This site is dedicated to the memory of Dr. Alan William Smolowe who gave birth to the creation of this database.
We are not fond of praising, and never praise any one except from interested motives. Praise is a clever, concealed, and delicate flattery, which gratifies in different ways the giver and the receiver. The one takes it as a recompense of his merit, and the other bestows it to display his equity and discernment.
Discernment | Display | Equity | Flattery | Merit | Motives | Praise | Recompense |
Few persons have sufficient wisdom to prefer censure which is useful to them to praise which deceives them.
Generally we praise only to be praised... Refusal of praise is a desire to be praised twice.
To praise great actions with sincerity may be said to be taking part in them.
All wars are wars among thieves who are too cowardly to fight and who therefore induce the young manhood of the whole world to do the fighting for them.
It is a sign of a creeping inner death when we no longer can praise the living.
Great evils befall the world when the powerful begin to copy the weak. The desperate devices which enable the weak to survive are unequaled instruments of oppression and extermination in the hands of the strong.
Oppression | World |
When a man argues for victory and not for truth, he is sure of just one ally, that is the devil. Not the defeat of intellect, but the acceptance of the heart is the only true object in fighting with the sword of spirit.
Acceptance | Defeat | Devil | Fighting | Heart | Man | Object | Spirit | Truth |
Wilson said that America’s doughboys fought for the Fourteen Points. Roosevelt said the GI was fighting for the Four Freedoms. Johnson and Humphrey sent men out to die for the planting of dams in Vietnam. Nixon preaches a war of generosity. Each time we have fought in this century, our leaders have denied that we did it for ourselves.
Fighting | Generosity | Men | Time | War |
The meanest, most contemptible kind of praise is that which first speaks well of a man, and then qualifies it with a 'but.'
The meanest, most contemptible kind of praise is that which first speaks well of a man, and then qualifies it with a "but."
John Ciardi, fully John Anthony Ciardi
It is easy enough to praise men for the courage of their convictions. I wish I could teach the sad young of this mealy generation the courage of their confusions.
Superstition, in all times and among all nations, is the fear of a spirit whose passions are those of a man, whose acts are the acts of a man; who is present in some places, not in others; who makes some places holy and not others; who is kind to one person, unkind to another; who is pleased or angry according to the degree of attention you pay him, or praise you refuse him; who is hostile generally to human pleasure, but may be bribed by sacrifice of a part of that pleasure into permitting the rest. This, whatever form of faith it colors, is the essence of superstition.
Attention | Faith | Fear | Man | Nations | Pleasure | Praise | Present | Rest | Sacrifice | Spirit | Superstition |
The highest thoughts are those which are least dependent on language, and the dignity of any composition and praise to which it is entitled are in exact proportion to is dependency of language and expression.