This site is dedicated to the memory of Dr. Alan William Smolowe who gave birth to the creation of this database.
This is the punishment of a liar: He is not believed, even when he speaks the truth.
Punishment | Truth | Wisdom |
One day when famine had wrought great misery in Russia a beggar, weak, emaciated, all but starved to death, asked for alms. Tolstoy searched his pockets for a coin but discovered that he was without as much as a copper piece. Taking the beggar's worn hands between his own, he said: "Do not be angry with me brother; I have nothing with me." The thin, lined face of the beggar became illumined as from some inner light, and he whispered in reply: "But you called me brother - that was a great gift."
The teaching of any science, for purposes of liberal education, without linking it with social progress and teaching its social significance, is a crime against the student mind. It is like teaching a child how to pronounce words but now what they mean.
Crime | Education | Mind | Progress | Science | Wisdom | Words | Child |
It is by attempting to reach the top at a single leap that so much misery is produced in the world.
John W. Daniel, fully John Warwick Daniel
By adversity are wrought the greatest works of admiration, and all the fair examples of renown, out of distress and misery are grown.
Admiration | Adversity | Distress | Wisdom |
Agatha Christie, fully Dame Agatha Miller Christie
To say that every crime brings its own punishment is by way of being a platitude, and yet in my opinion nothing can be truer.
Crime | Nothing | Opinion | Punishment | Wisdom |
The object of punishment is threefold: for just retribution; for the protection of society; for the reformation of the offender.
Object | Punishment | Society | Wisdom |
Fyodor Dostoevsky, fully Fyodor Mikhaylovich Dostoevsky or Feodor Mikhailovich Dostoevski
So long as man remains free he strives for nothing so incessantly and so painfully as to find someone to worship. But man seeks to worship what is established beyond dispute, so that all men would agree at once to worship it. For these pitiful creatures are concerned not only to find what one or the other can worship, but to find something that all would believe and worship; what is essential is that all may be together in it. This craving for community of worship is the chief misery of every man individually and of all humanity form the beginning of time. For the sake of common worship they’ve slain each other with the sword. They have set up gods and challenged one another, “Put away your gods and come and worship ours, or we will kill you and your gods!”
Beginning | Dispute | Humanity | Kill | Man | Men | Nothing | Time | Will | Wisdom | Worship |
Capital punishment is as fundamentally wrong as a cure for crime as charity is wrong as a cure for poverty.
Capital punishment | Charity | Crime | Poverty | Punishment | Wisdom | Wrong |
Abbie Hoffman, fully Abbot Howard "Abbie" Hoffman
It’s universally wrong to steal from your neighbor, but once you get the one-to-one level, and pit the individual against the multinational conglomerate, the federal bureaucracy, the modern plantation of agro-business, or the utility company, it becomes strictly a value judgment to decide exactly who is stealing from whom. One person’s crime is another person’s profit. Capitalism is license to steal; the government simply regulates who steals and how much.
Business | Capitalism | Crime | Government | Individual | Judgment | Wisdom | Wrong | Government | Value |
Leisure is the mother of philosophy... The source of every crime , is some defect of the understanding; or some error in reasoning; or some sudden force of the passions... And the life of man, solitary, poor, nasty, brutish and short.
Crime | Error | Force | Leisure | Life | Life | Man | Mother | Philosophy | Understanding | Wisdom |
War is as much a punishment to the punisher as to the sufferer.
Punishment | War | Wisdom |
I hold it that a little rebellion now and then is a good thing, and as necessary in the political world as storms in the physical. Unsuccessful rebellions, indeed, generally establish the encroachments on the rights of the people which have produced them. An observation of this truth should render honest republican governors so mild in the punishment of rebellions as not to discourage them too much. It is a medicine necessary for the sound health of government.
Good | Government | Health | Little | Observation | People | Punishment | Rebellion | Rights | Sound | Truth | Wisdom | World |