This site is dedicated to the memory of Dr. Alan William Smolowe who gave birth to the creation of this database.
There is no man in any rank who is always at liberty to act as he would incline. In some quarter or other he is limited by circumstances.
Circumstances | Liberty | Man | Rank | Wisdom |
The tree of liberty grows only when watered by the blood of tyrants.
Tolerance of opinions which are thought to be innocuous is as easy, as acts of charity that entail no sacrifice. But the test of a free society is its tolerance of what is deplored or despised by a majority of its members. The argument for such tolerance must be made on the ground that it is useful to the society... that free societies are better fitted to survive than closed societies.
Argument | Better | Charity | Majority | Sacrifice | Society | Thought | Wisdom | Society | Thought |
Edward Bulwer-Lytton, 1st Baron Lytton, fully Edward George Earle Lytton Bulwer-Lytton, Lord Lytton
Personal liberty is the paramount essential to human dignity and human happiness.
Edward Bulwer-Lytton, 1st Baron Lytton, fully Edward George Earle Lytton Bulwer-Lytton, Lord Lytton
Political freedom is, or ought to be, the best guaranty for the safety and continuance of spiritual, mental, and civil freedom. It is the combination of numbers to secure the liberty to each one.
Edmond Cahn, fully Edmond Nathaniel Cahn
Freedom is not free. Shaping and preserving society necessarily involves personal commitment, costly risk and constant effort; the cultivation of civil liberty can be no more passive than the cultivation of a farm. A man can inherit the land on which he lives, he can even inherit the first crop of produce after he takes over from those who came before him. But then if he stops, everything stops, and begins to crumble. Nothing grows, nothing ripe and rewarding comes to him, unless he plows, plants and tends the soil and unless he keeps it fertile year after year with the chemistry of effort and forethought.
Commitment | Cultivation | Effort | Forethought | Freedom | Land | Liberty | Man | Nothing | Risk | Society | Wisdom | Society |
Miguel de Cervantes, fully Miguel de Cervantes Saaversa
Works of charity negligently performed are of no worth.
John W. Daniel, fully John Warwick Daniel
Grand and manifold as were its phases, there is yet no difficulty in understanding the character of Washington. He was no Veiled Prophet. He never acted a part. Simple, natural, and unaffected, his life lies before us - a fair and open manuscript. He disdained the arts which wrap power in mystery in order to magnify it. He practiced the profound diplomacy of truthful speech - the consummate tact of direct attention. Looking ever to the All-Wise Disposer of events, he relied on that Providence which helps men by giving them high hearts and hopes to help themselves with the means which their Creator has put at their service. There was no infirmity in his conduct over which charity must fling its veil; no taint of selfishness from which purity averts her gaze; no dark recess of intrigue that must be lit up with colored panegyric; no subterranean passage to be trod in trembling, lest there be stirred the ghost of a buried crime.
Attention | Character | Charity | Conduct | Crime | Difficulty | Diplomacy | Events | Giving | Intrigue | Life | Life | Means | Men | Mystery | Order | Power | Providence | Purity | Selfishness | Service | Speech | Tact | Understanding | Wisdom | Wise |
E. M. Forster, fully Edward Morgan Forster
The hungry and the homeless don't care about liberty any more than they care about cultural heritage. To pretend that they do care is cant.
François Fénelon, fully Francois de Salignac de la Mothe-Fénelon
Beware of fatiguing them by ill-judged exactness. If virtue offers itself to the child under a melancholy and constrained aspect, while liberty and license present themselves under an agreeable form, all is lost, and your labor is in vain.
Labor | Liberty | Melancholy | Present | Virtue | Virtue | Wisdom | Child |
Capital punishment is as fundamentally wrong as a cure for crime as charity is wrong as a cure for poverty.
Capital punishment | Charity | Crime | Poverty | Punishment | Wisdom | Wrong |
A rich man without charity is a rogue; and perhaps it would be no difficult matter to prove that he is also a fool.
Without freedom of thought, there can be no such thing as wisdom; and no such thing as public liberty without freedom of speech; which is the right of every man as far as by it he does not hurt or control the right of another; and this is the only check it ought to suffer and the only bounds it ought to know... Whoever would overthrow the liberty of a nation must begin by subduing the freedom of speech, a thing terrible to traitors.
Control | Freedom of speech | Freedom of thought | Freedom | Liberty | Man | Public | Right | Speech | Thought | Wisdom |