This site is dedicated to the memory of Dr. Alan William Smolowe who gave birth to the creation of this database.
"(Corporations) They cannot commit treason, nor be outlawed, nor excommunicate, for they have no souls." - Edward Coke, fully Sir Edward Coke
"The tragedy of our time is “the treason of the clerks,” that is, the failure of our best minds to give themselves to contemplation of truth, and their undue preoccupation with immediate problems to the neglect of the deeper problems." - Bernard Leeming
"Let America realize that self-scrutiny is not treason. Self-examination is not disloyalty." - Richard Cushing, fully Richard James Cushing, aka RIchard Cardinal Cushing
"More men are guilty of treason through weakness than any studied design to betray." - François de La Rochefoucauld, François VI, Duc de La Rochefoucauld, Prince de Marcillac, Francois A. F. Rochefoucauld-Liancourt
"Fellowship in treason is a bad ground of confidence." - Edmund Burke
"The fear of doing right is the grand treason in times of danger." - Henry Ward Beecher
"Treason is greatest where trust is greatest." - John Dryden
"I can forgive a foe, but not a mistress and a friend; treason is there in its most horrid shape, where trust is greatest!" - John Dryden
"The man who cannot laugh is not only fit for treasons, stratagems, and spoils, but his whole life is already a treason and a stratagem." - Thomas Carlyle
"Ingratitude is treason to mankind. " - James Thomson
"To say that subjects in general are not proper judges (of the law) when their governors oppress them and play the tyrant, and when they defend their rights ...is as great a treason as ever a man uttered. Tis treason not against one single man, but against the state - against the whole body politic; tis treason against mankind; tis treason against Common sense; tis treason against God; And this impious principle lays the foundation for justifying all the tyranny and oppression that ever any prince was guilty of. The people know for what end they set up and maintain their governors, and they are the proper judges when governors execute their trust as they ought to do it." - Jonathan Mayhew
"The world, as transformed by this creative deed, is better than it would have been had all else remained the same, but had that deed of treason not been done at all. " - Josiah Royce
"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
"All men should have a drop of treason in their veins, if nations are not to go soft like so many sleepy pears." - Rebecca West, pen name of Mrs. Cicily Maxwell Andrews, born Fairfield, aka Dame Rebecca West
"I have always considered it as treason against the great republic of human nature, to make any man's virtues the means of deceiving him." - Robertson Davies
"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." - Samuel Adams
"I have found men to be more kind than I expected, and less just." - Samuel Johnson, aka Doctor Johnson
"Against my will, I became a witness to the most terrible defeat of reason and to the most savage triumph of brutality ever chronicled ... never before did a generation suffer such a moral setback after it had attained such intellectual heights." - Stefan Zweig
"As society advances the standard of poverty rises." - Theodore Parker
"Wealth and want equally harden the human heart, as frost and fire are both alien to the human flesh. Famine and gluttony alike drive nature away from the heart of man." - Theodore Parker
"The Press is the Fourth Estate of the realm." - Thomas Carlyle
"I repair, then, fellow-citizens, to the post you have assigned me. With experience enough in subordinate offices to have seen the difficulties of this the greatest of all, I have learnt to expect that it will rarely fall to the lot of imperfect man to retire from this station with the reputation and the favor which bring him into it." - Thomas Jefferson
"The firmness with which the people have withstood the late abuses of the press, the discernment they have manifested between truth and falsehood, show that they may safely be trusted to hear everything true and false, and to form a correct judgment between them." - Thomas Jefferson
"A traveler must have the back of an ass to bear all, a tongue like the tail of a dog to flatter all, the mouth of a hog to eat what is set before him, the ear of a merchant to hear all and say nothing" - Thomas Nashe
"Innocence seldom utters outraged shrieks. Guilt Does." - Whittaker Chambers, born Jay Vivian Chambers, aka Jay David Whittaker Chambers
"Out of that vision of Almighty Man that we call Communism and that agony of souls and bodies that we call the revolution of the 20th century was left that pinch of irreducible dust: “Who pays is boss, and who takes money must also give something.” It might stand as the motto of every welfare philosophy." - Whittaker Chambers, born Jay Vivian Chambers, aka Jay David Whittaker Chambers
