This site is dedicated to the memory of Dr. Alan William Smolowe who gave birth to the creation of this database.
Andrew Newberg and Mark Robert Waldman
Human morality is composed of four interconnecting principles: a genetic predisposition toward survival, the neural development of the brain, a social imperative toward group cohesion, and a cognitive propensity to make distinctions between right and wrong and good and evil. Our moral continuum appears to be strongly influenced by the degrees of connectedness we feel with others; the more connected we feel, the more we act with generosity, compassion and fairness.
Compassion | Evil | Fairness | Generosity | Good | Morality | Principles | Right | Survival | Wrong |
One hundred volumes of international law are not the equal of a few cannons; a handful of treaties are not worth a basket of gunpowder. Cannon and gunpowder are not aids for the enforcement of given moral principles, they are implements for the creation of morality where none exists.
Law | Morality | Principles | Worth |
The most powerful lessons about ethics and morality do not come from school discussions or classes in character-building. They come from family life where people treat one another with respect, consideration, and love.
Character | Consideration | Ethics | Family | Life | Life | Love | Morality | People | Respect |
All systems of morality are based on the idea that an action has consequences that legitimize or cancel it. A mind imbued with the absurd merely judges that those consequences must be considered calmly.
Absurd | Action | Consequences | Mind | Morality |
Men are more accountable for their motives, than for anything else; and primarily, morality consists in the motives, that is in the affections.
Bertrand Russell, fully Bertrand Arthur William Russell, 3rd Earl Russell
We have… two kinds of morality side by side: one which we preach, but do not practice, and another which we practice but seldom preach.
As one whose husband and mother-in-law have both died the victims of murder assassination, I stand firmly and unequivocally opposed to the death penalty for those convicted of capital offenses. An evil deed is not redeemed by an evil deed of retaliation. Justice is never advanced in the taking of a human life. Morality is never upheld by legalized murder.
Death | Evil | Husband | Justice | Law | Life | Life | Morality | Mother | Murder | Retaliation | Murder |
Our laws make law impossible; our liberties destroy all freedom; our property is organized robbery; our morality an impudent hypocrisy; our wisdom is administered by inexperienced or mal-experienced dupes; our power wielded by cowards and weaklings; and our honor false in all its points. I am an enemy of the existing order for good reasons.
Destroy | Enemy | Freedom | Good | Honor | Hypocrisy | Law | Morality | Order | Power | Property | Wisdom |
“Self-government” is primarily a personal morality in America, not a political philosophy... Thus does our individualism reduce social problems, always, to the level of private morality, to things outside the scope of legislation.
Government | Morality | Philosophy | Problems | Self |
Georg Hegel, fully Georg Wilhelm Friedrich Hegel
Passions, private aims, and the satisfaction of selfish desires, are… most effective springs of action. Their power lies in the fact that they would respect none of the limitations which justice and morality would impose on them; and [they] have a more direct influence over man than the artificial and tedious discipline that tends to order and self-restraint, law and morality.
Action | Aims | Discipline | Influence | Justice | Law | Man | Morality | Order | Power | Respect | Restraint | Self | Respect |