This site is dedicated to the memory of Dr. Alan William Smolowe who gave birth to the creation of this database.
There is no vice in nature more debasing and destructive to men than intemperance. It robs them of their reason, reputation, and interest. It renders them unfit for human society. It degrades them below the beasts that perish, and justly exposes them to universal odium and contempt.
Osho, born Chandra Mohan Jain, also known as Acharya Rajneesh and Bhagwan Shree Rajneesh NULL
But nobody’s approval can make anything real. Even if the whole world denies your enlightenment you will still be enlightened, there will be no difference. Or vice versa: even if the whole world approves your enlightenment and you are not enlightened, all that approval is not going to make you enlightened.
Enlightenment | Will | World | Approval | Vice |
Pamela Oliver and Gerald Maxwell
Our central thesis is that technologies for mobilizing resources impose tight constraints on the forms of action that are possible. Once a person or group is using one technology, it is not easy to switch to another. Groups that are structured to raise money are not well structured to mobilize volunteers, and vice versa. Raising money through direct mail tends to concentrate power in a central national office, while raising money through canvassing creates large cadre of canvassers in local areas who need to be managed and motivated. Volunteers mobilized for a protest demonstration are not usually available for volunteer fund-raising
The question that continues to reverberate to this day is whether human rights trump the rights of business, or vice versa, a conflict that has been ongoing for more than three hundred years... From an economic viewpoint, what citizens have been trying to do for two hundred years is to force business to pay full freight, to internalize their costs to society instead of externalizing them onto a river, a town, a single patient, or a whole generation.
Business | Day | Force | Question | Rights | Society | Society | Business | Vice |
Nature rejects the monarch, not the man; The subject, not the citizen; for kings And subjects, mutual foes, forever play A losing game into each other's hands, Whose stakes are vice and misery. The man Of virtuous soul commands not, nor obeys. Power, like a desolating pestilence, Pollutes whate'er it touches; and obedience, Bane of all genius, virtue, freedom, truth, Makes slaves of men, and of the human frame A mechanized automaton.
Philip Dormer Stanhope, 4th Earl of Chesterfield
The sure characteristic of a sound and strong mind is, to find, in everything, those certain bounds, quos ultra citrave nequit consistere rectum. These boundaries are marked out by a very fine line, which only good sense and attention can discover; it is much too fine for vulgar eyes. In manners, this line is good breeding; beyond it, is troublesome ceremony; short of it, is unbecoming negligence and inattention. In morals, it divides ostentatious Puritanism from criminal relaxation; in religion, superstition from impiety; and, in short, every virtue from its kindred vice or weakness.
Attention | Good | Mind | Sense | Sound | Superstition | Virtue | Virtue | Vice |
Virtue, thou in rags, may challenge more than vice set off with all the trim of greatness.
Thus, communism violates the sovereignty of the conscience, and equality: the first, by restricting spontaneity of mind and heart, and freedom of thought and action; the second, by placing labor and laziness, skill and stupidity, and even vice and virtue on an equality in point of comfort. For the rest, if property is impossible on account of the desire to accumulate, communism would soon become so through the desire to shirk.
Desire | Equality | Freedom of thought | Freedom | Labor | Mind | Property | Skill | Thought | Virtue | Virtue | Thought | Vice |
Tacitus, fully Publius (or Gaius) Cornelius Tacitus NULL
There will be vice as long as there are men.
Pythagoras, aka Pythagoras of Samos or Pythagoras the Samian NULL
A conversation should be conducted so that your conversational partners transform themselves from your enemies into your friends and not vice versa.
Conversation | Friends | Vice |
Richard Cumberland, Bishop of Peterborough
What is so hateful to a poor man as the purse-proud arrogance of a rich one? Let fortune shift the scene, and make the poor man rich, he runs at once into the vice that he declaimed against so feelingly; these are strange contradictions in the human character.
This country is run by a war criminal and his vice president, an even bigger war criminal.
Inasmuch as often in this life greater rewards are offered for vice than for virtue, few people would prefer the right to the useful, were they restrained neither by the fear of God nor the expectation of another life.
Expectation | Fear | God | Life | Life | People | Right | God | Expectation | Vice |
Such biological ideas as the 'survival of the fittest,' whatever their doubtful value in natural science, are utterly useless in attempting to understand society... The life of a man in society, while it is incidentally a biological fact, has characteristics that are not reducible to biology and must be explained in the distinctive terms of a cultural analysis... the physical well-being of men is a result of their social organization and not vice versa ... Social improvement is a product of advances in technology and social organization, not of breeding or selective elimination... Judgments as to the value of competition between men or enterprises or nations must be based upon social and not allegedly biological consequences; and ... there is nothing in nature or a naturalistic philosophy of life to make impossible the acceptance of moral sanctions that can be employed for the common good.
Acceptance | Competition | Ideas | Improvement | Life | Life | Man | Men | Nations | Nature | Nothing | Organization | Philosophy | Technology | Understand | Value | Vice |
Richard Feynman, fully Richard Phillips Feynman
You can't say A is made of B or vice versa. All mass is interaction.
Vice |
Robert Byrd, fully Robert Carlyle Byrd
The mission in Iraq, as laid out by President Bush and Vice President Cheney, has failed.