This site is dedicated to the memory of Dr. Alan William Smolowe who gave birth to the creation of this database.
It was under a solemn consciousness of the dangers from ecclesiastical ambition, the bigotry of spiritual pride, and the intolerance of sects... that is was deemed advisable to exclude from the national government all power to act upon the subject.
Bigotry | Consciousness | Government | Intolerance | Power | Government |
Carl von Clausewitz, fully Carl Philipp Gottfried von Clausewitz, also Karl von Clausewitz
Obstinacy is a fault of temperament. Stubbornness and intolerance of contradiction result from a special kind of egotism, which elevates above everything else the pleasure of its autonomous intellect, to which others must bow.
Contradiction | Fault | Intolerance | Pleasure | Fault |
Lester Pearson, fully Lester Bowles "Mike" Pearson
It would be especially tragic if the people who most cherish ideals of peace, who are most anxious for political cooperation on a wider than national scale, made the mistake of underestimating the pace of economic change in our modern world.
Change | Cooperation | Ideals | Mistake | People |
Louis L'Amour, fully Louis Dearborn L'Amour
A mistake constantly made by those who should know better is to judge people of the past by our standards rather than their own. The only way men or women can be judged is against the canvas of their own time.
Some men mistake talking about sense, for talking sense.
The voice of conscience is so delicate that it is easy to stifle it; but it is also so clear that it is impossible to mistake it.
Conscience | Mistake |
Lyndon Johnson, fully Lyndon Baines Johnson, aka LBJ
Books and ideas are the most effective weapons against intolerance and ignorance.
Ideas | Intolerance | Weapons |
It is right noble to fight with wickedness and wrong; the mistake is in supposing that spiritual evil can be overcome by physical means.
Evil | Mistake | Right | Wickedness |
Marguerite Yourcenar, pseudonym for Marguerite Cleenewerck de Crayencour
Our great mistake is to try to exact from each person virtues which he does not possess, and to neglect the cultivation of those which he has.
Cultivation | Mistake | Neglect |
Maya Angelou, born Marguerite Annie Johnson
I don't know if I continue, even today, always liking myself. But what I learned to do many years ago was to forgive myself. It is very important for every human being to forgive herself or himself because if you live, you will make mistakes- it is inevitable. But once you do and you see the mistake, then you forgive yourself and say, 'Well, if I'd known better I'd have done better,' that's all. So you say to people who you think you may have injured, 'I'm sorry,' and then you say to yourself, 'I'm sorry.' If we all hold on to the mistake, we can't see our own glory in the mirror because we have the mistake between our faces and the mirror; we can't see what we're capable of being. You can ask forgiveness of others, but in the end the real forgiveness is in one's own self. I think that young men and women are so caught by the way they see themselves. Now mind you. When a larger society sees them as unattractive, as threats, as too black or too white or too poor or too fat or too thin or too sexual or too asexual, that's rough. But you can overcome that. The real difficulty is to overcome how you think about yourself. If we don't have that we never grow, we never learn, and sure as hell we should never teach.
Better | Difficulty | Forgiveness | Glory | Hell | Important | Men | Mind | Mistake | People | Society | Will | Forgiveness | Society | Forgive | Think |
Technology as the knack of eliminating the world as resistance,... the technologist's worldlessness.... My mistake lay in the fact that we technologists try to live without death.
Michael Harrington, fully Edward Michael "Mike" Harrington
That the poor are invisible is one of the most important things about them. They are not simply neglected and forgotten as in the old rhetoric of reform; what is much worse, they are not seen.
In love, no certainty is ultimate... That elementary thing - the feeling that you are loved - must be certified again and again, because one doubt,one mistake razes everything to madness and ecstasy.
Milton Friedman, fully John Milton Friedman
I start…from a belief in individual freedom and that derives fundamentally from a belief in the limitations of our knowledge, from a belief…that nobody can be sure that what he believes is right, is really right.…I’m an imperfect human being who cannot be certain of anything, so what position…involved the least intolerance on my part?…The most attractive position…is putting individual freedom first.
Belief | Freedom | Individual | Intolerance |
The basis of shame is not some personal mistake of ours, but the ignominy, the humiliation we feel that we must be what we are without any choice in the matter, and that this humiliation is seen by everyone.
Wolfgang Amadeus Mozart, baptismal name Johannes Chrysostomus Wolfgangus Theophilus Mozart
It is a mistake to think that the practice of my art has become easy to me. I assure you, dear friend, no one has given so much care to the study of composition as I. There is scarcely a famous master in music whose works I have not frequently and diligently studied.
Art | Care | Famous | Mistake | Music | Practice | Study | Art | Think |