This site is dedicated to the memory of Dr. Alan William Smolowe who gave birth to the creation of this database.
"Freethinkers are those who are willing to use their minds without prejudice and without fearing to understand that clash with their own customs, privileges, or beliefs. This state of mind is not common, but it is essential for right thinking; where it is absent, discussion is apt to become worse than useless." -
"It is a prejudice to believe that knowledge is always rational, that there is no such thing as irrational knowledge. Actually, we apprehend a great deal more through feeling than by intellection." - Nikolai Berdyaev, fully Nikolai Alexandrovich Berdyaev, also spelled Nichlas Berdiaev
"The only causes of regret are laziness, outbursts of temper, hurting others, prejudice, jealousy and envy." - Germaine Greer
"Prejudice, put theologically, is one of man’s several neurotic and perverted expressions of his will to be God." - Kyle Haselden
"The dogma that “mental diseases are diseases of the brain” is a hangover from the materialism of the 1870s. It has become a prejudice which hinders all progress, with nothing to justify it." - Carl Jung, fully Carl Gustav Jung
"No man is prejudiced in favor of a thing knowing it to be wrong. He is attached to it on the belief of its being right, and when he sees it is not, the prejudice will be gone." - Thomas Paine
"Prejudice will fall in a combat of interest." - Thomas Paine
"Pride of race is the antidote to prejudice." - Arthur A Schomburg
"Religion shows an ugly face to many contemporary eyes. In-group prejudice, violence perpetrated in its name, sexism, commercialism, and quackery - these crude surfaces often blind us to the liberating wisdom that courses far below. Let us readily admit that not all aspects of these wisdom traditions are enduringly wise." -
"Never try to reason the prejudice out of a person. It was not reasoned into them and cannot be reasoned out." - Stevie Smith, fully Florence Margaret Smith
"Non-violence is not a biblical term but a Western ideal which has evolved in large measure because of the misuse of Christianity by Western powers to justify imperial wars, class injustice and racial prejudice." - Philip Wheaton and Duane Shank
"Just as Socrates felt that it was necessary to create a tension in the mind so that individuals could rise from the bondage of myths and half-truths to the unfettered realm of creative analysis and objective appraisal, so we must see the need for nonviolent gadflies to create the kind of tension in society that will help men rise from the dark depths of prejudice and racism to the majestic heights of understanding and brotherhood." - Martin Luther King, Jr.
"Prejudice always obscures the truth." - Reginald Rose
"A prejudice is a vagrant opinion without visible means of support." - Ambrose Gwinett Bierce
"There is no prejudice that the work of art does not finally overcome." - André Gide, fully André Paul Guillaume Gide
"When dealing with people remember you are not dealing with creatures of logic, but with creatures of emotion, creatures bristling with prejudice, and motivated by pride and vanity." - Dale Carnegie, originally spelled Dale Carnegey
"Ignorance is less remote from the truth than prejudice." - Denis Diderot
"Law is a reflection and a source of prejudice. It both enforces and suggests forms of bias." - Diane B. Schulder
"Learning teaches how to carry things in suspense without prejudice till you resolve." - Francis Bacon
"To lay aside all prejudice is to lay aside all principles. He who is destitute of principles is governed, theoretically and practically, by whims." - Friedrich Heinrich Jacobi
"Does the world need more medicine and energy and buildings and food? No. There is enough food and medicine, there are enough resources for all. There is starvation and poverty and widespread disease because of human ignorance, prejudice, and fear. Out of greed and hatred we hoard materials; we create wars over imaginary geographic boundaries and act as if one group of people is truly different from another group somewhere else on the planet." - Jack Kornfield
"There are truths which some men despise because they have not examined, and which they will not examine because they despise. There is one signal instance on record where this kind of prejudice was overcome by a miracle; but the age of miracles is past, while that of prejudice remains." - James Bryant Conant
"The greatest friend of truth is time; her greatest enemy is prejudice; and her constant companion is humility." - James Bryant Conant
"Ignorance is the mother of prejudice." - John Bright
"Race prejudice, in its gravest and most typical form, is the passing judgment of criminality or of essential inferiority upon all the members of a racial or ethnic group, with no sufficient intellectual motive for such a judgment." - John LaFarge