"One of the great differences between childhood and manhood is that we come to like our work more than our play. It becomes to us if not the chief pleasure at least the chief interest of our lives, and even when it is not this, an essential condition of our happiness. Few lives produce so little happiness as those that are aimless and unoccupied. Apart from all considerations of right and wrong, one of the first conditions of a happy life is that it should be a full and busy one, directed to the attainment of aims outside ourselves....the first great rule is that we must do something – that life must have a purpose and an aim – that work should be not merely occasional and spasmodic, but steady and continuous. Pleasure is a jewel which will only retain its luster when it is in a setting of work, and a vacant life is one of the worst of pains, though the islands of leisure that stud a crowded, well-occupied life may be among the things to which we look back with the greatest delight." - W. E. H. Lecky, fully William Edward Hartpole Lecky
"The unknown, said Faxe's soft voice in the forest, the unforetold, the unproven, that is what life is based on. Ignorance is the ground of thought. Unproof is the ground of action. If it were proven that there is no God there would be no religion. No Handdara, no Yomesh, no hearthgods, nothing. But also if it were proven that there is a God, there would be no religion. ... Tell me, Genry, what is known? What is sure, unpredictable, inevitable -- the one certain thing you know concerning your future, and mine?" - Ursula Le Guin, fully Ursula Kroeber Le Guin
"They knew that their anarchism was the product of a very high civilization, of a complex diversified culture, of a stable economy and a highly industrialized technology that could maintain high production and rapid transportation of goods. However vast the distances separating settlements, they held to the ideal of complex organicism." - Ursula Le Guin, fully Ursula Kroeber Le Guin
"About the sixth hour; when beasts most graze, birds best peck, and men sit down to that nourishment which is called supper." - William Shakespeare
"After my death I wish no other herald, No other speaker of my living actions, To keep mine honour from corruption, But such an honest chronicler as Griffith. King Henry VIII. Act iv. Sc. 2." - William Shakespeare
"And to make us no better thought of, a little help will serve; for once we stood up about the corn, he himself stuck not to call us the many-headed multitude. Coriolanus, Act ii, Scene 3" - William Shakespeare
"DUNCAN. This castle hath a pleasant seat: the air nimbly and sweetly recommends itself unto our gentle senses. BANQUO: The heaven's breath smells wooingly here: no jutty, frieze, buttress, nor coigne of vantage, but this bird hath made his pendent bed and procreant cradle: where they most breed and haunt, I have observed, the air is delicate. Macbeth, Act i, Scene 6" - William Shakespeare
"O conspiracy, sham'st thou to show thy dang'rous brow by night, when evils are most free? O then, by day where wilt thou find a cavern dark enough to mask thy monstrous visage?" - William Shakespeare
"I have no desire to make windows into men’s souls" - Elizabeth II, born Elizabeth Alexandra May NULL
"Have you ever reflected that posterity may not be the faultless dispenser of justice that we dream of? One consoles oneself for being insulted and denied, by reyling on the equity of the centuries to come; just as the faithful endure all the abominations of this earth in the firm belief of another life, in which each will be rewarded according to his deserts. But suppose Paradise exists no more for the artist than it does for the Catholic, suppose that future generations prolong the misunderstanding and prefer amiable little trifles to vigorous works! Ah! What a sell it would be, eh? To have led a convict's life - to have screwed oneself down to one's work - all for a mere delusion! Bah! What does it matter? Well, there's nothing hereafter. We are even madder than the fools who kill themselves for a woman. When the earth splits to pieces in space like a dry walnut, our works won't add one atom to its dust." - Emile Zola
"As a rule hogs are only raised where they have good health and grow fat. Any old place will do to raise human beings." - Eugene V. Debs, fully Eugene Victor Debs
"First of all, Theodore Roosevelt and Charles W. Fairbanks, candidates for President and Vice-President, respectively, deny the class struggle and this almost infallibly fixes their status as friends of capital and enemies of labor. They insist that they can serve both; but the fact is obvious that only one can be served and that one at the expense of the other. Mr. RooseveltÂ’s whole political career proves it." - Eugene V. Debs, fully Eugene Victor Debs
"They are continually talking about your patriotic duty. It is not their but your patriotic duty that they are concerned about. There is a decided difference. Their patriotic duty never takes them to the firing line or chucks them into the trenches. And now among other things they are urging you to "cultivate" war gardens, while at the same time a government war report just issued shows that practically 52 percent of the arable, tillable soil is held out of use by the landlords, speculators and profiteers. They themselves do not cultivate the soil. Nor do they allow others to cultivate it. They keep it idle to enrich themselves, to pocket the millions of dollars of unearned increment." - Eugene V. Debs, fully Eugene Victor Debs