This site is dedicated to the memory of Dr. Alan William Smolowe who gave birth to the creation of this database.
No one can deny that much of our modern advertising is essentially dishonest; and it can be maintained that to lie freely and all the time for private profit is not to abuse the right of free speech, whether it is a violation of the law or not. But again the practical question is, how much lying for private profit is to be permitted by law?
Abuse | Advertising | Free speech | Law | Lying | Question | Right | Speech | Time |
Georg Hegel, fully Georg Wilhelm Friedrich Hegel
Mere customary life (the watch wound up and going on of itself) is that which brings on natural death. Custom is activity without opposition, for which there remains only a formal duration; in which the fullness and zest that originally characterized the aim of life are out of the question - a merely external sensuous existence which has ceased to throw itself enthusiastically into its object.
Custom | Death | Existence | Life | Life | Object | Opposition | Question |
Must love be ever treated with profaneness as a mere illusion? or with coarseness as a mere impulse? or with fear as a mere disease? or with shame as a mere weakness? or with levity as a mere accident? whereas it is a great mystery and a great necessity, lying at the foundation of human existence, morality, and happiness - mysterious, universal, inevitable as death.
Accident | Death | Disease | Existence | Fear | Illusion | Impulse | Inevitable | Love | Lying | Morality | Mystery | Necessity | Shame | Weakness | Happiness |
Holbrook Jackson, fully George Holbrook Jackson
Every custom was once an eccentricity; every idea was once an absurdity.
Custom | Eccentricity |
Holbrook Jackson, fully George Holbrook Jackson
Every custom was once an eccentricity.
Custom | Eccentricity |
There is no such thing as preaching patience into people unless the sermon is so long that they have to practice it while they hear. No man can learn patience except by going out into the hurly-burly world, and taking life just as it blows. Patience is but lying to and riding out the gale.
Life | Life | Lying | Man | Patience | People | Practice | World | Learn |
Time is a necessary representation, lying at the foundation of all our intuitions. With regard to phenomena in general, we cannot think away time from them, and represent them to ourselves as out of and unconnected with time, but we can quite well represent to ourselves time void of phenomena. Time is therefore given a priori. In it alone is all reality of phenomena possible. These may all be annihilated in thought, but in itself, as the universal condition of their possibility, cannot be so annulled.
Lying | Phenomena | Reality | Regard | Thought | Time | Think |
The progressive principle is antagonistic to the sway of custom. The contest between these two principles, custom and progress, constitutes the chief interest of the history of mankind.
Custom | History | Mankind | Principles | Progress |
The despotism of custom is everywhere the standing hindrance to human advancement.
Custom |
Joseph Chilton Pearce, aka Joe
The toddler is allowed to regulate his own exploratory behavior. What occurs as a result of this entire mechanism is that nature’s imperative to explore the world at large is overwhelmed by the greater imperative to avoid the pain of a broken relationship with the life-giving caregiver. What will be developed in the child is a capacity for deception as he tries to maintain some vestige of integrity while outwardly appearing to conform. Living a lie to survive a lying culture, the child forgets the truth of who he really is.
Behavior | Capacity | Culture | Giving | Integrity | Life | Life | Lying | Nature | Pain | Relationship | Truth | Will | World | Child |
Morality is made up of customs and habits. Custom makes public morality, and habit individual morality.
Custom | Habit | Individual | Morality | Public |
Of all the virtues, is not wisdom the one which the mass of mankind are always claiming, and which most arrouses in them a spirit of contention and lying conceit of wisdom?
Contention | Lying | Mankind | Spirit | Wisdom |
Plutarch, named Lucius Mestrius Plutarchus after becoming Roman citizen NULL
We are more sensible of what is done against custom than of what is done against nature.
Pythagoras, aka Pythagoras of Samos or Pythagoras the Samian NULL
Choose always the way that seems best, however rough it may be, and custom will soon render it easy and agreeable.