This site is dedicated to the memory of Dr. Alan William Smolowe who gave birth to the creation of this database.
Please stop using the word “Negro”... We are the only human beings in the world with fifty-seven varieties of complexions who are classed together as a single racial unit. Therefore, we are really colored people, and that is the only name in the English language which accurately describes us.
Real goodness does not attach itself merely to this life - it points to another world. Political or professional reputation cannot last forever, but a conscience void of offense before God and man is an inheritance for eternity.
Conscience | Eternity | God | Inheritance | Life | Life | Man | Offense | Reputation | Wisdom | World | God |
All societies create their own worlds, using language and folklore to impose an arbitrary order on the complexity of the cosmos. This ordering of reality helps make sense of things by interpreting information in ways which are compatible with what is already known.
Ahmad Faris al-Shidyaq, known also as Fares Chidiac, Faris Al Chidiac
Every language in the world has something beautiful and something ugly about it, for language is nothing more than the expression of the activities, thoughts, and actions of human beings. There is naturally always something to blame and something to praise.
The weight of great power crushes the goodness of the man who rules and the honesty of those who are ruled.
At last religion has come to reckon with the fact that its highest quest is not for a supernatural order but just for natural goodness in the largest and fullest measure.
Nikolai Berdyaev, fully Nikolai Alexandrovich Berdyaev, also spelled Nichlas Berdiaev
The dignity of man and the dignity of faith require the recognition of freedom to choose the truth, and freedom in the truth. Freedom cannot be identified with goodness or truth or perfection: it is by nature autonomous, it is freedom and not goodness.
Dignity | Faith | Freedom | Man | Nature | Perfection | Truth |
For boredom speaks the language of time, and it is to teach you the most valuable lesson in your life--...the lesson of your utter insignificance. It is valuable to you, as well as to those you are to rub shoulders with. 'You are finite,' time tells you in a voice of boredom, 'and whatever you do is, from my point of view, futile.' As music to your ears, this, of course, may not count; yet the sense of futility, of limited significance even of your best, most ardent actions is better than the illusion of their consequence and the attendant self-satisfaction.
Better | Illusion | Language | Lesson | Life | Life | Music | Sense | Teach | Time |
Marquis de Condorcet, Marie Jean Antoine Nicolas de Caritat
The moral goodness of man, the necessary consequence of his constitution, is capable of indefinite perfection like all his other faculties, and nature has linked together in an unbreakable chain truth, happiness and virtue.
Man | Nature | Perfection | Truth | Virtue | Virtue | Happiness |
Langdon Gilkey, fully Langdon Brown Gilkey
Human existence has no such simple and direct meaning or goodness as the humanistic American dream... A comfortable chair, a hi-fi set, a pwoerful car, the protection of a deoderant, a college romance and a paying job, cannot even in combination provide meaning for our life.
F. A. Hayek, fully Friedrich August Hayek or von Hayek
Outside the sphere of individual responsibility there is neither goodness or badness… Only where we ourselves are responsible for our own interests and are free to sacrifice them has our decision moral value.
Decision | Individual | Responsibility | Sacrifice |
Julian Huxley, fully Sir Julian Sorell Huxley
Any religion which is not an affirmation of the ultimate value of truth and knowledge, beauty and its expression, and goodness and moral action, which ever sets itself up against these, is in that respect a false, low and incomplete religion.
Action | Beauty | Knowledge | Religion | Respect | Truth | Respect | Beauty | Value |