This site is dedicated to the memory of Dr. Alan William Smolowe who gave birth to the creation of this database.
It is only when we haggle with conscience that we have recourse to the subtleties of argument.
Argument | Character | Conscience |
To start from self does not mean to be selfish. It means to start from premises based on human life and the rest of nature, rather than premises that are the artificial products of the Corporate State, such as power or status. It is not an ‘ego trip’ but a radical subjectivity designed to find genuine values in a world whose official values are false and distorted. It is not egocentricity, but honesty, wholeness, genuineness in all things. It starts from self because human life is found as individual units, not as corporations and institutions; its intent is to start from life.
Character | Ego | Honesty | Individual | Life | Life | Means | Nature | Power | Rest | Self | Wholeness | World |
Lillian Smith, fully Lillian Eugenia Smith
Minds broken in two. Hearts broken. Conscience torn from acts. A culture split in a thousand pieces. That is segregation.
Character | Conscience | Culture |
We grow with the years more fragile in body but morally stouter, and can throw off the chill of a bad conscience almost at once.
Body | Character | Conscience |
We can do nothing well without joy, and a good conscience which is the ground of joy.
Character | Conscience | Good | Joy | Nothing |
Fear is the tax that conscience pays to guilt.
Character | Conscience | Fear | Guilt |
Good character is human nature in its best form. It is moral order embodied in the individual. Men of character are not only the conscience of society, but in every well governed state they are its best motive power; for it is moral qualities which, in the main, rule the world.
Character | Conscience | Good | Human nature | Individual | Men | Nature | Order | Power | Qualities | Rule | Society | World |
It is not for man to rest in absolute contentment. He is born to hopes and aspirations as the sparks fly upward, unless he has brutified his nature and quenched the spirit of immortality which is his portion.
Absolute | Character | Contentment | Immortality | Man | Nature | Rest | Spirit |
Madame Swetchine, fully Anne Sophie Swetchine née Sophia Petrovna Soïmonov or Soymanof
Our faults afflict us more than our good deeds console. Pain is ever uppermost in the conscience as in the heart.
Character | Conscience | Deeds | Good | Heart | Pain | Deeds |
Lawrence Sterne, alternatively Laurence Sterne
Trust that man is nothing who has not a conscience in everything.
Character | Conscience | Man | Nothing | Trust |
Lawrence Sterne, alternatively Laurence Sterne
If there is an evil in this world, it is sorrow and heaviness of heart. The loss of goods, of healthy, of coronets and mitres, is only evil as they occasion sorrow; take that out, the rest is fancy, and dwelleth only in the head of man.
Character | Evil | Heart | Man | Rest | Sorrow | World | Loss |
No man becomes fully evil at once; but suggestion bringeth on indulgence; indulgence, delight; delight, consent; consent, endeavor; endeavor, practice; practice, custom; custom, excuse; excuse, defense; defense, obstinacy; obstinacy, boasting; boasting, a seared conscience and a reprobate mind.
Boasting | Character | Conscience | Custom | Defense | Evil | Indulgence | Man | Mind | Practice |