This site is dedicated to the memory of Dr. Alan William Smolowe who gave birth to the creation of this database.
Henry Miller, aka Henry Valentine Miller
Develop an interest in life as you see it - the people, things, literature, music. The world is so rich, simply throbbing with rich treasures, beautiful souls, and interesting people. Forget yourself.
Henry Miller, aka Henry Valentine Miller
Develop interest in life as you see it; in people, things, literature, music - the world is so rich, simply throbbing with rich treasures, beautiful souls and interesting people. Forget yourself.
Who are the really disloyal? Those who inflame racial hatreds, who sow religious and class dissensions. those who subvert the Constitution by violating the freedom of the ballot box. Those who make a mockery of majority rule by the use of the filibuster. Those who impair democracy by denying equal educational facilities. Those who frustrate justice by lynch law or by making a farce of jury trials. Those who deny freedom of speech and of the press and of assembly. Those who demand special favors against the interest of the commonwealth. Those who regard public office as a source of private gain. Those who exalt the military over the civil. Those who for selfish and private purposes stir up national antagonisms and expose the world to the ruin of war.
Democracy | Freedom of speech | Freedom | Justice | Law | Majority | Mockery | Office | Public | Regard | Rule | Speech | Trials | War | World |
The beautiful is what pleases in the mere judgment (and therefore not by the medium of sensation in accordance with a concept of the understanding). It follows at once from this that it must please apart from all interest. The sublime is what pleases immediately through its opposition to the interest of sense.
Judgment | Opposition | Sense | Understanding |
Indira Gandhi, fully Indirā Priyadarśinī Gāndhī
Whenever you take a step forward, you are bound to disturb the air as you go forward you disturb the dust, the ground. You trample upon things. When whole society moves forward, this trampling is on a much bigger scale; and each thing that you disturb, each vested interest which you want to remove, stands as an obstacle.
I regard utility as the ultimate appeal on all ethical questions; but it must be utility in the largest sense, grounded on the permanent interests of man as a progressive being. Those interests, I contend, authorize the subjection of individual spontaneity to external control only in respect to those actions of each which concern the interest of other people.
Control | Individual | Man | People | Regard | Respect | Sense | Respect |
He who can take no interest in what is small will take false interest in what is great.
Will |
Conscience and self-love, if we understand our true happiness, always lead us the same way. Duty and interest are perfectly coincident; for the most part in this world, but entirely and in every instance if we take in the future, and the whole; this being implied in the notion of a good and perfect administration of things.
Administration | Conscience | Duty | Future | Good | Love | Self | Self-love | World | Understand |
The progressive principle is antagonistic to the sway of custom. The contest between these two principles, custom and progress, constitutes the chief interest of the history of mankind.
Custom | History | Mankind | Principles | Progress |
One of the greatest dangers... of democracy, as of all other forms of government, lies in the sinister interest of the holders of power: it is the danger of class legislation; of government intended for (whether really effecting it or not) the immediate benefit of the dominant class, to the lasting detriment of the whole. And one of the most important questions demanding consideration, in determining the best constitution of a representative government, is how to provide efficacious securities against this evil.
Consideration | Danger | Democracy | Evil | Government | Important | Power | Government | Danger |
Maltbie Babcock, fully Maltbie Davenport Babcock
Many men fail to realize that joy is distinctly moral. It is a fruit of the spiritual life. We have no more right to pray for joy, if we are not doing the things that Jesus said would bring it, than we would have to ask interest in a savings bank in which we had never deposited money. Joy does not happen. It is a flower that springs from roots. It is the inevitable results of certain lines followed and laws obeyed, and so a matter of character.
Character | Inevitable | Joy | Life | Life | Men | Money | Right |
Cicero, fully Marcus Tullius Cicero, anglicized as Tully NULL
For not only is Fortune herself blind, but she generally causes those men to be blind whose interest she has more particularly embraced. Therefore they are often haughty and arrogant; nor is there anything more intolerable than a prosperous fool. And hence we often see that men who were at one time affable and agreeable are completely changed by prosperity, despising their old friends, and clinging to the new.
Fortune | Men | Prosperity | Time | Old |
Maurice Sendak, fully Maurice Bernard Sendak
You cannot write for children. They're much too complicated. You can only write books that are of interest to them.
Noah Webster, fully Noah Webster, Jr.
It is alleged by men of loose principles, or defective views of the subject, that religion and morality are not necessary or important qualifications for political station. When a citizen gives his vote to a man of immorality, he abuses his civic responsibility. He sacrifices not only his own interest but that of his neighbor, and he betrays the interest of his country.
Important | Man | Men | Morality | Principles | Religion | Responsibility |
When men have realized that time has upset many fighting faiths, they may come to believe even more than they believe the very foundations of their own conduct that the ultimate good desired is better reached by free trade in ideas - that the best test of truth is the power of the thought to get itself accepted in the competition of the market, and that truth is the only ground upon which their wishes safely can be carried out.
Better | Competition | Conduct | Fighting | Good | Ideas | Men | Power | Thought | Time | Truth | Wishes | Thought |
Just because you do not take an interest in politics doesn't mean politics won't take an interest in you!
Politics |
Ruth Benedict, born Ruth Fulton
The happiest excitement in life is to be convinced that one is fighting for all one is worth on behalf of some clearly seen and deeply felt good.