This site is dedicated to the memory of Dr. Alan William Smolowe who gave birth to the creation of this database.
Desiderius Erasmus Roterodamus, sometimes known as Desiderius Erasmus of Rotterdam
I have no patience with the stupidity of the average teacher of grammar who wastes precious years in hammering rules into children's heads. For it is not by learning rules that we acquire the powers of speaking a language, but by daily intercourse with those accustomed to express themselves with exactness and refinement and by copious reading of the best authors.
Children | Language | Learning | Patience | Reading | Refinement | Stupidity | Teacher |
For avoiding the extremes of despotism or anarchy ... the only ground of hope must be on the morals of the people. I believe that religion is the only solid base of morals and that morals are the only possible support of free governments.
Havelock Ellis, fully Henry Havelock Ellis
It is becoming clear that the old platitudes can no longer be maintained, and that if we wish to improve our morals we must first improve our knowledge.
Platitudes | Old |
Friedrich Schiller, fully Johann Christoph Friedrich von Schiller
With stupidity the gods themselves struggle in vain.
The greatest happiness of the greatest number is the foundation of morals and legislation.
J. B. S. Haldane, fully John Burdon Sanderson Haldane
We must learn not to take traditional morals too seriously. And it is just because even the least dogmatic of religions tends to associate itself with some kind of unalterable moral tradition, that there can be no truce between science and religion.
How unbelievingly, carelessly, and senselessly most men live on earth, as if there were no such difference in another world ... No one driveth or forceth them to hell, and will they go thither of themselves? ... Did you but see yourselves, what we see by faith, (believing God) and at once behold the saints in heaven, the lost despairing souls in hell, and the senseless, sensual sinners on earth, that will lay none of this to heart, surely it would make you wonder at the stupidity of mankind.
Karl Menninger, fully Karl Augustus Menninger
Before we can diminish our sufferings from the ill-controlled aggressive assaults of fellow citizens, we must renounce the philosophy of punishment, the obsolete, vengeful penal attitude. In its place we would seek a comprehensive, constructive social attitude - therapeutic in some instances, restraining in some instances, but preventive in its total social impact. In the last analysis this becomes a question of personal morals and values. No matter how glorified or how piously disguised, vengeance as a human motive must be personally repudiated by each and every one of us. This is the message of old religions and new psychiatries. Unless this message is heard, unless we ... can give up our delicious satisfactions in opportunities for vengeful retaliation on scapegoats, we cannot expect to preserve our peace, our public safety, or our mental health... the punitive attitude persists. And just so long as the spirit of vengeance has the slightest vestige of respectability, so long as it pervades the public mind and infuses its evil upon the statute books of the law, we will make no headway toward the control of crime. We cannot assess the most appropriate and effective penalties so long as we seek to inflict retaliatory pain.
Books | Control | Evil | Mind | Philosophy | Public | Question | Retaliation | Spirit | Vengeance | Will | Old |
Karl Popper, fully Sir Karl Raimund Popper
Nature consists of facts and of regularities, and is in itself neither moral nor immoral. It is we who impose our standards upon nature, and who in this way introduce morals into the natural world, in spite the fact that we are part of this world. We are products of nature, but nature has made us together with our power of altering the world, of foreseeing and of planning for the future, and of making far-reaching decisions for which we are morally responsible. Yet, responsibility, decisions, enter the world of nature only with us.
Corruption is worse than prostitution. The latter might endanger the morals of an individual, the former invariably endangers the morals of the entire country.
Karl Popper, fully Sir Karl Raimund Popper
It seems to me certain that more people are killed out of righteous stupidity than out of wickedness.
Ken Wilber, fully Kenneth Earl Wilber II
With science we touch the True, the "It" of Spirit. With morals we touch the Good, the "We" of Spirit. What, then, would an integral approach have to say about the Beautiful, the "I" of Spirit itself? What is the Beauty that is in the eye of the Beholder? When we are in the eye of Spirit, the I of Spirit, what do we finally see?
Vladimir Lenin, fully Vladimir Ilyich Lenin
There are no morals in politics; there is only expedience. A scoundrel may be of use to us just because he is a scoundrel.
John Dalberg-Acton, Lord Acton, fully John Emerich Edward Dalberg-Acton, 1st Baron Acton
Liberty becomes a question of morals more than of politics.
Question |
Mark Twain, pen name of Samuel Langhorne Clemens
The jury system puts a ban upon intelligence and honesty and a premium upon ignorance, stupidity and perjury.
Honesty | Intelligence | Stupidity | System |
The stupidity of people comes from having an answer to everything. The wisdom of the novel comes from having a question for everything... it seems to me that all over the world people nowadays prefer to judge rather than to understand, to answer rather than to ask, so that the voice of the novel can hardly be heard over the noisy foolishness of human certainties.
The morals of today are the immorals of yesterday, the creeds of tomorrow.
This is the old fear …. that truth will not prevail, that the moral structure of a nation is so fragile that it needs elaborate defences. Christians, it seems to me, have to choose between the safety of ‘morals’ and the danger of love. It is my own belief that Christ’s teaching was principally about the latter, but that if you do teach men and women to love God and love their neighbours then morals take care of themselves.
Belief | Care | Danger | Fear | God | Love | Men | Teach | Truth | Will | Danger | God | Old |