This site is dedicated to the memory of Dr. Alan William Smolowe who gave birth to the creation of this database.
The presumption of innocence is not just a legal concept. In commonplace terms, it rests on that generosity of spirit which assumes the best, not the worst, of the stranger.
Generosity | Innocence | Presumption | Spirit |
Unlike any other business in the United States, sports must preserve an illusion of perfect innocence. The mounting of this illusion defines the purpose and accounts for the immense wealth of American sports. It is the ceremony of innocence that the fans pay to see -- not the game or the match or the bout, but the ritual portrayal of a world in which time stops and all hope remains plausible, in which everybody present can recover the blameless expectations of a child, where the forces of light always triumph over the powers of darkness.
Business | Ceremony | Hope | Illusion | Innocence | Light | Present | Purpose | Purpose | Time | Wealth | World | Business |
Marcus Aurelius, Marcus Aurelius Antoninus Augustus
Begin each day by telling yourself: Today I shall be meeting with interference, ingratitude, insolence, disloyalty, ill-will, and selfishness – all of them due to the offenders’ ignorance of what is good or evil.
Day | Good | Ignorance | Selfishness |
Martin Tupper, fully Martin Farquhar Tupper
A babe in the house is a well-spring of pleasure, a messenger of peace and love, a resting place for innocence on earth, a link between angels and men.
Meister Eckhart, formally Meister von Hochheim
Through the higher love the whole life of man is to be elevated from temporal selfishness to the spring of all love, to God: man will again be master over nature by abiding in God and lifting her up to God.
God | Life | Life | Love | Man | Nature | Selfishness | Will | God |
Meher Baba, born Merwan Sheriar Irani
Those who cleanse their hearts of the embittering poison of selfishness, hate and greed shall find God as their own true Self. When you find and realize God, the problem of selfishness and its numerous expressions melts away like mist before the sun. In God and as God, all life reveals itself as being really one and indivisible, and all separateness created by identification with human or sub-human forms is seen to be illusory.
Menachem Mendel Schneerson, known as the Lubavitcher Rebbe
Man, by nature, is a selfish creature. Even in his relationships with others he tends to focus primarily on himself or, at most, on his self-colored perception of his fellow. "Love" is the endeavor to transcend this intrinsic selfishness and truly relate to one's fellow, to be sensitive to and devoted to his/her needs as an individual distinct of oneself and one's own stake in the relationship.
Focus | Individual | Perception | Selfishness |
We can surely no longer pretend that our children are growing up into a peaceful, secure, and civilized world. We've come to the point where it's irresponsible to try to protect them from the irrational world they will have to live in when they grow up. The children themselves haven't yet isolated themselves by selfishness and indifference; they do not fall easily into the error of despair; they are considerably braver than most grownups. Our responsibility to them is not to pretend that if we don't look, evil will go away, but to give them weapons against it.
Children | Error | Evil | Responsibility | Selfishness | Weapons | Will | World |
It's innocence when it charms us, ignorance when it doesn't.
Mihaly Csikszentmihalyi, native form is Csíkszentmihályi Mihály
A self that is only differentiated - not integrated - may attain great individual accomplishments, but risks being mired in self-centered egotism. By the same token, a person who self is based exclusively on integration will be well connected and secure, but lack autonomous individuality. Only when a person invests equal amounts of psychic energy in these two processes and avoids both selfishness and conformity is the self likely to relect complexity.
Conformity | Energy | Individual | Integration | Self | Selfishness | Will |
We must never allow the future to be weighed down by memory. For children have no past, and that is the whole secret of the magical innocence of their smiles.
The innocence that feels no risk and is taught no caution, is more vulnerable than guilt, and oftener assailed.
It is to the credit of human nature, that, except where its selfishness is brought into play, it loves more readily than it hates. Hatred, by a gradual and quiet process, will even be transformed to love, unless the change be impeded by a continually new irritation of the original feeling of hostility.
Change | Credit | Quiet | Selfishness | Will |
Ouida, pseudonym of Maria Louise Ramé, preferred to be called Marie Louise de la Ramée NULL
To vice, innocence must always seem only a superior kind of chicanery.
Osho, born Chandra Mohan Jain, also known as Acharya Rajneesh and Bhagwan Shree Rajneesh NULL
D.H. Lawrence was very much against your so-called education — it is not education, it is mis-education. Real education can only be based on love, not on knowledge. Real education cannot be utilitarian, real education cannot be of the marketplace. Not that real education will not give you knowledge; first, real education will prepare your heart, your love, and then whatever knowledge is needed to pass through life will be given to you, but that will be secondary. And it will never be overpowering; it will not be more valuable than love. And whenever there is a possibility of any conflict between love and knowledge, real education will help you to be ready to drop your knowledge and move with your love; it will give you courage, it will give you adventure. It will give you space to live, accepting all risks, insecurities; it will help you to be ready to sacrifice yourself if love demands it. It will put love not only above knowledge but even above life, because life is meaningless without love. Love without life is still meaningful; even if your body dies it makes no difference to your love energy. It continues, it is eternal, it is not a time phenomenon. To have a loving heart, you need a little less calculating head. To be capable of loving you need to be capable of wondering. That’s why, Nur, I always say that awe and childlike innocence are deeply related with the energy called love. In fact they are different names for the same thing.
Awe | Body | Education | Energy | Innocence | Knowledge | Life | Life | Little | Love | Need | Sacrifice | Space | Time | Will |
There are so many kinds of innocence to be lost at the movies. [about the title of her book, I Lost It At The Movies]
Before man can be free, and equal, and truly wise, he must cast aside the chains of habit and superstition; he must strip sensuality of its pomp, and selfishness of its excuses, and contemplate actions and objects as they really are. He will discover the wisdom of universal love; he will feel the meanness and the injustice of sacrificing the reason and the liberty of his fellow-men to the indulgence of his physical appetites, and becoming a party to their degradation by the consummation of his own.
Habit | Indulgence | Injustice | Injustice | Liberty | Man | Meanness | Reason | Selfishness | Sensuality | Will | Wisdom |
In proportion as mankind becomes wise — yes, in exact proportion to that wisdom — should be the extinction of the unequal system under which they now subsist. Government is, in fact, the mere badge of their depravity. They are so little aware of the inestimable benefits of mutual love as to indulge, without thought, and almost without motive, in the worst excesses of selfishness and malice. Hence, without graduating human society into a scale of empire and subjection, its very existence has become impossible. It is necessary that universal benevolence should supersede the regulations of precedent and prescription, before these regulations can safely be abolished. Meanwhile, their very subsistence depends on the system of injustice and violence, which they have been devised to palliate.
Benevolence | Existence | Government | Injustice | Injustice | Little | Love | Mankind | Precedent | Selfishness | Society | System | Wisdom | Wise | Society | Government |
What can innocence hope for when such as sit her judges are corrupted!