This site is dedicated to the memory of Dr. Alan William Smolowe who gave birth to the creation of this database.
"The reason why great men meet with so little pity or attachment in adversity, would seem to be this: the friends of a great man were made by his fortune, his enemies by himself, and revenge is a much more punctual paymaster than gratitude." - Charles Caleb Colton
"In taking revenge a man is but equal to his enemy, but in passing it over he is his superior." - Francis Bacon
"Nothing is terrible, except fear itself... revenge is a kind of wild justice; which the more man's nature runs to, the more ought law to week it out... Certainly, in taking revenge a man is but even with his enemy; but in passing it over, he is superior; for it is a prince's part to pardon. This is certain, the man that studieth revenge keeps his own wounds green, which otherwise would heal and do well." - Francis Bacon
"In revenge a man is but even with his enemies; but it is a princely things to pardon, for Solomon saith, "It is the glory of a man to pass over a transgression."" - Francis Bacon
"It is a work of prudence to prevent injury, and of a great mind, when done, not to revenge it. He that hath revenge in his power, and does not use it, is the great man; it is for low and vulgar spirits to transport themselves with vengeance. To endure injuries with a brave mind is one half the conquest." - Francis Bacon
"Men fear death, as children fear the dark; and as that natural fear in children is increased by frightful tales, so is the other. Groans, convulsions, weeping friends, and the like show death terrible; yet there is no passion so weak but conquers the fear of it, and therefore death is not such a terrible enemy. Revenge triumphs over death, loves slights its, honor aspires to it, dread of shame prefers it, grief flies to it, and fear anticipates it." - Francis Bacon
"Revenge is a kind of wild justice; which the more man’s nature runs to, the more ought law to weed it out." - Francis Bacon
"A man that studieth revenge keeps his own wounds green." - Francis Bacon
"[Hatred]... the coward's revenge for being intimidated." - George Bernard Shaw
"It is difficult to fight against anger, for a man will buy revenge with his soul." - Heraclitus or Heraclitus of Ephesus NULL
"Education, then, beyond all other devices, of human origin, is a great equalizer of conditions of men,-the balance wheel of the social machinery. It does better than to disarm the poor of their hostility toward the rich: it prevents being poor. Agrarianism is the revenge of poverty against wealth." - Horace Mann
"Not sharp revenge, nor hell itself can find a fiercer torment than a guilty mind." - John Dryden
"There is no revenge so complete as forgiveness." - Josh Billings, pen name for Henry Wheeler Shaw, aka Uncle Esek
"Humanity is the peculiar characteristic of great minds; little vicious minds abound with anger and revenge, and are incapable of feeling the exact pleasure of forgiving their enemies." - Lord Chesterfield, Philip Dormer Stanhope, 4th Earl of Chesterfield
"Enmity is anger waiting for a chance for revenge." - Cicero, fully Marcus Tullius Cicero, anglicized as Tully NULL
"We are at a crossroads; I am at a crossroads; you are at a crossroads. We are in the midst of an age-old story, that of the forces of light versus the forces of darkness. Will we choose the path of fear, anger, and revenge, or will we choose the path of nonviolence and hope?" - Michael Toms
"The desire to repel harmful things and to revenge oneself, is the most persistent of all desires." - René Descartes
"An envious man waxeth lean with the fatness of his neighbors. Envy is murder and revenge, the beginner of secret sedition and the perpetual tormentor of virtue. Envy is the filthy slime of the soul; a venom, a poison, or quicksilver which consumeth the flesh and drieth up the marrow of bones." - Socrates NULL
"Interpretation is the revenge of the intellect upon art... To interpret is to impoverish... The only interesting answers are those which destroy the questions." - Susan Sontag
"Revenge is not always better, but neither is forgiveness; learn to know them both, son, so that there be no problem. Son, a man who is always forgiving finds many things wrong; his servants despise him, and so do outsiders. No creatures ever bow to him, and that is why the learned criticize being always forgiving." - Mahabharata or The Mahabharata NULL
"Worldly and sensual pleasures lie, for the most part, are short, false, and deceitful. Like drunkenness, they revenge the jolly madness of one hour with the sad repentance of many." - Thomas Fuller
"In taking revenge a man is but even with his enemy; but in passing it over, he is superior." - Thomas Fuller
"Forgetting of a wrong is a mild revenge." - Thomas Fuller
"Men are more prone to revenge injuries than to requite kindnesses." - Thomas Fuller
"It is worthy the observing, that there is no passion in the mind of man, so weak, but it mates, and masters, the fear of death; and therefore, death is no such terrible enemy, when a man hath so many attendants about him, that can win the combat of him. Revenge triumphs over death; love slights it; honor aspireth to it; grief flieth to it; fear preoccupieth it." - Francis Bacon
"'Tis sweet to love; but when with scorn we meet, revenge supplies the loss with joys as great." - George Granville, 1st Baron Lansdowne
