This site is dedicated to the memory of Dr. Alan William Smolowe who gave birth to the creation of this database.
Spiro T. Agnew, fully Spiro Theodore Agnew
Intellectual and spiritual leaders hailed the cause of civil rights and gave little thought to where the civil disobedience road might end. But defiance of the law, even for the best reasons, opens a tiny hole in the dike and soon a trickle becomes a flood... And while no thinking person denies that social injustice exits, no thinking person can condone any group, for any reason, taking justice into his own hands. Once this is permitted, democracy dies; for democracy is sustained through one great premise: the premise that civil rights are balanced by civil responsibilities.
Cause | Civil disobedience | Defiance | Democracy | Disobedience | Injustice | Injustice | Justice | Law | Little | Reason | Rights | Thinking | Thought | Wisdom | Thought |
Debt haunts the mind; a conversation about justice troubles it; the sight of a creditor fills it with confusion; even the sanctuary is not a place of refuge. The borrower is servant to the lender. Independence, so essential to the virtues and pleasures of a man, can only be maintained by setting bounds to our desires and owing no man anything.
Conversation | Debt | Justice | Man | Mind | Troubles | Wisdom |
The office of government is not to confer happiness, but to give men opportunity to work out happiness for themselves.
Government | Men | Office | Opportunity | Wisdom | Work | Government | Happiness |
Free inquiry, if restrained within due bounds, and applied to proper subjects, is a most important privilege of the human mind; and if well conducted, is one of the greatest friends to truth. But when reason knows neither its office nor its limits, and when employed on subjects foreign to its jurisdiction, it then becomes a privilege dangerous to be exercised.
Important | Inquiry | Mind | Office | Reason | Truth | Wisdom | Friends | Privilege |
Clarence Darrow, fully Clarence Seward Darrow
There is no such thing as justice - in or out of court.
Every kind of peaceful cooperation among men is primarily based on mutual trust and only secondarily on institutions such as courts of justice and police.
Cooperation | Justice | Men | Trust | Wisdom |
E. M. Forster, fully Edward Morgan Forster
It is pleasant to be transferred from an office where one is afraid of a sergeant-major into an office where one can intimidate generals, and perhaps this is why History is so attractive to the more timid among us. We can recover self-confidence by snubbing the dead.
Confidence | History | Office | Self | Self-confidence | Wisdom | Afraid |
Municipal government is corrupt simply because corrupt and corruptible men are elected to office. Corrupt men are elected to office because office “pays” and corruptible men yield because they make money by; yielding. If municipal government had no profitable contracts to award, if school boards had no textbooks to select, we should have no “municipal problem.”
Government | Men | Money | Office | Wisdom | Yielding | Government |
Epaminondas (or Epameinodas) NULL
Not only does the office distinguish the man, but also the man the office.
Distinguish | Man | Office | Wisdom |