This site is dedicated to the memory of Dr. Alan William Smolowe who gave birth to the creation of this database.
Over the centuries, we've moved on from Scripture to accumulate precepts of ethical, legal and moral philosophy. We've evolved a liberal consensus of what we regard as underpinnings of decent society, such as the idea that we don't approve of slavery or discrimination on the grounds of race or sex, that we respect free speech and the rights of the individual. All of these things that have become second nature to our morals today owe very little to religion, and mostly have been won in opposition to the teeth of religion.
Free speech | Little | Nature | Opposition | Race | Regard | Respect | Rights | Scripture | Slavery | Speech | Respect |
Childhood may have periods of great happiness, but it also has times that must simply be endured. Childhood at its best is a form of slavery tempered by affection.
Robert Ingersoll, fully Robert Green "Bob" Ingersoll
My creed: To love justice, to long for the right, to love mercy, to pity the suffering, to assist the weak, to forget wrongs and remember benefits, to love the truth, to be sincere, to utter honest words, to love liberty, to wage relentless war against slavery in all its forms, to love family and friend, to make a happy home, to love the beautiful in art, in nature, to cultivate the mind, to be familiar with the mighty thoughts that genius has expressed, the noble deeds of all the world; to cultivate courage and cheerfulness, to make others happy, to fill life with the splendor of generous acts, the warmth of loving words; to discard error, to destroy prejudice, to receive new truths with gladness, to cultivate hope, to see the calm beyond the storm, the dawn beyond the night, to do the best that can be done and then be resigned. This is the religion of reason, the creed of science. This satisfies the brain and the heart.
Courage | Creed | Dawn | Deeds | Destroy | Family | Genius | Happy | Life | Life | Love | Pity | Receive | Religion | Slavery | War | Deeds | Truths |
Samuel I. Prime, fully Samuel Irenaeus Prime
And so sweetly adapted is the child-mind to the Gospel and the Gospel to the child-mind that they cheerfully coalesce, and the babe's milk is not more palatable and nutritious than is the bread of life to the new-born soul. No one can say how soon a child may intelligently apprehend the divine truth. Many saints of God have no memory of the period in their early lives when Christ was not dear to their hearts. When they were born from above they do not remember any more than they can recollect the moment when they first breathed the breath of life. It is not so with all; perhaps not so with the most. But the true theory of the Gospel is that children should be brought up on it, as their daily food; be nurtured b it; renewed by the Holy Spirit, and made heirs of salvation.
Just as a person who is always asserting that he is too good-natured is the very one from whom to expect, on some occasion, the coldest and most unconcerned cruelty, so when any group sees itself as the bearer of civilization this very belief will betray it into behaving barbarously at the first opportunity.
One can never really give a proof of the reality of anything; reality is not something open to proof, it is something established. It is established just because proof is not enough. It is this characteristic of language, at once indispensable and inadequate, which shows the reality of the external world. Most people hardly ever realize this, because it is rare that the very same man thinks and puts his thought into action.
Capacity | Dawn | Day | Death | Experience | Force | Journey | Mind | Purpose | Purpose | Slavery | Soul | Thought | Time | War | Thought |
Simone de Beauvoir, fully Simone-Ernestine-Lucie-Marie Bertrand de Beauvoir
What should a society be, so that in his last years a man might still be a man?
Better | Individual | Slavery | Work |
Simone de Beauvoir, fully Simone-Ernestine-Lucie-Marie Bertrand de Beauvoir
It is not in giving life but in risking life that man is raised above the animal that is why superiority has been accorded in humanity not to the sex that brings forth but to that which kills.
Absolute | Adventure | Challenge | Existence | Humanity | Hypocrisy | Man | Miracles | Nonsense | Opposition | Pleasure | Reciprocity | Slavery | System | Will | Woman | Words |
To waste, to destroy our natural resources, to skin and exhaust the land instead of using it so as to increase its usefulness, will result in undermining in the days of our children the very prosperity which we ought by right to hand down to them amplified and developed.
Better | Cause | Delusion | Democracy | Destroy | Effort | Evil | Experience | Failure | Good | Greed | Liberty | Men | Mind | Power | Present | Property | Reason | Service | Slavery | Wrong | Failure |
Ladies know what to guard against, because they read novels that tell them of these tricks.