This site is dedicated to the memory of Dr. Alan William Smolowe who gave birth to the creation of this database.
Celtic civilization was tribal, but by no means savage or uncultivated. People who regarded the theft of a harp from a bard as a crime second only to an attack on the tribal chieftain cannot be regarded as wanting in cultivated feeling.
Civilization | Crime | Means | People |
Robert Ingersoll, fully Robert Green "Bob" Ingersoll
Blasphemy is what an old mistake says of a newly discovered truth. Blasphemy is what a withered last year's leaf says to a this year's bud. Blasphemy is the bulwark of religious prejudice. Blasphemy is the breastplate of the heartless. And let me say now, that the crime of blasphemy, as set out in this statute, is impossible. No man can blaspheme a book. No man can commit blasphemy by telling his honest thought. No man can blaspheme a God, or a Holy Ghost, or a Son of God. The Infinite cannot be blasphemed.
We are born to action; and whatever is capable of suggesting and guiding action has power over us from the first.
Crime |
In regard to religion, mutual toleration in the different professions thereof is what all good and candid minds in all ages have ever practiced, and, both by precept and example, inculcated on mankind.
The worst that can be said against [a provision to require a literacy test for immigrants] would be that it would have a tendency to induce prospective immigrants from other countries to attain some degree of education in order that they might meet the test. Is there any good reason for objection upon that score? The fact that there have been and are a number of unemployed workers in the United States ought to prompt men engaged in the affairs of our country to take some consideration of the workmen already here.
Samuel Johnson, aka Doctor Johnson
High people, Sir, are the best: Take a hundred ladies of quality, you'll find them better wives, better mothers, more willing to sacrifice their own pleasures to their children, than a hundred other women.
Samuel Johnson, aka Doctor Johnson
If pleasure was not followed by pain, who would forbear it?
Crime | Humanity | Man | Punishment |
Samuel Johnson, aka Doctor Johnson
Wealth is nothing in itself, it is not useful but when it departs from us; its value is found only in that which it can purchase, which, if we suppose it put to its best use by those that posses it, seems not much to deserve the desire or envy of a wise man. It is certain that, with regard to corporal enjoyment, money can neither open new avenues to pleasure, nor block up the passages to anguish. Disease and infirmity still continue to torture and enfeeble, perhaps exasperated by luxury, or promoted by softness. With respect to the mind, it has rarely been observed, that wealth contributes much to quicken the discernment, enlarge the capacity, or elevate the imagination; but may, by hiring flattery, or laying diligence asleep, confirm error, and harden stupidity.
Crime |
Algebra and money are essentially levelers; the first intellectually, the second effectively.
Crime | Guilt | Self-hatred | Sense | Soul |
The schools would fail through their silence, the Church through its forgiveness, and the home through the denial and silence of the parents. The new generation has to hear what the older generation refuses to tell it.
Arthur Conan Doyle, fully Sir Arthur Ignatius Conan Doyle
Are you conscious of the restful influence which the stars exert? To me they are the most soothing things in Nature. I am proud to say that I don't know the name of one of them. The glamour and romance would pass away from them if they were all classified and ticketed in one's brain. But when a man is hot and flurried, and full of his own little ruffled dignities and infinitesimal misfortunes, then a star bath is the finest thing in the world.
Beauty | Crime | Isolation | Law | Opinion | Present | Public | Reason | Sin | Thought | Beauty | Thought |
Arthur Conan Doyle, fully Sir Arthur Ignatius Conan Doyle
All my instincts are one way, and all the facts are the other, and I much fear that British juries have not yet attained that pitch of intelligence when they will give the preference to my theories over Lestrade's facts.
Arthur Conan Doyle, fully Sir Arthur Ignatius Conan Doyle
Dame Ermyntrude Loring, wife, and mother of warriors, was herself a formidable figure. Tall and gaunt, with hard craggy features and intolerant dark eyes, even her snow-white hair and stooping back could not entirely remove the sense of fear which she inspired in those around her. Her thoughts and memories went back to harsher times, and she looked upon the England around her as a degenerate and effeminate land which had fallen away for the old standard of knightly courtesy and valor.
Arthur Conan Doyle, fully Sir Arthur Ignatius Conan Doyle
If I could be assured of your destruction, i would in the interest of the public, cheerfully accept my death.
Stanley Baldwin, 1st Earl of Bewdley
The Holy Bible is not only great but high explosive literature. It works in strange ways and no living man can tell or know how that book in its journeyings through the world has started an individual soul 10,000 different places into a new life, a new belief, a new conception and a new faith.