This site is dedicated to the memory of Dr. Alan William Smolowe who gave birth to the creation of this database.
"Everywhere in these days men have, in their mockery, ceased to understand that the true security is to be found in social solidarity rather than in isolated individual effort." - Fyodor Dostoevsky, fully Fyodor Mikhaylovich Dostoevsky or Feodor Mikhailovich Dostoevski
"This is man: a writer of books, a putter-down of words, a painter of pictures, a maker of ten thousand philosophies. He grows passionate over ideas, he hurls scorn and mockery at another's work, he finds the one way, the true way, for himself, and calls all others false--yet in the billion books upon the shelves there is not one that can tell him how to draw a single fleeting breath in peace and comfort. He makes histories of the universe, he directs the destiny of the nations, but he does not know his own history, and he cannot direct his own destiny with dignity or wisdom for ten consecutive minutes. " - Thomas Wolfe, fully Thomas Clayton Wolfe
"It is impossible to conceive any contrast more entire and absolute than that which exists between a heart glowing with love to God, and a heart in which the love of money has cashiered all sense of God - His love, His presence, His glory; and which is no sooner relieved from the mockery of a tedious round of religious formalism than it reverts to the sanctuaries where its wealth is invested, with an intenseness of homage surpassing that of the most devout Israelite who ever, from a foreign land, turned his longing eyes toward Jerusalem." - Richard Fuller
"True religion teaches us to reverence what is under us, to recognize humility and poverty, and despite mockery and disgrace, wretchedness, suffering, and death as things divine." - Johann Wolfgang von Goethe
"As knowledge advances, science ceases to scoff at religion; and religion ceases to frown on science. The hour of mockery by the one, and of reproof by the other, is passing away. Henceforth, they will dwell together in unity and good-will. They will mutually illustrate the wisdom, power, and grace of God. Science will adorn and enrich religion; and religion will ennoble and sanctify science." - Oliver Wendell Holmes, Sr.
"Political sovereignty is but a mockery without the means of meeting poverty and illiteracy and disease. Self-determination is but a slogan if the future holds no hope." - John F. Kennedy, fully John Fitzgerald "Jack" Kennedy
"We are bleeding at the roots, because we are cut off from the earth and sun and stars, and love is grinning mockery, because, poor blossom, we plucked it from its stem on the tree of Life, and expected it to keep on blooming in our civilized vase on the table." - D. H. Lawrence, fully David Herbert "D.H." Lawrence
"The Christian faith is a sacrifice: a sacrifice of all freedom, all pride, all self-confidence of the spirit; at the same time, enslavement and self-mockery, self-mutilation." - Friedrich Nietzsche, fully Friedrich Wilhelm Nietzsche
"All acts of charity or giving are valuable only inasmuch as they recognize the true dignity of those toward whom the contribution is directed. Any money or time given to another without recognizing their full equality, is as chaff in the wind, and serves only the mockery of the ego. Pity or sorrow is never a worthy reason for charity, for it only reinforces the bondage of the giver and the recipient. Real charity is never a giving, but always a sharing. He who gives as a giver remains half; he who shares, knows wholeness." - Alan Cohen
"All acts of charity or giving are valuable only inasmuch as they recognize the true dignity of those toward whom the contribution is directed. Any money or time given to another without recognizing their full equality, is as chaff in the wind, and serves only the mockery of the ego. Pity or sorrow is never a worthy reason for charity, for it only reinforces the bondage of the giver and the recipient. Real charity is never a giving, but always a sharing. He who gives as a giver remains half; he who shares, knows wholeness." -
"All acts of charity or giving are valuable only inasmuch as they recognize the true dignity of those toward whom the contribution is directed. Any money or time given to another without recognizing their full equality, is as chaff in the wind, and serves only the mockery of the ego. Pity or sorrow is never a worthy reason for charity, for it only reinforces the bondage of the giver and the recipient. Real charity is never a giving, but always a sharing. He who gives as a giver remains half; he who shares, knows wholeness." -
"I know but one freedom and that is the freedom of the mind. As for any other freedom it is but a mockery and a delusion, for however free you may think yourself, you have to use the door when you go out of the room, nor are you free to make yourself young at will or to profit by the sun at night... Not-being is not freedom." - Antoine de Saint-Exupery
"The wider the scope of my reflection on the present and past, the more I am impressed by their mockery of human plans in every transaction." - Tacitus, fully Publius (or Gaius) Cornelius Tacitus NULL
"Who are the really disloyal? Those who inflame racial hatreds, who sow religious and class dissensions. those who subvert the Constitution by violating the freedom of the ballot box. Those who make a mockery of majority rule by the use of the filibuster. Those who impair democracy by denying equal educational facilities. Those who frustrate justice by lynch law or by making a farce of jury trials. Those who deny freedom of speech and of the press and of assembly. Those who demand special favors against the interest of the commonwealth. Those who regard public office as a source of private gain. Those who exalt the military over the civil. Those who for selfish and private purposes stir up national antagonisms and expose the world to the ruin of war." - Henry Steele Commager
"Dogma has been the fundamental principle of my religion... Religion, as mere sentiment, is to me a mockery." - John Henry Newman
