This site is dedicated to the memory of Dr. Alan William Smolowe who gave birth to the creation of this database.
There is no right without parallel duty, no liberty without the supremacy of the law, no high destiny without earnest perseverance, no greatness without self-denial.
Character | Destiny | Duty | Greatness | Law | Liberty | Perseverance | Right | Self | Self-denial |
James Mackintosh, fully Sir James Mackintosh
It is right to be contented with what we have, never with what we are.
We are not asking our children to do their own best but to be the best. Education is in danger of becoming a religion based on fear; its doctrine is to compete. The majority of our children are being led to believe that they are doomed to failure in a world which has room only for those at the top.
Character | Children | Danger | Doctrine | Education | Failure | Fear | Majority | Religion | World | Danger | Failure |
Madmen... do not appear to me to have lost the faculty of reasoning, but having joined together some ideas very wrongly, they mistake them for truths; and they err as men do that argue right from wrong principles. For, by the violence of their imaginations, having taken their fancies for realities, they make right deductions from them.
Character | Ideas | Men | Mistake | Principles | Right | Wrong |
James Mackintosh, fully Sir James Mackintosh
Selfishness is a vice utterly at variance with the happiness of him who harbors it, and as such, condemned by self-love.
Character | Love | Self | Selfishness | Self-love | Happiness | Vice |
Man is in his actions and practice, as well as in his fictions, essentially a story-telling animal. He is not essentially, but becomes through is history, a teller of stories that aspire to truth. But the key question for men is not about their own authorship; I can only answer the question ‘What am I to do?’ if I can answer the prior question, ‘Of what story or stories do I find myself a part?’ We enter human society, that is, with one or more imputed characters - roles into which we have been drafted - and we have to learn what they are in order to be able to understand how others respond to us and how our responses to them are a part to be construed... Deprive children of stories and you leave them unscripted, anxious strutters in their actions as in their words. Hence there is no way to give us an understanding of any society, including our own, except through the stock of stories which constitute its initial dramatic resource. Mythology, in its original sense, is at the heart of things. Vico was right and so was Joyce. And so too of course is that moral tradition fro heroic society to its medieval heirs according to which the telling of stories has a key part in educating us into the virtues.
Character | Children | Heart | History | Man | Men | Order | Practice | Question | Right | Sense | Society | Story | Tradition | Truth | Understanding | Words | Society | Learn | Understand |
John E. Large, fully John Ellis Large
Social security depends on personal security. And personal security depends on spiritual security. Spiritual security is primary, in the sense that every other kind of security stems from it. Without spiritual security, there just can’t be any other kind of lasting security.
Men’s happiness or misery is most part of their own making.
Niccolò Machiavelli, formally Niccolò di Bernardo dei Machiavelli
For the great majority of mankind are satisfied with appearances, as though they were realities and are often more influenced by the things that seem than by those that are.
What is it that determines the Will in regard to our Actions?... we shall find, that we being capable but of one determination of the will to one action at once, the present uneasiness, that we are under, does naturally determine the will, in order to that happiness which we all aim at in all our actions: For as much as whilst we are under any uneasiness, we cannot apprehend ourselves happy, or in the way to it... And therefore that, which of course determines the choice of our will to the next action, will always be the removing of pain, as long as we have any left, as the first and necessary step towards happiness.
Action | Character | Choice | Determination | Happy | Order | Pain | Present | Regard | Will | Happiness |
There is not a vice which more effectually contracts and deadens the feelings, which more completely makes a man’s affections center in himself, and excludes all others from partaking in them, than the desire of accumulating possessions. When the desire has once gotten hold of the heart, it shuts out all other considerations, but such as may promote its views. In its zeal for the attainment of its end, it is not delicate in the choice of means. As it closes the heart, so also it clouds the understanding. It cannot discern between right and wrong; it takes evil for good, and good for evil; it calls darkness light, and light darkness. Beware, then, of the beginning of covetousness, for you know not where it will end.
Attainment | Beginning | Character | Choice | Darkness | Desire | Evil | Feelings | Good | Heart | Light | Man | Means | Possessions | Right | Understanding | Will | Wrong | Zeal | Vice |