This site is dedicated to the memory of Dr. Alan William Smolowe who gave birth to the creation of this database.
What action would promote happiness of a rational being is completely insoluble, and consequently no imperative respect it is possible which should, in the strict sense, command to do what makes happy; because happiness is not an ideal of reason but of imagination, resting solely on empirical grounds, and it is vain to expect that these should define an action by which one could attain the totality of a series of consequences which is really endless.
Action | Consequences | Happy | Imagination | Reason | Respect | Sense | Respect | Happiness |
Where an excess of power prevails, property of no sort is duly respected. No man is safe in his opinions, his person, his faculties, or his possessions. Where there is an excess of liberty, the effect is the same, though from an opposite cause. Government is instituted to protect property of every sort, as well that which lies in the various rights of individuals, as that which the term particularly expresses. This being the end of government that alone is a just government which impartially secures to every man whatever is his own.
Cause | Excess | Government | Liberty | Man | Possessions | Power | Property | Rights | Safe | Government |
Mortimer J. Adler, fully Mortimer Jerome Adler
More consequences for thought and action follow from the affirmation or denial of God than from answering any other question.
Action | Consequences | God | Question | Thought | God | Thought |
The wise through excess of wisdom is made a fool.
If there is anything more dangerous to the life of the mind than having no independent commitment to ideas, it is having an excess of commitment to some special and constricting idea.
Our actions are our own; their consequences belong to Heaven.
Consequences | Heaven |
The body, too, with yesterday’s excess burden’d and tired shall the pure soul depress.
A just war is in the long run far better for a nation’s soul than the most prosperous peace obtained by acquiescence toward wrong or injustice. Moreover, though it is criminal for a nation not to prepare for war, so that it may escape the dreadful consequences of being defeated in war, it must always be remembered that even to be defeated in war is far better than never to have fought at all.
Better | Consequences | Injustice | Injustice | Peace | Soul | War | Wrong |
Thomas Henry Huxley, aka T.H. Huxley and Darwin's Bulldog
Logical consequences are the scarecrows of fools and the beacons of wise men.
Consequences | Men | Wise |
Voltaire, pen name of François-Marie Arouet NULL
Use, do not abuse; neither abstinence nor excess ever renders a man happy.
Abstinence | Abuse | Excess | Happy | Man |
C. S. Lewis, fully Clive Staples "C.S." Lewis, called "Jack" by his family
For every one pupil who needs to be guarded from a weak excess of sensibility there are three who need to be awakened from the slumber of cold vulgarity. The task of the modern educator is not to cut down jungles but to irrigate deserts.
Excess | Need | Sensibility | Vulgarity |
Baron d’Holbach, Paul Henri Thiry, born Paul Heinrich Dietrich
In short, the actions of man are never free; they are always the necessary consequences of his temperament, of the received ideas, and of the notions, either true or false, which he has formed to himself of happiness.
Consequences | Ideas | Man |
Forget about the consequences of failure. Failure is only a temporary change in direction to set you straight for your next success.
Change | Consequences | Failure | Success | Failure |
I believe that we are solely responsible for our choices, and we have to accept the consequences of every deed, word, and thought throughout our lifetime.
Consequences | Thought | Thought |
You are free to choose, but you are not free to alter the consequences of your decisions.
Erich Fromm, fully Erich Seligmann Fromm
By alienation is meant a mode of experience in which the person experiences himself as an alien. He has become, one might say, estranged from himself. He does not experience himself as the center of his world, as the creator of his own acts — but his acts and their consequences have become his masters, whom he obeys, or whom he may even worship. The alienated person is out of touch with himself as he is out of touch with any other person. He, like the others, are experienced as things are experienced; with the senses and with common sense, but at the same time without being related to oneself and to the world outside positively.
Alienation | Consequences | Experience | Time | World |