This site is dedicated to the memory of Dr. Alan William Smolowe who gave birth to the creation of this database.
"Children should be led to make their own investigations and to draw their own inferences. They should be told as little as possible and induced to discover as much as possible. Humanity has progressed solely by self-instruction… If the subjects be put before him in right order and right form, any pupil of ordinary capacity will surmount his successive difficulties with but little assistance." - Herbert Spencer
"A house without books is like a room without windows. No man has a right to bring up his children without surrounding them with books, if he has the means to buy them. It is a wrong to his family. Children learn to read by being in the presence of books. The love of knowledge comes with reading and grows upon it. And the love of knowledge, in a young mind, is almost a warrant against the inferior excitement of passions and vices." - Horace Mann
"It is very questionable, in my mind, how far we have the right to judge one of another, since there is born within every man the germs of both virtue and vice. The development of one or the other is contingent upon circumstances." - Hosea Ballou
"Suspicion is far more apt to be wrong than right; oftener unjust than just. It is no friend to virtue, and always an enemy to happiness." - Hosea Ballou
"Suspicion is far more apt to be wrong than right is oftener unjust than just. It is no friend to virtue, and always an enemy to happiness." - Hosea Ballou
"It is not enough to do what is right, but we should practice it solely on the ground of its being right." - Immanuel Kant
"Right... comprehends the whole of the conditions under which the voluntary actions of any one person can be harmonized in reality with the voluntary actions of every other person, according to a universal law of freedom." - Immanuel Kant
"The determination of what constitutes right in war, is the most difficult problem of the right of nations and international law. It is very difficult even to form a conception of such a right, or to think of any law in this lawless state without falling into a contradiction." - Immanuel Kant
"It is not right for men to seek happiness or wish to be happy, rather they should wish so to conduct their lives that they deserve to be happy." - Immanuel Kant
"Without courage, you cannot practice any other virtue. You have to have courage – courage of different kinds: first, intellectual courage, to sort out different values and make up your mind about which is the one which is right for you to follow. You have to have moral courage to stick up to that – no matter what comes in your way, no matter what the obstacle and the opposition is." - Indira Gandhi, fully Indirā Priyadarśinī Gāndhī
"Never let your sense of morals keep you from doing what is right." - Isaac Asimov, born Isaak Yudovich Ozimov
"Kind words toward those you daily meet, kind words and actions right, will make this life of our most sweet, turn darkness into light." - Isaac Watts
"We are right to take alarm at the first experiment upon our liberties." - James Madison
"Science does not have appropriate tools for the dissection of the spirit. How sad it would be, I thought, if we humans ultimately were to lose all sense of mystery, all sense of awe, if our left brains were utterly to dominate the right so that logic and reason triumphed over intuition and alienated us absolutely from our innermost being, from our hearts, from our souls." - Jane Goodall, fully Dame Jane Morris Goodall, born Valerie Jane Morris-Goodall
"Nature has placed mankind under the government of two sovereign masters, pain and pleasure. It is for them to point out what we ought to do, as well as to determine what we shall do. On the one hand, the standard of right, and wrong; on the other, the chain of causes and effects, are fastened to their throne." - Jeremy Bentham
"He who thinks and thinks for himself will always have a claim to thanks; it is no matter whether it be right or wrong, so as it be explicit. If is right, it will serve as a guide to direct; if wrong, as a beacon to warn." - Jeremy Bentham
"I recognize, as the all-comprehensive, and only right and proper end of Government, the greatest happiness of the members of the community in question: the greatest happiness - of all of them, without exception , in so far as possible.: the greatest happiness of the greatest number of them..." - Jeremy Bentham
"Nature has placed mankind under the governance of two sovereign asters, pain and pleasure. It is for them alone to point out what we ought to do, as well as to determine what we shall do. On the one hand the standard of right and wrong, on the other the chain of causes and effects, are fastened to their throne. They govern us in all we do, in all we say, in all we think: every effort we can make to throw off our subjection will serve but to demonstrate and confirm it. In words a man may pretend to abjure their empire: but in reality he will remain subject to it all the while. The principle of utility recognizes this subjection, and assumes it for the foundation of that system, the object of which is to rear the fabric of felicity by the hands of reason and law. Systems which attempt to question it deal in sounds instead of sense, in caprice instead of reason, in darkness instead of light." - Jeremy Bentham
"Extremity of right is wrong... extremity of law is extremity of wrong." - John Clarke
"Set the saddle on the right horse." - John Clarke
"I believe that love is the greatest thing in the world; that it alone can overcome hate; that right can and will triumph over might." - John Davison Rockefeller, Jr.