"Any prejudice whatever will be insurmountable if those who do not share it themselves, truckle to it, and flatter it, and accept it as a law of nature." - John Stuart Mill
"Discourses on morality and reflection on human nature are the best means we can make use of to improve our minds, gain a true knowledge of ourselves, and recover our souls out of the vice, ignorance, and prejudice which naturally cleave to them." - Joseph Addison
"Prejudice and self-sufficiency, naturally proceed from inexperience of the world, and ignorance of mankind." - Joseph Addison
"There are many shining qualities on the mind of man; but none so useful as discretion. It is this which gives a value to all the rest, and sets them at work in their proper places, and turns them to the advantage of their possessor. Without it, learning is pedantry; wit, impertinence; virtue itself looks like weakness; and the best parts only qualify a man to be more sprightly in errors, and active to his own prejudice. Though a man has all other perfections and wants discretion, he will be of no great consequence in the world; but if he has this single talent in perfection, and but a common share of others, he may do what he pleases in his station of life." - Joseph Addison
"Go out and get interested in the human problems that are everywhere around us. Help to improve the human lot. This service of love is perhaps the healthiest attitude in this world. It puts one into the main stream of the human race, where the profound problems re, and as one participates and gets involved and learns to know people and they him, one is loving and being loved and life becomes good - very good. Love is never a soft, genial attitude, indeed it is far from it. For example, when you really love the poor and underprivileged, you will get and fight for better conditions for all men. The fight is often against prejudice and entrenched greed, and it is no easy struggle to overcome these. But love is tough and never gives up as long as one of God’s children is the victim of injustice and mistreatment." - Norman Vincent Peale
"We might as well give up the fiction that we can argue any view. For what in me is pure Conviction is simple Prejudice in you." - Phyllis McGinley
"Laws will not eliminate prejudice from the hearts of human beings. But that is no reason to allow prejudice to continue to be enshrined in our laws and to perpetuate injustice through inaction." - Shirley Chisholm
"When no discriminating thoughts arise, the old mind ceases to exist. When thought objects vanish, the thinking-subject vanishes, as when the mind vanishes, objects vanish. Things are objects because there is a subject or mind; and the mind is a subject because there are objects. Understand the relativity of these two and the basic reality; the unity of emptiness. In this Emptiness the two are indistinguishable and each contains in itself the whole world. If you do not discriminate between coarse and fine you will not be tempted to prejudice and opinion." - Sosan Zenji, aka Chien-chih Seng-Tsan or Ch'an Seng-ts'an
"Nothing is good or bad, right or wrong; it all depends on how we judge with our prejudice. Listening in purity and emptiness judges not, only learns." - Tom Brown, Jr.
"The true warrior is always the last to pick up the lance or go to battle. His battles are fought with the lance of love and understanding. His enemies are prejudice, greed, and bad medicine, and the biggest battles are always fought within himself. So, do not go out upon the earth to battle unseen demons of the physical world, for your hatred will be like theirs. Instead, go out as a true warrior, with love and understanding." - Tom Brown, Jr.
"Prejudice is opinion without judgment." - Voltaire, pen name of François-Marie Arouet NULL
"Prejudice is the reason of fools." - Voltaire, pen name of François-Marie Arouet NULL
"Race prejudice decreases values, both real estate and human." - W. E. B. Du Bois, fully William Edward Burghardt Du Bois
"There is nothing stronger than human prejudice." - Wendell Phillips
"However we may flatter ourselves to the contrary, our friends think no higher of us than the world do. They see us with the jaundiced or distrustful eyes of others. They may know better, but their feelings are governed by popular prejudice. Nay, they are more shy of us (when under a cloud) than even strangers; for we involve them in a common disgrace, or compel them to embroil themselves in continual quarrels and disputes in our defense." - William Hazlitt
"Prejudice is never easy unless it can pass itself off for reason." - William Hazlitt
"There is no prejudice so strong as that which arises from a fancied exemption from all prejudice." - William Hazlitt