This site is dedicated to the memory of Dr. Alan William Smolowe who gave birth to the creation of this database.
Pity is the virtue of the law, and none but tyrants use it cruelly. Timon of Athens, Act iii, Scene 5
Murasaki Shikibu, aka Lady Murasaki
It is useless to talk with those who do not understand one and troublesome to talk with those who criticize from a feeling of superiority. Especially one-sided persons are troublesome. Few are accomplished in many arts and most cling narrowly to their own opinion.
The brightest crowns that are worn in heaven have been tried, and smelted, and polished, and glorified through the furnace of tribulation.
Heart |
Prince Shōtoku, born Shotoku Taishi, aka Prince Umayado or Prince Kamitsumiya
Do not be envious! For if we envy others, then they in turn will envy us. The evils of envy know no limit. If others surpass us in intelligence, we are not pleased; if they are more able, we are envious. But if we do not find wise men and sages, how shall the realm be governed?
In the history of man it has been very generally the case, that when evils have grown insufferable they have touched the point of cure.
Good |
Do we, mad as we all are after riches, hear often enough from the pulpit the spirit of those words in which Dean Swift, in his epitaph on the affluent and profligate Colonel Chartres, announces the small esteem of wealth in the eyes of God, from the fact of His thus lavishing it upon the meanest and basest of His creatures?
Contempt | Enough | Good | Principles |
A patient, humble temper gathers blessings that are marred by the peevish, and overlooked by the aspiring.
We have overdeveloped the individualism that arose in a pioneer country. We are destined to become more co-operative, more collectivistic, and to find in this direction still greater opportunity for the individual, not so much restricted and defeated by competition but enlarged and enhanced by the support of a common will. It may be that the problem of material goods--of the necessary but yet external goods of food, clothing, shelter, and money-is about to be solved through new discoveries and developments, with the energies of men left freer than they have ever been to cultivate on higher levels the sharable goods of life, such as love and wisdom. These values grow with use and multiply by being freely shared.
Business | Church | Defiance | God | Isolation | Knowledge | Organic | Sense | Society | Society | Business | God | Old |
Murasaki Shikibu, aka Lady Murasaki
Let us be sure that the lady of our choice possesses certain tangible qualities that we admire; and if in other ways she falls short of our ideal, we must be patient and call to mind those qualities that first induced us to begin our courting.
In such diffused changes of culture two factors are necessary: contact and understanding.
Eldridge Cleaver, fully Leroy Eldridge Cleaver
The oppressor has no right to which the oppressed is bound to respect.
Egon Friedell, born Egon Friedmann
Clothe an idea in words and it loses its freedom of movement.
Old |
I have not been animated in my life to fight against race and sex discrimination simply because of my own identity. That would mean that one must be South African to fight apartheid, or a poor white in Appalachia to fight poverty, or Jewish to fight anti-Semitism. And I just reject that conception of how struggles should be waged.
If you search for the laws of harmony, you will find knowledge.
Eldridge Cleaver, fully Leroy Eldridge Cleaver
The Twist was a guided missile launched from the ghetto into the heart of suburbia. The Twist succeeded, as politics, religion, and law could never do, in writing in the heart and soul what the Supreme Court could only write on the books.