This site is dedicated to the memory of Dr. Alan William Smolowe who gave birth to the creation of this database.
The public have more interest in the punishment of an injury than he who receives it.
Public | Punishment |
Never expect to find perfection in men, in my commerce with my contemporaries I have found much human virtue. I have seen not a little public spirit; a real subordination of interest to duty; and a decent and regulated sensibility to honest fame and reputation. The age unquestionably produces daring profligates and insidious hypocrites. What then? Am I not to avail myself of whatever good is to be found in the world because of the mixture of evil that will always be in it? The smallness of the quantity in currency only heightens the value. They who raise suspicions on the good, on account of the behavior of ill men, are of the party of the latter.
Age | Behavior | Commerce | Daring | Duty | Evil | Fame | Good | Little | Men | Perfection | Public | Reputation | Sensibility | Spirit | Virtue | Virtue | Will | World | Commerce |
An enlightened self-interest, which, when well understood, they tell us will identify with an interest more enlarged and public.
Public | Self | Self-interest | Will |
Personal interest is often the standard of our belief, as well as of our practice.
Wisdom consists in the highest use of the intellect for the discernment of the largest moral interest of humanity. It is the most perfect willingness to do the right combined with the utmost attainable knowledge of what is right… Wisdom consists in working for the better from the love of the best.
Better | Discernment | Humanity | Knowledge | Love | Right | Wisdom | Intellect |
A man's interest in the world is only an overflow from his interest in himself.
Georg Hegel, fully Georg Wilhelm Friedrich Hegel
The history of the world begins with its general aim, the realization of the idea of spirit, only in an implicit form, that is, as nature; a hidden, most profoundly hidden, unconscious instinct; and the whole process of history (as already observed) is directed to rendering this unconscious impulse a conscious one... This vast congeries of volitions, interest and activities, constitute the instruments and means of the world-spirit for attaining its object; bringing it to consciousness, and realizing it.
Consciousness | History | Impulse | Instinct | Means | Nature | Object | Spirit | World |
Henry Kissinger, fully Henry Alfred Kissinger
Empires have no interest in operating within an international system; they aspire to be the international system.
System |
Henry Miller, aka Henry Valentine Miller
Develop an interest in life as you see it - the people, things, literature, music. The world is so rich, simply throbbing with rich treasures, beautiful souls, and interesting people. Forget yourself.
Henry Miller, aka Henry Valentine Miller
Develop interest in life as you see it; in people, things, literature, music - the world is so rich, simply throbbing with rich treasures, beautiful souls and interesting people. Forget yourself.
Who are the really disloyal? Those who inflame racial hatreds, who sow religious and class dissensions. those who subvert the Constitution by violating the freedom of the ballot box. Those who make a mockery of majority rule by the use of the filibuster. Those who impair democracy by denying equal educational facilities. Those who frustrate justice by lynch law or by making a farce of jury trials. Those who deny freedom of speech and of the press and of assembly. Those who demand special favors against the interest of the commonwealth. Those who regard public office as a source of private gain. Those who exalt the military over the civil. Those who for selfish and private purposes stir up national antagonisms and expose the world to the ruin of war.
Democracy | Freedom of speech | Freedom | Justice | Law | Majority | Mockery | Office | Public | Regard | Rule | Speech | Trials | War | World |
The beautiful is what pleases in the mere judgment (and therefore not by the medium of sensation in accordance with a concept of the understanding). It follows at once from this that it must please apart from all interest. The sublime is what pleases immediately through its opposition to the interest of sense.
Judgment | Opposition | Sense | Understanding |
Indira Gandhi, fully Indirā Priyadarśinī Gāndhī
Whenever you take a step forward, you are bound to disturb the air as you go forward you disturb the dust, the ground. You trample upon things. When whole society moves forward, this trampling is on a much bigger scale; and each thing that you disturb, each vested interest which you want to remove, stands as an obstacle.
I regard utility as the ultimate appeal on all ethical questions; but it must be utility in the largest sense, grounded on the permanent interests of man as a progressive being. Those interests, I contend, authorize the subjection of individual spontaneity to external control only in respect to those actions of each which concern the interest of other people.
Control | Individual | Man | People | Regard | Respect | Sense | Respect |
He who can take no interest in what is small will take false interest in what is great.
Will |
Conscience and self-love, if we understand our true happiness, always lead us the same way. Duty and interest are perfectly coincident; for the most part in this world, but entirely and in every instance if we take in the future, and the whole; this being implied in the notion of a good and perfect administration of things.
Administration | Conscience | Duty | Future | Good | Love | Self | Self-love | World | Understand |