This site is dedicated to the memory of Dr. Alan William Smolowe who gave birth to the creation of this database.
Teach your scholar to observe the phenomena of nature; you will soon rouse his curiosity, but if you would have it grow, do not be in too great a hurry to satisfy this curiosity. Put the problems before him and let him solve them himself. Let him know nothing because you have told him, but because he has learnt it for himself. Let him not be taught science, let him discover it. If ever you substitute authority for reason he will cease to reason; he will be a mere plaything of other people's thoughts.
Authority | Hurry | Nothing | Phenomena | Problems | Reason | Scholar | Will |
When faith is completely replaced by creed, worship by discipline, love by habit; when the crisis of today is ignored because of the splendor of the past; when faith becomes an heirloom rather than a living fountain; when religion speaks only in the name of authority rather than with the voice of compassion, its message becomes meaningless.
John Steinbeck, fully John Ernst Steinbeck
An unbelieved truth can hurt a man much more than a lie. It takes great courage to back truth unacceptable to our times. There's a punishment for it, and it's usually crucifixion
Courage | Man | Punishment | Truth |
Calvin Coolidge, fully John Calvin Coolidge, Jr.
The world has had enough of the curse of hatred and selfishness, of destruction and war. It has had enough of the wrongful use of material power. For the healing of the nations there must be good will and charity, confidence and peace. The time has come for a more practical use of moral power, and more reliance upon the principle that right makes its own might. Our authority among the nations must be represented by justice and mercy. It is necessary not only to have faith, but to make sacrifices for our faith. The spiritual forces of the world make all its final determinations. It is with these voices that America should speak. Whenever they declare a righteous purpose there need be no doubt that they will be heard. America has taken her place in the world as a Republic--free, independent, powerful. The best service that can be rendered to humanity is the assurance that this place will be maintained.
Authority | Confidence | Doubt | Enough | Good | Humanity | Justice | Nations | Need | Purpose | Purpose | Right | Service | Time | Will | World |
It is the common fate of the indolent to see their rights become a prey to the active. The condition upon which God hath given liberty to man is eternal vigilance; which condition if he break, servitude is at once the consequence of his crime and the punishment of his guilt.
Crime | Eternal | Fate | God | Liberty | Man | Punishment | Rights | Servitude | Fate | God |
Religious discord has lost her sting; the cumbrous weapons of theological warfare are antiquated: the field of politics supplies the alchymists of our times with materials of more fatal explosion, and the butchers of mankind no longer travel to another world for instruments of cruelty and destruction. Our age is too enlightened to contend upon topics, which concern only the interests of eternity; and men who hold in proper contempt all controversies about trifles, except such as inflame their own passions, have made it a common-place censure against your ancestors, that their zeal was enkindled by subjects of trivial importance; and that however aggrieved by the intolerance of others, they were alike intolerant themselves.
Age | Censure | Contempt | Cruelty | Intolerance | Mankind | Men | Politics | Weapons | World | Zeal | Cruelty |
Joseph H. Hertz, fully Rabbi Joseph Herman Hertz
Divine punishment is at once followed by Divine pity.
Joshua L. Liebman, fully Joshua Loth Liebman
Theoretically, religion wishes to make men serene and inwardly peaceful by reaching a loving and forgiving god. But in practice, there is too much undissolved wrath and punishment in most religions.
Men | Punishment | Religion | Wishes |
Joseph de Maistre, fully Joseph-Marie, comte de Maistre
All grandeur, all power, all subordination to authority rests on the executioner he is the horror and the bond of human association. Remove this incomprehensible agent from the world and at that very moment order gives way to chaos, thrones topple and society disappears.
Junius, psyeudonym of unknown English Political Writer NULL
Vanity indeed is a venial error; for it usually carries its own punishment with it.
Julian Huxley, fully Sir Julian Sorell Huxley
Man ... differs from all other animals in having a brain which can and largely does bring all the various elements of experience into contact, instead of keeping them in a series of wholly or largely separate compartments or channels. This not only provides the basis for conceptual thought, and so for all man's ideas and philosophic systems, ideals and works of art and creative imagination, but also for his battery of complex sentiments unknown in animals, such as reverence and religious awe, moral feelings (including hate and contempt arising from moral abhorrence), and love in its developed form.
Art | Contempt | Experience | Feelings | Hate | Ideals | Ideas | Love | Reverence | Art |
Jules Feiffer, fully Jules Ralph Feiffer
I grew up to have my father's looks, my father's speech patterns, my father's posture, my father's opinions, and my mother's contempt for my father.
Kofi Annan, fully Kofi Atta Annan
Justice has taken its course and the authority and legitimacy of the legal process must be respected.
Learned Hand, fully Billings Learned Hand
Political agitation, by the passions it arouses or the convictions it engenders, may in fact stimulate men to the violation of the law. Detestation of existing policies is easily transformed into forcible resistance of the authority which puts them in execution, and it would be folly to disregard the causal relation between the two. Yet to assimilate agitation, legitimate as such, with direct incitement to violent resistance, is to disregard the tolerance of all methods of political agitation which in normal times is a safeguard of free government.
Agitation | Authority | Convictions | Folly | Men |
The individual makes a clear effort to define moral values and principles that have validity and application apart from the authority of the groups of persons holding them and apart from the individual's own identification with the group.
Authority | Effort | Individual | Principles |
Laws of Manu, aka Manusmṛti, Manusmriti, Manusmruti or Mānava-Dharmaśāstra NULL
If the punishment does not fall on the offender himself, it falls on his sons; if not on the sons, on his grandsons.
It is no accident that banks resemble temples, preferably Greek, and that the supplicants who come to perform the rites of deposit and withdrawal instinctively lower their voices into the registers of awe. Even the most junior tellers acquire within weeks of their employment the officiousness of hierophants tending an eternal flame. I don't know how they become so quickly inducted into the presiding mysteries, or who instructs them in the finely articulated inflections of contempt for the laity, but somehow they learn to think of themselves as suppliers of the monetarized DNA that is the breath of life.