This site is dedicated to the memory of Dr. Alan William Smolowe who gave birth to the creation of this database.
"It is hardly possible to suspect another without having in one's self the seeds of the baseness the other is accused of." - Stanislaw I, born Stanisław Leszczyński, also spelled Stanislaus NULL
"The only thing worse than a liar is a liar that's also a hypocrite! There are only two great currents in the history of mankind: the baseness which makes conservatives and the envy which makes revolutionaries." - Jules de Goncourt, fully Jules Huot de Goncourt
"The greatest baseness of man is the pursuit of glory. But it is also the great mark of his excellence; for whatever possessions he may have on earth, whatever health and essential comfort, he is not satisfied if he has not the esteem of men." - Blaise Pascal
"All real joy and power of progress... depend on finding something to reverence, and all the baseness and misery of humanity begin in a habit of disdain." - John Ruskin
"All real joy and power of progress in humanity depend on finding something to reverence, and all the baseness and misery of humanity begin in a habit of disdain." - John Ruskin
"Ingratitude is the abridgment of all baseness, a fault never found unattended with other viciousness." - Thomas Fuller
"No baseness or cruelty of treason so deep or so tragic shall enter our human world, but that loyal love shall be able in due time to oppose to just that deed of treason its fitting deed of atonement." - Josiah Royce
"A nation can survive its fools, and even the ambitious. But it cannot survive treason from within. An enemy at the gates is less formidable, for he is known and carries his banner openly. But the traitor moves amongst those within the gate freely, his sly whispers rustling through all the alleys, heard in the very halls of government itself. For the traitor appears not a traitor; he speaks in accents familiar to his victims, and he wears their face and their arguments, he appeals to the baseness that lies deep in the hearts of all men. He rots the soul of a nation, he works secretly and unknown in the night to undermine the pillars of the city, he infects the body politic so that it can no longer resist. A murderer is less to fear." - Cicero, fully Marcus Tullius Cicero, anglicized as Tully NULL
"It is much safer to be feared than loved because ...love is preserved by the link of obligation which, owing to the baseness of men, is broken at every opportunity for their advantage; but fear preserves you by a dread of punishment which never fails. " - Niccolò Machiavelli, formally Niccolò di Bernardo dei Machiavelli
"The childish and outgrown absurdities, the moral baseness in the idea of God interwoven (shaped on the pattern of an Eastern despot) with the memories of Christ’s beautiful life and teaching and death into a system. . . . [A]nd that demolition will happen now gently and quickly—now that there is once more a kindred human soul to Christ’s on the earth—one filled with the same radiant glowing consciousness (it is a consciousness, not a belief) of the divine and immortal nature of the human soul—the same fearless, trusting, loving attitude towards God, as of a son, the same actual close embracing shape in what new and rich developments through the lips of this Poet! . . . Now Christianity will go—and Christ be better understood and loved than He has been since those early times when His great personal influence yet vibrated in the world, and the darkness of His expounders had not begun to work adversely to the growing lights of succeeding times." - Anne Gilchrist, née Burrows
"There is a certain kind of morality which is even more alien to good and evil than amorality is." - Simone Weil
"Now what greater comfort is there than this, that there is one presides in the world who is so wise he cannot be mistaken, so faithful he cannot deceive, so pitiful he cannot neglect his people, and so powerful that he can make stones even to be turned into bread if he please!" - Stephen Charnock
"The government is us; we are the government, you and I." - Theodore “Teddy” Roosevelt
"Mild is the parting year, and sweet the odour of the falling spray; life passes on more rudely fleet, and balmless is its closing day. I wait its close, I court its gloom, but mourn that never must there fall or on my breast or on my tomb the tear that would have soothed it all." - Walter Savage Landor
"There is but one Paris and however hard living may be here, and if it became worse and harder even-the French air clears up the brain and does good-a world of good." - Vincent van Gogh, fully Vincent Willem van Gogh
"The elevated sentiments and high examples which poetry, eloquence, and history are often bringing under our view naturally tend to nourish in our minds public spirit, the love of glory, contempt of external fortune, and the admiration of what is truly illustrious and great." - Hugh Blair
"How does Love speak? In the faint flush upon the telltale cheek, and in the pallor that succeeds it; by the quivering lid of an averted eye-- the smile that proves the parent to a sigh thus doth Love speak." - Ella Wheeler Wilcox
"To venture upon an undertaking of any kind, even the most insignificant, is to sacrifice to envy." - Emil M. Cioran
"Gladness, in some instances, springs from a natural buoyancy of temperament, and is quite consistent with shallowness and superficiality of character. In other cases it is coincident with the swift flow of the currents of the blood, and ceases when the stream flows more slowly and begins to stagnate. Or it is due to gifts which an exceptional good fortune showers into the laps of favoured mortals. Gladness of this sort comes with happiness and departs with it." - Felix Adler