This site is dedicated to the memory of Dr. Alan William Smolowe who gave birth to the creation of this database.
Josiah Gilbert Holland, also Joshua Gilbert Holland
Gossip is always a personal confession either of malice or imbecility; it is a low, frivolous, and too often a dirty business. There are neighborhoods where it rages like a pest; churches are split in pieces by it, and neighbors made enemies for life. Let the young avoid or cure it while they may.
Those who get through the world without enemies are commonly three classes: the supple, the adroit, the phlegmatic. The leaden rule surmounts obstacles by yielding to them; the oiled wheel escapes friction; the cotton sack escapes damage by its impenetrable elasticity.
Gossip is always a personal confession of malice or imbecility; it is a low, frivolous, and too often a dirty business. There are neighborhoods where it rages like a pest; churches are split in pieces by it, and neighbor made enemies for life. Let the young avoid or cure it while they may.
Baron de Montesquieu, fully Charles-Louis de Secondat, Baron de La Brède et de Montesquieu
Nothing more assimilates a man to a bast than living among freedmen, himself a slave. Such people as these are natural enemies of society; and their number must be dangerous.
It is from our enemies that we often gain excellent maxims, and are frequently surprised into reason by their mistakes.
War... is a relation, not between man and man, but between State and State, and individuals are enemies only accidentally, not as men, nor even as citizens, but as soldiers; not as members of their country, but as its defenders. Finally, each State can have for enemies only other States, and not men.
Man has other enemies more formidable, against which he is not provided with such means of defense: these are the natural infirmities of infancy, old age, and illness of every kind, melancholy proofs of our weakness, of which the two first are common to all animals, and the last belongs chiefly to man in a; state of society.
Age | Defense | Infancy | Man | Means | Melancholy | Old age | Society | Weakness | Wisdom | Old |
Those who misrepresent the normal experiences of life, who decry being controversial, who shun risk, are the enemies of the American way of life, whatever the piety of the vocal professions and the patriotic flavor of their platitudes.