This site is dedicated to the memory of Dr. Alan William Smolowe who gave birth to the creation of this database.
Madame Swetchine, fully Anne Sophie Swetchine née Sophia Petrovna Soïmonov or Soymanof
We deceive ourselves when we fancy that only weakness needs support. Strength needs it far more.
M. Scott Peck, fully Morgan Scott Peck
When I say that evil has to do with killing, I do not mean to restrict myself to corporeal murder. Evil is that which kills spirit. There are various essential attributes of life -- particularly human life -- such as sentience, mobility, awareness, growth, autonomy, will. It is possible to kill or attempt to kill one of these attributes without actually destroying the body. Thus we may "break" a horse or even a child without harming a hair on its head. Erich Fromm was acutely sensitive to this fact when he broadened the definition of necrophilia to include the desire of certain people to control others-to make them controllable, to foster their dependency, to discourage their capacity to think for themselves, to diminish their unpredectibility and originalty, to keep them in line. Distinguishing it from a "biophilic" person, one who appreciates and fosters the variety of life forms and the uniqueness of the individual, he demonstrated a "necrophilic character type," whose aim it is to avoid the inconvenience of life by transforming others into obedient automatons, robbing them of their humanity. Evil then, for the moment, is the force, residing either inside or outside of human beings, that seeks to kill life or liveliness. And goodness is its opposite. Goodness is that which promotes life and liveliness.
Capacity | Character | Control | Desire | Evil | Kill | Life | Life | People | Child | Think |
Cicero, fully Marcus Tullius Cicero, anglicized as Tully NULL
Your enemies can kill you, but only your friends can hurt you.
Martin Tupper, fully Martin Farquhar Tupper
In the morning of life, before its wearisome journey, The youthful soul doth expand, in the simple luxury of being; It hath not contracted its wishes, nor set a limit on its hopes; The wing of fancy is unclipped, and sin hath not seared the feelings: Each feature is stamped with immortality, for all its desires are infinite, And it seeketh an ocean of happiness, to fill the deep hollow within.
The problem is that you cannot prove yourself against someone who is much weaker than yourself. They are in a lose/lose situation. If you are strong and fighting the weak, then if you kill your opponent then you are a scoundrel... if you let him kill you, then you are an idiot. So here is a dilemma which others have suffered before us, and for which as far as I can see there is simply no escape.
Mary Shelley, née Mary Wollstonecraft Godwin
I seek not a fellow feeling in my misery. No sympathy may I ever find. When I first sought it, it was the love of virtue, the feelings of happiness and affection with which my whole being overflowed, that I wished to be participated. But now that virtue has become to me a shadow, and that happiness and affection are turned into bitter and loathing despair, in what should I seek for sympathy? I am content to suffer alone while my sufferings shall endure; when I die, I am well satisfied that abhorrence and opprobrium should load my memory. Once my fancy was soothed with dreams of virtue, of fame, and of enjoyment. Once I falsely hoped to meet with beings who, pardoning my outward form, would love me for the excellent qualities which I was capable of unfolding. I was nourished with high thoughts of honour and devotion. But now crime has degraded me beneath the meanest animal. No guilt, no mischief, no malignity, no misery, can be found comparable to mine. When I run over the frightful catalogue of my sins, I cannot believe that I am the same creature whose thoughts were once filled with sublime and transcendent visions of the beauty and the majesty of goodness. But it is even so; the fallen angel becomes a malignant devil. Yet even that enemy of God and man had friends and associates in his desolation; I am alone.
Associates | Beauty | Crime | Dreams | Enemy | Feelings | God | Loathing | Love | Man | Qualities | Sympathy | Virtue | Virtue | Beauty | God | Friends | Happiness |
Max Jacob, pen name Léon David and Morven le Gaëlique
Friendship is inexplicable, it should not be explained if one doesn't want to kill it.
Kill |
Maxim Gorky, pen name of Alexei Maximovich Peshkov
We kill everybody, my dear. Some with bullets, some with words, and everybody with our deeds. We drive people into their graves, and neither see it nor feel it.
Maya Angelou, born Marguerite Annie Johnson
Did you want to see me broken? Bowed head and lowered eyes? Shoulders falling down like teardrops. Weakened by my soulful cries. You may shoot me with your words, You may cut me with your eyes, You may kill me with your hatefulness, But still, like air, I’ll rise.
Kill |
Maya Angelou, born Marguerite Annie Johnson
You may shoot me with your words, you may cut me with your eyes, you may kill me with your hatefulness, but still, like air, I'll rise!
Kill |
Meher Baba, born Merwan Sheriar Irani
So long for one thing; be restless for one thing; long and wait for one thing that will kill the million other longings. Long for union with the Beloved.
Ordinary people, even weak people, can do extraordinary things through temporary courage generated by a situation. But the person of character does not need the situation to generate his courage. It is a part of his being and a standard approach to all life's challenges. We’re all ethical in our own eyes. Although we are usually judged by our last worst act, we usually judge ourselves by our most noble deeds, our best intentions and our most virtuous traits. Character is not a fancy coat we put on for show, it’s who we really are.
Together with war [the death penalty] was for a long time the other form of the right of the sword; it constituted the reply of the sovereign to those who attacked his will, his law, or his person... As soon as power gave itself the function of administering life, its reason for being and the logic of its exercise - and not the awakening of humanitarian feelings - made it more difficult to apply the death penalty. How could power exercise its highest prerogatives by putting people to death, when its main role was to ensure, sustain and multiply life, to put this life in order? For such a power, execution was at the same time a limit, a scandal, and a contradiction. Hence capital punishment could not be maintained except by invoking less the enormity of the crime itself than the monstrosity of the criminal, his incorrigibility, and the safeguard of society. One had the right to kill those who represented a kind of biological danger to others.
Awakening | Capital punishment | Crime | Danger | Death | Feelings | Kill | Life | Life | Logic | People | Power | Punishment | Reason | Right | Time | War | Danger |
Mikhail Bakunin, fully Mikhail Alexandrovich Bakunin
All religions, with their gods, their demigods, and their prophets, their messiahs and their saints, were created by the credulous fancy of men who had not attained the full development and full possession of their faculties. Consequently, the religious heaven is nothing but a mirage in which man, exalted by ignorance and faith, discovers his own image, but enlarged and reversed — that is, divinized. The history of religion, of the birth, grandeur, and decline of the gods who have succeeded one another in human belief, is nothing, therefore, but the development of the collective intelligence and conscience of mankind.
Conscience | Heaven | History | Ignorance | Intelligence | Men | Nothing |
The very beginning of Genesis tells us that God created man in order to give him dominion over fish and fowl and all creatures. Of course, Genesis was written by a man, not a horse. There is no certainty that God actually did grant man dominion over other creatures. What seems more likely, in fact, is that man invented God to sanctify the dominion that he had usurped for himself over the cow and the horse. Yes, the right to kill a deer or a cow is the only thing all of mankind can agree upon, even during the bloodiest of wars.
Beginning | God | Kill | Man | Mankind | Order | Right | God |