This site is dedicated to the memory of Dr. Alan William Smolowe who gave birth to the creation of this database.
Were the judgments of mankind correct, custom would be regulated by the good. But it is often far otherwise in point of fact; for, whatever the many are seen to do, forthwith obtains the force of custom. But human affairs have scarcely ever been so happily constituted as that the better course pleased the greater number. Hence the private vices of the multitude have generally resulted in public error, or rather that common consent in vice which these worthy men would have to be law.
Loud indignation against vice often stands for virtue with bigots.
Indignation | Virtue | Virtue | Vice |
Slander is perhaps the only vice which no circumstance can palliate, as well as being one which we are most ingenious in concealing from ourselves.
Circumstance | Vice |
Content thyself to be obscurely good. When vice prevails and impious men bear away, The post of honor is a private station.
The non-spatial nature of consciousness makes it possible for any apparently unconscious entity to be conscious, and vice versa.
Consciousness | Nature | Vice |
The common vice of democracy is disregard for morality.
People must learn that the accumulation of wealth by the successful conduct of business is the corollary of the improvement of their own standard of living and vice versa. They must realize that bigness in business is not an evil, but both the cause and effect of the fact that they themselves enjoy all those amenities whose enjoyment is called the “American way of life.
Business | Cause | Enjoyment | Improvement | Wealth | Business | Learn | Vice |
The happiness and unhappiness of the rational, social animal depends not on what he feels but on what he does; just as his virtue and vice consist not in feeling but in doing.
Unhappiness | Virtue | Virtue | Happiness | Vice |
Happiness lies neither in vice nor in virtue; but in the manner we appreciate the one and the other, and the choice we make pursuant to our individual organization.
Choice | Individual | Vice |
I would not be surprised to learn that some branch of our government conspired either actively to promote or passively to allow the attack on 9/11. For those who watched the reactionary political uses made of this tragedy, it’s easy to conjure up a variety of possible conspiratorial motives that would have led the president, the vice president, or some branch of the armed forces or CIA or FBI or other “security” forces to have passively or actively participated in a plot to re-credit militarism and war.
Government | Motives | Government | Learn | Vice |
Covetousness is both the beginning and the end of the devil's alphabet; the first vice in corrupt nature that moves, and the last which dies.
Curiosity is a vice that has been stigmatized in turn by Christianity, by philosophy and even by a certain conception of science. Curiosity, futility. I like the the word however. To me it suggests something altogether different: it evokes "concern"; it evokes the care one takes for what exists and could exist; an acute sense of the real which, however, never becomes fixed; a readiness to find our surroundings strange and singular; a certain relentlessness in ridding ourselves of our familiarities and looking at things otherwise; a passion for seizing what is happening now and what is passing away; a lack of respect for traditional hierarchies of the important and the essential.
Care | Important | Passion | Philosophy | Respect | Sense | Respect | Vice |
Where the state begins, individual liberty ceases, and vice versa.
Individual | Liberty | Vice |
Even the most wretched individual of our present society could not exist and develop without the cumulative social efforts of countless generations. Thus the individual, his freedom and reason, are the products of society, and not vice versa: society is not the product of individuals comprising it; and the higher, the more fully the individual is developed, the greater his freedom — and the more he is the product of society, the more does he receive from society and the greater his debt to it.
Debt | Freedom | Individual | Present | Receive | Society | Society | Vice |
Abuse nobody, and if a man abuse thee, and lay upon a vice which he knoweth in thee then do not disclose one which thou knowest in him.