This site is dedicated to the memory of Dr. Alan William Smolowe who gave birth to the creation of this database.
Johann Georg Ritter von Zimmermann
The love of solitude, when cultivated in the morn of life, elevates the mind to a noble independence, but to acquire the advantages which solitude is capable of affording, the mind must not be impelled to it by melancholy and discontent, but by a real distaste to the idle pleasures of the world, a rational contempt for the deceitful joys of life, and just apprehensions of being corrupted and seduced by its insinuating and destructive gayeties.
Contempt | Discontent | Life | Life | Love | Melancholy | Mind | Solitude | Wisdom | World |
Rolling Thunder, born Louis Belmont Newell NULL
The idea is to have contempt for crime, not for people… It’s more useful to think of every other person as another you - to think of every individual as a representative of the universe.
If our freedom means ease alone, if it means shirking the hard disciplines of learning, if it means evading the rigors and rewards of creative activity, if it means more expenditure on advertising than education, if it means in the schools the steady cult of the trivial and the mediocre, if it means - worst of all - indifference, or even contempt for all but athletic excellence, we may keep for a time the forms of free society, but its spirit will be dead.
Advertising | Contempt | Cult | Education | Excellence | Freedom | Indifference | Learning | Means | Society | Spirit | Time | Will |
Hatred comes from the heart; contempt from the head; and neither feeling is quite within our control.
Bertrand Russell, fully Bertrand Arthur William Russell, 3rd Earl Russell
From childhood upwards, everything is done to make the minds of men and women conventional and sterile. And if, by misadventure, some spark of imagination remains, its unfortunate possessor is considered unsound and dangerous, worthy only of contempt in time of peace and of prison or a traitor’s death in time of war.
Childhood | Contempt | Death | Imagination | Men | Peace | Prison | Time | Traitor | War |
Seek not proud wealth; but such as thou mayest get justly, use soberly, distribute cheerfully, and leave contently, yet have not any abstract or friarly contempt of it.
There is a principle that is guaranteed to keep man in everlasting ignorance. That principle is contempt prior to investigation.
[On children] Train them to virtue; habituate them to industry, activity, and spirit. Make them consider every vice as shameful and unmanly. Fire them with ambition to be useful. Make them disdain to be destitute of any useful knowledge. Fix their ambition upon great and solid objects, and their contempt upon little, frivolous, and useless ones.
Ambition | Children | Contempt | Disdain | Industry | Knowledge | Little | Spirit | Virtue | Virtue | Ambition | Vice |
Louis D. Brandeis, fully Louis Dembitz Brandeis
Crime is contagious. If the government becomes a lawbreaker, it breeds contempt for law; it invites every man to become a law unto himself; it invites anarchy. To declare that in the administration of the criminal law the end justifies the means – to declare that the government may commit crimes in order to secure the conviction of a private criminal – would bring terrible retribution.
Administration | Anarchy | Contempt | Crime | Government | Law | Man | Means | Order | Government |
Lord Chesterfield, Philip Dormer Stanhope, 4th Earl of Chesterfield
It is often more necessary to conceal contempt than resentment; the former is never forgiven, but the latter is sometimes forgotten.
Contempt | Resentment |
Every heroic act measures itself by its contempt of some external good. But it finds its own success at last, and then the prudent also extol.