"The best revenge is living well without you. " - Joyce Carol Oates
"The best revenge is to be unlike him who performed the injury." - Marcus Aurelius, Marcus Aurelius Antoninus Augustus
"Karma is the universal law of cause and effect. You reap what you sow. You get what you earn. You are what you eat. If you give love, you get love. Revenge returns itself upon the avenger. What goes around comes around." - Mary T. Browne
"When we want to give expression to a dramatic situation in our lives, we tend to use metaphors of heaviness. We say that something has become a great burden to us. We either bear the burden or fail and go down with it, we struggle with it, win or lose. And Sabina - what had come over her? Nothing. She had left a man because she felt like leaving him. Had he persecuted her? Had he tried to take revenge on her? No. Her drama was a drama not of heaviness but of lightness. What fell to her lot was not the burden, but the unbearable lightness of being." - Milan Kundera
"Life being what it is, one dreams of revenge — and has to content oneself with dreaming." - Paul Gaugin, fully Eugène Henri Paul Gauguin
"The Marquis De Sade said that the most important experiences a man can have are those that take him to the very limit; that is the only way we learn, because it requires all our courage. When a boss humiliates an employee, or a man humiliates his wife, he is merely being cowardly or taking his revenge on life, they are people who have never dared to look into the depths of their soul, never attempted to know the origin of that desire to unleash the wild beast, or to understand that sex, pain and love are all extreme experiences. Only those who know those frontiers know life; everything else is just passing the time, repeating the same tasks, growing old and dying without ever having discovered what we are doing here. " - Paulo Coelho
"The essence of practice is always the same: instead of falling prey to a chain reaction of revenge or self-hatred, we gradually learn to catch the emotional reaction and drop the story lines." - Pema Chödrön, born Deirdre Blomfield-Brown
"Forget the dead, the past? O yet there are ghosts that may take revenge for it, memories that make the heart a tomb, regrets which gild thro’ the spirit’s gloom, and with ghastly whispers tell that joy, once lost, is pain. " - Percy Bysshe Shelley
"In primitive Buddhism, in primitive Christianity, in the writings of some of the Mussulman teachers, in the early movements of the Reform, and especially in the ethical and philosophical movements of the last century and of our own times, the total abandonment of the idea of revenge, or of "due reward" — of good for good and evil for evil — is affirmed more and more vigorously. The higher conception of "no revenge for wrongs," and of freely giving more than one expects to receive from his neighbors, is proclaimed as being the real principle of morality — a principle superior to mere equivalence, equity, or justice, and more conducive to happiness. And man is appealed to be guided in his acts, not merely by love, which is always personal, or at the best tribal, but by the perception of his oneness with each human being. In the practice of mutual aid, which we can retrace to the earliest beginnings of evolution, we thus find the positive and undoubted origin of our ethical conceptions; and we can affirm that in the ethical progress of man, mutual support — not mutual struggle — has had the leading part. In its wide extension, even at the present time, we also see the best guarantee of a still loftier evolution of our race." - Peter Kropotkin, fully Prince Pyotr Alexeyevich Kropotkin
"Vicious minds abound with anger and revenge are incapable of feeling the pleasure of forgiving their enemies. " - Philip Dormer Stanhope, 4th Earl of Chesterfield
"If a man, notoriously and designedly, insults and affronts you, knock him down; but if he only injures you, your best revenge is to be extremely civil to him in your outward behaviour, though at the same time you counterwork him, and return him the compliment, perhaps with interest." - Philip Dormer Stanhope, 4th Earl of Chesterfield
"To take revenge halfheartedly is to court disaster; either condemn or crown your hatred." - Pierre Cornielle
"Do they not know that no less than one hundred percent of all seriously abused children are unwanted? Do they not know what that can lead to? Do they not know that mistreatment is a parent’s way of taking revenge on the children they never wanted? Shouldn’t the authorities do everything in their power, in the light of this information, to see to it that the only children who are born are wanted, planned for, and loved? If they did, then we could put an end to the creation and continuation of evil in our world." - Alice Miller, née Rostovski
