of whole continents, unequal exchange, a protectionist policy, an incredible waste of natural resources, and a system of hunger for the world?
Authority | Global | Hunger | Man | Rights | System | Waste | Wealth | Woman | Child |