"There is one virtue in almost every vice except hypocrisy; and even that, while it is a mockery of virtue, is, at the same time, a compliment to it." - William Hazlitt
"Three passions, simple but overwhelmingly strong, have governed my life: the longing for love, the search for knowledge, and unbearable pity for the suffering of mankind... the whole world of loneliness, poverty, and pain make a mockery of what human life should be. " - Bertrand Russell, fully Bertrand Arthur William Russell, 3rd Earl Russell
"The worst mockery God can make of a moralist is that He compels him to be a solipsist." - Kedar Joshi
"Education must enable young people to effect what they have recognized to be right, despite hardships, despite dangers, despite inner skepticism, despite boredom, and despite mockery from the world. " - Kurt Hahn, fully Kurt Martin "the rod" Hahn
"Having then for the first time clearly understood that before every man, and before himself, there lay only suffering, death, and eternal oblivion, he had concluded that to live under such conditions was impossible; that one must either explain life to oneself so that it does not seem to be an evil mockery by some sort of devil, or one must shoot oneself. But he had done neither the one nor the other, yet he continued to live, think, and feel, had even at that very time got married, experienced many joys, and been happy whenever he was not thinking of the meaning of his life. What did that show? It showed that he had lived well, but thought badly." - Leo Tolstoy, aka Count Lev Nikolayevich Tolstoy or Tolstoi
"No great movement designed to change the world can bear to be laughed at or belittled. Mockery is a rust that corrodes all it touches." - Milan Kundera
"The cause of liberty becomes a mockery if the price to be paid is the wholesale destruction of those who are to enjoy liberty." - Mahatma Gandhi, fully Mohandas Karamchand Gandhi, aka Bapu
"I am so afraid of people's words. They describe so distinctly everything: And this they call dog and that they call house, here the start and there the end. I worry about their mockery with words, they know everything, what will be, what was; no mountain is still miraculous; and their house and yard lead right up to God. I want to warn and object: Let the things be! I enjoy listening to the sound they are making. But you always touch: and they hush and stand still. That's how you kill." - Rainer Maria Rilke, full name René Karl Wilhelm Johann Josef Maria Rilke
"We discover that we do not know our role; we look for a mirror; we want to remove our make-up and take off what is false and real. But somewhere a piece of disguise that we forgot still sticks to us. A trace of exaggeration remains in our eyebrows; we do not notice that the corners of our mouth are bent. And so we walk around, a mockery and a mere half: neither having achieved being nor actors." - Rainer Maria Rilke, full name René Karl Wilhelm Johann Josef Maria Rilke
"This welfare for wealthy companies wastes taxpayer dollars, harms the environment, and makes a mockery of the recent reductions in federal social spending programs." - Ralph Nader
"In the end the tough guys are the truely effeminate ones, who need the weaklings as their victims in order not to admit that they are like them." - Theodor W. Adorno, born Theodor Ludwig Wiesengrund
"Legitimate works of art are today without exception socially undesired." - Theodor W. Adorno, born Theodor Ludwig Wiesengrund
"Poppies On Ludlow Castle - Through halls of vanished pleasure, And hold of vanished power, And crypt of faith forgotten, A came to Ludlow tower. A-top of arch and stairway, Of crypt and donjan cell, Of council hall, and chamber, Of wall, and ditch, and well, High over grated turrets Where clinging ivies run, A thousand scarlet poppies Enticed the rising sun, Upon the topmost turret, With death and damp below,-- Three hundred years of spoilage,-- The crimson poppies grow. This hall it was that bred him, These hills that knew him brave, The gentlest English singer That fills an English grave. How have they heart to blossom So cruel and gay and red, When beauty so hath perished And valour so hath sped? When knights so fair are rotten, And captains true asleep, And singing lips are dust-stopped Six English earth-feet deep? When ages old remind me How much hath gone for naught, What wretched ghost remaineth Of all that flesh hath wrought; Of love and song and warring, Of adventure and play, Of art and comely building, Of faith and form and fray-- I'll mind the flowers of pleasure, Of short-lived youth and sleep, That drunk the sunny weather A-top of Ludlow keep." - Willa Cather, fully Willa Sibert Cather
"And this susceptibility of theirs is doubly unfortunate , I thought, returning again to my original enquiry into what state of mind is propitious for creative work, because the mind of an artist, in order to achieve to the prodigious effort of freeing whole and entire the work that is in him, must be incandescent, like Shakespeare's mind, I conjectured, looking at the book which lay open at Antony and Cleopatra. There must be no obstacle in it, no foreign matter unconsumed." - Virginia Woolf, nee Stephen, fully Adeline Virginia Woolf
"There never was a man all intellect; but just in proportion as men become so they become like lofty mountains, all ice and snow the higher they rise above the warm heart of the earth." - Edwin Hubbell Chapin
"They would hit a man in the water, if they were hungry, even if the man had no smell of fish blood nor of fish slime on him." - Ernest Hemingway, fully Ernest Miller Hemingway
"From a Buddhist point of view, this is standing the truth on its head by considering goods as more important than people and consumption as more important than creative activity. It means shifting the emphasis from the worker to the product of work, that is, from the human to the sub-human, surrender to the forces of evil." - E. F. Schumacher, fully Ernst Friedrich "Fritz" Schumacher