This site is dedicated to the memory of Dr. Alan William Smolowe who gave birth to the creation of this database.
What is in reality cowardice and faithlessness, we call charity, and consider it the part of benevolence sometimes to forgive men’s evil practice for the sake of their accurate faith, and sometimes to forgive their confessed heresy for the sake of their admirable practice.
Benevolence | Charity | Cowardice | Evil | Faith | Men | Practice | Reality | Forgive |
An evil intention perverts the best actions, and makes them sins.
The most cogent reason for restricting the interference of government is the great evil of adding unnecessarily to its power.
Evil | Government | Power | Reason | Government |
When you are a man, you are in the field of time and decisions. One of the problems of life is to live with the realization of both terms, to say, "I know the center, and I know that good and evil are simply temporal aberrations and that, in God's view, there is no difference."
Louis D. Brandeis, fully Louis Dembitz Brandeis
No danger flowing from speech can be deemed clear and present, unless the incidence of the evil apprehended is so imminent that it may befall before there is opportunity for full discussion. If there be time to expose through discussion the falsehood and fallacies, to avert the evil by the process of education, the remedy to be applied is more speech, not enforced silence.
Danger | Discussion | Education | Evil | Falsehood | Opportunity | Present | Silence | Speech | Time | Danger |
What is evil but good tortured by its own hunger and thirst?
Maimonides, given name Moses ben Maimon or Moshe ben Maimon, known as "Rambam" NULL
There are eight degrees in almsgiving… Supreme above all is to give assistance to a fellow man who has fallen on evil times by presenting him with a gift or loan, or entering into a partnership with him, or procuring him work, thereby helping him to become self-supporting. Next best is giving alms in such a way that the giver and recipient are unknown to each other. This is, indeed, the performance of a commandment from disinterested motives.
Cicero, fully Marcus Tullius Cicero, anglicized as Tully NULL
Every evil in the bud is easily crushed; as it grows older it becomes stronger.
Evil |
Marcel Proust, fully Valentin Louis Georges Eugène Marcel Proust
We do not receive wisdom, we must discover it for ourselves, after a journey through the wilderness which no one else can make for us, which no one can spare us, for our wisdom is the point of view from which we come at last to regard the world. The lives that you admire, the attitudes that seem noble to you, have not been shaped by a paterfamilias or a schoolmaster, they have sprung from very different beginnings, having been influenced by evil or commonplace that prevailed round them. They represent a struggle and a victory.
It may be necessary temporarily to accept a lesser evil, but one must never label a necessary evil as good.
Cicero, fully Marcus Tullius Cicero, anglicized as Tully NULL
The most learned men have told us that only the wise man is free. What is freedom but the ability to live as one will? The man who lives as he wills is none other than the one who strives for the right, who does his duty, who plans his life with forethought, and who obeys the laws because he knows it is good for him, and not out of fear. Everything he says, does, or thinks is spontaneous and free. His tasks and conduct begin and end in himself, because nothing has so much influence over him as his own counsel and decision. Even the supreme power of fortune is submissive to him. The wise poet has reminded us that fortune is molded for each man by the manner of his life. Only the wise man does nothing against his will, or with regret and by compulsion. Thought this truth deserves to be discussed at greater length, it is nevertheless proverbial that no one is free except the wise. Evil men are nothing but slaves.
Ability | Conduct | Counsel | Decision | Duty | Evil | Fear | Forethought | Fortune | Freedom | Good | Influence | Life | Life | Man | Men | Nothing | Power | Regret | Right | Thought | Truth | Will | Wills | Wise | Counsel | Thought |
Natural law is a practical first principle in the sphere of morality; it forbids evil and commands good. Positive law is a decision that takes circumstances into account and conforms with natural law on credible grounds. The basis of natural law is God, who has created this light, but the basis of positive law is civil authority.
Authority | Circumstances | Decision | Evil | God | Good | Law | Light | Morality |
Mencius, born Meng Ke or Ko NULL
The evil of men is that they like to be teachers of others.
Man's great guilt does not lie in the sins he commits, for temptation is great and his strength is limited. Man's great guilt lies in the fact that he can turn away from evil at any moment, and yet he does not.
Evil | Guilt | Man | Strength | Temptation | Temptation |
The great man is powerful, involuntarily and composedly powerful, but he is not avid for power. What he is avid for is the realization of what he has in mind, the incarnation of the spirit. So long as a man's power is bound to the goal, the work, the calling, it is, in itself, neither good nor evil, only a suitable or unsuitable instrument. But as soon as this bond with the goal is broken off or loosened, and the man ceases to think of power as the capacity to do something, but thinks of it as a possession, then his power, being cut off and self-satisfied, is evil and corrupts the history of the world.
Capacity | Evil | Good | History | Man | Mind | Power | Self | Spirit | Work | World | Think |