"The following points are intended to amplify my meaning: 1. All children are born to grow, to develop, to live, to love, and to articulate their needs and feelings for their self-protection. 2. For their development, children need to the respect and protection of adults who take them seriously, love them, and honestly help them to become oriented in the world. 3. When these vital needs are frustrated and children are, instead, abused for the sake of the adults' needs by being exploited, beaten, punished, taken advantage of, manipulated neglected, or deceived without the intervention of any witness, then their integrity will be lastingly impaired. 4. The normal reactions to such injury should be anger and pain. Since children in this hurtful kind of environment are forbidden to express their anger, however, and since it would be unbearable to experience their pain all alone, they are compelled to suppress their feelings, repress all memory of the trauma, and idealize those guilty of the abuse. Later they will have no memory of what was done to them. 5. Disassociated from the original cause, their feelings of anger, helplessness, despair, longing, anxiety, and pain will find expression in destructive acts against others (criminal behavior, mass murder) or against themselves (drug addiction, alcoholism, prostitution, psychic disorders, suicide). 6. If these people become parents, they will then often direct acts of revenge for their mistreatment in childhood against their own children, whom they use as scapegoats. Child abuse is still sanctioned -- indeed, held in high regard -- in our society as long as it is defined as child-rearing. It is a tragic fact that parents beat their children in order to escape the emotions from how they were treated by their own parents. 7. If mistreated children are not to become criminals or mentally ill, it is essential that at least once in their life they come in contact with a person who knows without any doubt that the environment, not the helpless, battered child, is at fault. In this regard, knowledge or ignorance on the part of society can be instrumental in either saving or destroying a life. Here lies the great opportunity for relatives, social workers, therapists, teachers, doctors, psychiatrists, officials and nurses to support the child and believe in her or him. 8. Till now, society has protected the adult and blamed the victim. It has been abetted in its blindness by theories, still in keeping with the pedagogical principles of our great-grandparents, according to which children are viewed as crafty creatures, dominated by wicked drives, who invent stories and attack innocent parents or desire them sexually. In reality, children tend to blame themselves for their parents' cruelty and to absolve their parents, whom they invariably love [I would say 'need' - SH] of all responsibility. 9. For some years now, it has been possible to prove, through new therapeutic methods, that repressed traumatic experiences of childhood are stored up in the body and, though unconscious, exert an influence even in adulthood. In addition, electronic testing of the fetus has revealed a fact previously unknown to most adults -- that a child responds to and learns both tenderness and cruelty from the very beginning. 10. In the light of this new knowledge, even the most absurd behavior reveals its formerly hidden logic once the traumatic experiences of childhood need no longer remain shrouded in darkness. 11. Our sensitization to the cruelty with which children are treated, until now commonly denied, and to the consequences of such treatment will as a matter of course bring an end to the perpetuation of violence from generation to generation. 12. People whose integrity has not been damaged in childhood, who were protected, respected, and treated with honesty by their parents, will be -- both in their youth and in adulthood -- intelligent, responsive, empathic and highly sensitive. They will take pleasure in life and will not feel any need to kill or even hurt others or themselves. They will use their power to defend themselves, not to attack others. They will not be able to do otherwise than respect and protect those weaker than themselves, including their own children, because this is what they have learned from their own experience, and because it is this knowledge (and not the experience of cruelty) that has been stored up inside them from the beginning. It will be inconceivable to such people that earlier generations had to build up a gigantic war industry in order to feel comfortable and safe in this world. Since it will not be their unconscious drive in life to ward off intimidation experienced at a very early age, they will be able to deal with attempts at intimidation in their adult life more rationally and creatively." - Alice Miller, née Rostovski
"I will fight against the division politics of revenge and retribution. If you put me to work for you, I will work to lift people up, not put them down." - Hillary Rodham Clinton
"Men are more ready to repay an injury than a benefit, because gratitude is a burden and revenge a pleasure." - Tacitus, fully Publius (or Gaius) Cornelius Tacitus NULL
"It would be impossible to get through the kind of life that I have known without accumulating a vast unused stockpile of rage. Retaliation, though, was a luxury I could never afford. On the physical level I was too feeble. On any other I was not rich enough. I never dared to be rude to anyone. I never knew that I might not need him later. Long after fantasies of sexual excess had ceased to torment me, my imagination was inflamed by lurid day-dreams of having my revenge on the world." - Quentin Crisp, born Denis Charles Pratt
"Slavery is now nowhere more patiently endured, than in countries once inhabited by the zealots of liberty." - Samuel Johnson, aka Doctor Johnson