This site is dedicated to the memory of Dr. Alan William Smolowe who gave birth to the creation of this database.
Frederick Copleston, fully Frederick Charles Copleston
If our conscience tells us that we ought to perform a particular act, it is our moral duty to perform it.
Conscience | Duty |
It is the Law that any difficulties that can come to you at any time, no matter what they are, must be exactly what you need most at the moment, to enable you to take the next step forward by overcoming them. There need be no unqualified evils. The only real misfortune, the only real tragedy, comes when we suffer without learning the lesson.
Law | Learning | Lesson | Misfortune | Need | Time | Tragedy |
Mahatma Gandhi, fully Mohandas Karamchand Gandhi, aka Bapu
Non-cooperation with evil is as much a duty as is cooperation with good.
Cooperation | Duty | Evil | Good |
The present moment is never intolerable. It is always what is coming in five minutes or five days that makes people despair. The Law of Life is to live in the present, and this applies to both time and place. Keep your attention to the present moment, and in the place where your body is now.
Attention | Body | Despair | Law | Life | Life | People | Present | Time |
What you think upon grows. Whatever you allow to occupy your mind you magnify in your own life. Whether the subject of your thought be good or bad, the law works and the condition grows. Any subject that you tend to keep out of your mind tends to diminish in your life, because what you do not use atrophies.
Good | Law | Life | Life | Mind | Thought | Think | Thought |
Mahatma Gandhi, fully Mohandas Karamchand Gandhi, aka Bapu
In my humble opinion, non-cooperation with evil is as much a duty as is cooperation with good.
Cooperation | Duty | Evil | Good | Opinion |
Spiritual progress must be slow as long as we are worried, frightened, resentful, sick, or discouraged – and those things can be overcome only through prayer. It is a duty and a joy to help others, wisely, and to leave the world a better place than we found it – and we can do that only through prayer. The more we pray for ourselves the more power will our prayers have for any other purpose whatsoever; so we see that praying for ourselves is the reverse of selfishness – it is truly glorifying God.
Better | Duty | God | Joy | Power | Prayer | Progress | Purpose | Purpose | Selfishness | Will | World |
James Frazer, aka James George Frazer
The old view that the principles of right and wrong are immutable and eternal is no longer tenable. The moral world is as little exempt as the physical world from the law of ceaseless change, of perpetual flux.
Change | Eternal | Law | Little | Principles | Right | World | Wrong | Old |
Roy F. Harrod, fully Sir Henry Roy Forbes Harrod
The most basic law of economics, namely that one cannot get something for nothing.
An act of injustice is condemned, not because the law is broken, but because a person has been hurt.
F. A. Hayek, fully Friedrich August Hayek or von Hayek
Responsibility, not to a superior, but to one’s conscience, the awareness of a duty not exacted by compulsion, the necessity to decide which of the things one values are to be sacrificed to others, and to beat the consequences of one’s own decision, are the very essence of any morals which deserve the name.
Awareness | Conscience | Consequences | Decision | Duty | Necessity | Responsibility | Awareness |
F. A. Hayek, fully Friedrich August Hayek or von Hayek
It is… the essence of the demand for equality before the law that people should be treated alike in spite of the fact that they are different.
Arthur Goldberg, fully Arthur Joseph Goldberg
Law is not served by power is an illusion, but power not ruled by law is a menace.