"Reason is our soul’s left hand, faith her right; by these we reach divinity." - John Donne
"Good sense and good-nature are never separated, though the ignorant world has thought otherwise. Good-nature by which I mean beneficence and candor, is the product of right reason." - John Dryden
"The bigot sees religion, not as a sphere, but a line; and it is the line in which he is moving. He is like as African buffalo - sees right forward, but nothing on the right or the left. He would not perceive a legion of angels or devils at the distance of ten yards, on the one side or the other." - John Foster, fully John Watson Foster
"In any great organization it is far, far safer to be wrong with the majority than to be right alone." - John Kenneth Galbraith, aka "Ken"
"Ofttimes nothing profits more than self-esteem, grounded on just and right well managed." - John Milton
"Life is probation: mortal man was made to solve the solemn problem - right or wrong." - John Quincy Adams
"Justice is the first virtue of social institutions, as truth is of systems of thought. A theory however elegant and economical must be rejected or revised if it is untrue; likewise laws and institutions no matter how efficient and well-arranged must be reformed or abolished if they are unjust. Each person possesses an inviolability founded on justice that even the welfare of society as a whole cannot override. For this reason justice denies that the loss of freedom for some is made right by a greater good shared by others. It does not allow that the sacrifices imposed on a few are outweighed by the larger sum of advantages enjoyed by many. Therefore in a just society the liberties of equal citizenship are taken as settled; the rights secured by justice are not subject to political bargaining or to the calculus of social interests." - John Rawls, fully John Bordley Rawls
"The entire object of true education is to make people not merely do the right thing, but enjoy the right things; not merely industrious, but to love industry; not merely learned, but to love knowledge; not merely pure, but to love purity; not merely just, but to hunger and thirst after justice." - John Ruskin
"As unity demanded for its expression what at first might have seemed its opposite - variety; so repose demands for its expression the implied capability of its opposite - energy. It is not the most unfailing test of beauty; nothing can be ignoble that possesses it, nothing right that has it not." - John Ruskin
"Actions are right in proportion as they tend to promote happiness; wrong as they tend to produce the reverse of happiness." - John Stuart Mill
"The creed which accepts as the foundation of morals, utility, or the Great Happiness Principle, holds that actions are right in proportion as they tend to promote happiness, wrong as they tend to produce the reverse of happiness... Pleasure and freedom from pain, are the only things desirable as ends." - John Stuart Mill
"Whatever crushes individuality is despotism... I am not aware that any community has a right to force another to be civilized." - John Stuart Mill
"Customs are made for customary circumstances; even in what people do for pleasure, conformity is the first thing thought of; they live in crowds: they exercise choice only among things commonly done: peculiarity of taste, eccentricity of conduct, are shunned equally with crimes: until by dint of not following their own nature they have not nature to follow. Whatever crushes individuality is despotism. [And] I am not aware that any community has a right to force another to be civilized." - John Stuart Mill
"Some glances of real beauty may be seen in their faces who dwell in true meekness. There is a harmony in the sound of that voice to which divine love gives utterance, and some appearance of right order in their temper and conduct whose passions are regulated." - John Woolman
"A man of a right spirit is not a man of narrow and private views, but is greatly interested and concerned for the good of the community to which he belongs, and particularly of the city or village in which he resides, and for the true welfare of the society of which he is a member." - Jonathan Edwards
"Human beings are perhaps never more frightening than when they are convinced beyond doubt that they are right." - Joseph Addison
"The elementary idea, likewise, of the Promised Land cannot originally have referred to a part of this earth to be conquered by military right, but to a place of spiritual peace in the heart, to be discovered through contemplation." - Joseph Campbell
"Something has clearly gone awry when students at prestigious institutions of higher learning cannot bring themselves to denounce Auschwitz and Treblinka. Too many Americans now shrink from appearing "judgmental" or "moralistic" - the very words themselves are now used only as pejoratives. The prevailing attitude is: "Who's to say what's right or wrong?"" - Joseph Jacobs
"If men were stubborn just in proportion as they were right, stubbornness would take her seat among the virtues; but men are generally stubborn just in proportion as they are ignorant and wrong." - Josh Billings, pen name for Henry Wheeler Shaw, aka Uncle Esek
"Unlike Hinduism and most Western ethics, Buddhism is nonhierarchical, emphasizing oneness and the interrelatedness and moral value of all living beings. Right living, therefore, includes compassion and an attitude of nonviolence toward all of nature." - Judith A. Boss
"In the social production of their existence, human beings necessarily enter into determinate relations, independent of their will, relations of production, corresponding to a given stage of development of their material productive powers. The totality of these relations of production constitutes the economic structure of society, the real foundation on which rises a legal and political superstructure and tow which correspond determinate forms of social consciousness. the mode of production of material life conditions the general process of social, political and spiritual life. It is not the consciousness of human beings which determines their existence, but their social existence determines their consciousness. At a certain stage of development, the material productive powers of society come into conflict with the existing relations of production or - this merely expresses the same things in terms of right - with the property relations in the framework of which they have thus far operated. From forms of development of the productive powers these relations turn into their fetters. Then begins an era of social revolution. The changes in the economic foundation lead sooner or later to the transformation of the whole immense superstructure." - Karl Marx
"Those who insist that mystical experience is not specifically different from the ordinary life of grace (as such) are certainly right." - Karl Rahner
"A fellow who won't do a favor has no right to ask for one." - Latin Proverbs
"Human beings are perhaps never more frightening than when they are convinced beyond doubt that they are right." - Laurens van der Post
"I am speaking of religion as belief colored with emotion, an elemental sense of piety or reverence for life summing up man's certainty as to what is right and noble." - Lin Yutang
"The right to be alone - the most comprehensive of rights, and the right most valued by civilized man." - Louis D. Brandeis, fully Louis Dembitz Brandeis
"The right to be let alone is the most comprehensive of rights, and the right most valued by civilized man." - Louis D. Brandeis, fully Louis Dembitz Brandeis