This site is dedicated to the memory of Dr. Alan William Smolowe who gave birth to the creation of this database.
Our chief usefulness to humanity rests on our combining power with high purpose. Power undirected by high purpose spells calamity, and high purpose by itself is utterly useless if the power to put it into effect is lacking.
Body | Destroy | Effort | Evil | Good | Inevitable | Nothing | Public | Work |
Consider the end of God’s decrees – and this is no other than His own glory. Every rational agent acts for an end; and God being the most perfect agent, and His glory the highest end, there can be no doubt but all His decrees are directed to that end. “For to Him are all things.”
Certainly one of the highest duties of the citizen is a scrupulous obedience to the laws of the nation. But it is not the highest duty.
With fingers weary and worn, with eyelids heavy and red, a woman sat in unwomanly rags plying her needle and thread,— Stitch! stitch! stitch! O men with sisters dear, O men with mothers and wives, it is not linen you’re wearing out, but human creatures’ lives! Sewing at once a double thread, a shroud as well as a shirt… O God! that bread should be so dear, and flesh and blood so cheap! No blessed leisure for love or hope, but only time for grief…My tears must stop, for every drop hinders needle and thread.
Avarice |
The principle of spending money to be paid by posterity, under the name of funding, is but swindling futurity on a large scale.
Resort is had to ridicule only when reason is against us.
Choice | Confidence | Delusion | Government | Men | Silence | Trust | Government | Parent |
It takes time to persuade men to do even what is for their own good.
In the arguments in favor of a declaration of rights, one which has great weight with me [is] the legal check which it puts into the hands of the judiciary.
Man [is] a rational animal, endowed by nature with rights, and with an innate sense of justice; and... he [can] be restrained from wrong and protected in right, by moderate powers, confided to persons of his own choice, and held to their duties by dependence on his own will.
Ambition | Avarice | Duty | Existence | Faith | Genius | God | Mankind | Men | Misfortune | Opinion | People | Possessions | Rights | Teach | Toleration | Will | Misfortune | Ambition | Following | God |
Do not depend on the hope of results. When you are doing the sort of work you have taken on, you may have to face the fact that your work will be apparently worthless and even achieve no worth at all, if not perhaps, results opposite to what you expect. As you get used to this idea, you will start more and more to concentrate not on the results, but on the value, the rightness, the truth of the work itself.
Avarice | God | Man | Materialism | Mediocrity | Selfishness | God |
People who know nothing of God and whose lives are centered on themselves, imagine that they can only find themselves by asserting their own desires and ambitions and appetites in a struggle with the rest of the world. They try to become real by imposing themselves on other people, by appropriating for themselves some share of the limited supply of created goods and thus emphasizing the difference between themselves and the other men who have less than they, or nothing at all. They can only conceive one way of becoming real: cutting themselves off from other people and building a barrier of contrast and distinction between themselves and other men. They do not know that reality is to be sought not in division but in unity, for we are ‘members one of another.’
Avarice | Children | Cruelty | Doubt | Evil | God | Grace | Greed | Human race | Love | Lust | Men | Oppression | Peace | Race | Sin | Wills | Cruelty | God | Think |
It is sometimes discouraging to see how small the peace movement is, and especially here in America where it is most necessary. But we have to remember that this is the usual pattern, and the Bible has led us to expect it. Spiritual work is done with disproportionately small and feeble instruments.. And now above all when everything is so utterly complex, and when people collapse under the burden of confusions and cease to think at all, it is natural that few may want to take on the burden of trying to effect something in the moral and spiritual way, in political action. Yet this is precisely what has to be done.
Avarice | Children | Cruelty | Doubt | Evil | God | Grace | Greed | Human race | Love | Lust | Man | Mercy | Oppression | Peace | People | Race | Sin | Wills | Cruelty | God | Think |
Of all the tyrannies that affect mankind, tyranny in religion is the worst; every other species of tyranny is limited to the world we live in; but this attempts to stride beyond the grave, and seeks to pursue us into eternity.
Absurd | Avarice | Good | Heart | Man | Means | Nothing | Purpose | Purpose | Religion |
It was the excess to which imaginary systems of religion had been carried, and the intolerance, persecutions, burnings, and massacres, they occasioned, that first induced certain persons to propagate infidelity; thinking, that upon the whole, that it was better not to believe at all, than to believe a multitude of things and complicated creeds, that occasioned so much mischief in the world. But those days are past, persecution has ceased, and the antidote then set up against it has no longer even the shadow of apology. We profess, and we proclaim in peace, the pure, unmixed, comfortable, and rational belief of a God, as manifested to us in the universe. We do this without any apprehension of that belief being made a cause of persecution as other beliefs have been, or of suffering.persecution ourselves. To God, and not to man, are all men to account for their belief.
As parents, we can have no joy, knowing that this government is not sufficiently lasting to ensure anything which we may bequeath to posterity: And by a plain method of argument, as we are running the next generation into debt, we ought to do the work of it, otherwise we use them meanly and pitifully. In order to discover the line of our duty rightly, we should take our children in our hand, and fix our station a few years farther into life; that eminence will present a prospect, which a few present fears and prejudices conceal from our sight.