This site is dedicated to the memory of Dr. Alan William Smolowe who gave birth to the creation of this database.
"The aim of art, the aim of a life can only be to increase the sum of freedom and responsibility to be found in every man and in the world. It cannot, under any circumstances, be to reduce or suppress that freedom, even temporarily. No great work has ever been based on hatred and contempt. On the contrary, there is not a single true work of art that has not in the end added to the inner freedom of each person who has known and loved it." -
"Familiarity breeds acquiescence as well as contempt." - Arnold J. Toynbee, fully Arnold Joseph Toynbee
"Hatred comes from the heart; contempt from the head; and neither feeling is quite within our control." - Arthur Schopenhauer
"Many forgive injuries, but none ever forgave contempt." - Author Unknown NULL
"Avoid familiarities in intercourse. Neither use them nor permit them. The stars keep their brilliance by not making themselves common. Every familiarity breeds contempt." - Baltasar Gracián
"From childhood upwards, everything is done to make the minds of men and women conventional and sterile. And if, by misadventure, some spark of imagination remains, its unfortunate possessor is considered unsound and dangerous, worthy only of contempt in time of peace and of prison or a traitor’s death in time of war." - Bertrand Russell, fully Bertrand Arthur William Russell, 3rd Earl Russell
"The profoundly wise do not declaim against superficial knowledge in others, so much as the profoundly ignorant; on the contrary, they would rather assist it with their advice that overwhelm it with their contempt; for they know that there was a period when even a Bacon or a Newton were superficial, and that he who has little knowledge is far more likely to get more that has none." - Charles Caleb Colton
"The contempt of riches in the philosophers was a concealed desire of revenging on fortune the injustice done to their merit, by despising the good she denied them." - François de La Rochefoucauld, François VI, Duc de La Rochefoucauld, Prince de Marcillac, Francois A. F. Rochefoucauld-Liancourt
"The most effective way to silence our guilty conscience is to convince ourselves and others that those we have sinned against are indeed depraved creatures, deserving every punishment, even extermination. We cannot pity those we have wronged, nor can we be indifferent toward them. We must hate and persecute them or else leave the door open to self-contempt." - Eric Hoffer
"Love is ever rewarded with the reciprocal, or with an inward and secret contempt." - Francis Bacon
"Seek not proud wealth; but such as thou mayest get justly, use soberly, distribute cheerfully, and leave contently, yet have not any abstract or friarly contempt of it." - Francis Bacon
"There is a principle that is guaranteed to keep man in everlasting ignorance. That principle is contempt prior to investigation." - Herbert Spencer
"Servility is disgusting to a truly noble character, and engenders only contempt." - Hosea Ballou
"[On children] Train them to virtue; habituate them to industry, activity, and spirit. Make them consider every vice as shameful and unmanly. Fire them with ambition to be useful. Make them disdain to be destitute of any useful knowledge. Fix their ambition upon great and solid objects, and their contempt upon little, frivolous, and useless ones." - John Quincy Adams
"If you seek in the spirit of selfishness, to grasp all as your own, you shall lose all, and be driven out of the world, at last, naked and forlorn, to everlasting poverty and contempt." - Jonathan Edwards
"It is often more necessary to conceal contempt than resentment; the former is never forgiven, but the latter is sometimes forgotten." - Lord Chesterfield, Philip Dormer Stanhope, 4th Earl of Chesterfield
"Wrongs are often forgiven, but contempt never is. Our pride remembers it forever. It implies a discovery of weaknesses, which we are much more careful to conceal than crimes." - Lord Chesterfield, Philip Dormer Stanhope, 4th Earl of Chesterfield
"Crime is contagious. If the government becomes a lawbreaker, it breeds contempt for law; it invites every man to become a law unto himself; it invites anarchy. To declare that in the administration of the criminal law the end justifies the means – to declare that the government may commit crimes in order to secure the conviction of a private criminal – would bring terrible retribution." - Louis D. Brandeis, fully Louis Dembitz Brandeis
"Reason is a whore, the greatest enemy that faith has; it never comes to the aid of spiritual things, but more frequently than not struggles against the divine Word, treating with contempt all that emanates from God." - Martin Luther
"Politics resemble religion; attempting to divest either of ceremony is the most certain mode of bringing either into contempt." - Oliver Goldsmith
"Every heroic act measures itself by its contempt of some external good. But it finds its own success at last, and then the prudent also extol." - Ralph Waldo Emerson
"How can I adequately express my contempt for the assertion that all things occur for the best, for a wise and beneficent end, and are ordered by a human intelligence! It is the most utter falsehood and a crime against the human race." - Richard Jefferies, fully John Richard Jefferies
"It is a good thing to believe; it is a good thing to admire. By continually looking upwards; as a man, by indulging in habits of scorn and contempt for others, is sure to descend to the level of those he despises." - Arthur Helps, fully Sir Arthur Helps
"True humor springs not more from the head than from the heart; it is not contempt; its essence is love: it issues not in laughter, but in still smiles, which lie far deeper. It is a sort of inverse sublimity, exalting as it were, into our affections what is below us, while sublimity draws down into our affections what is above us." - Thomas Carlyle
"True humor springs not more from the head than from the heart. It is not contempt; its essence is love. It issues not in laughter, but in still smiles, which lie far deeper." - Thomas Carlyle
"Let thy carriage be friendly, but not foolishly free; an unwary openness causeth contempt, but a little reservedness, respect; and handsome courtesy, kindness." - Thomas Fuller
"Be not too familiar with thy servants; at first it may beget love, but in the end it will breed contempt." - Thomas Fuller
"Many can bear adversity, but few contempt." - Thomas Fuller
"Everything can be borne except contempt." - Voltaire, pen name of François-Marie Arouet NULL
"In laughter there is always a kind of joyousness that is incompatible with contempt or indignation." - Voltaire, pen name of François-Marie Arouet NULL
"No wise man can have a contempt for prejudices of others; and he should even stand in a certain awe of his own, as if they were aged parents and monitors. They may in the end prove wiser than he." - William Hazlitt
"Though familiarity may not breed contempt, it takes off the edge of admiration." - William Hazlitt
"The insolence of the vulgar is in proportion to their ignorance: they treat everything with contempt, which they do not understand." - William Hazlitt
"To be remembered after we are dead is but a poor recompense for being treated with contempt while we are living." - William Hazlitt
"Whenever we pretend, on all occasions, a mighty contempt for any thing, it is a pretty clear sign that we feel ourselves very nearly on a level with it." - William Hazlitt
"Though familiarity may not breed contempt, it takes off the edge of admiration; and the shining points of character are not those we chiefly wish to dwell upon." - William Hazlitt
"Our greatest need is emancipation from self-contempt." - Ahad HaAm, pen name, born Asher Zvi Hirsch Ginsberg
"Man is much more sensitive to the contempt of others than to self-contempt. " - Friedrich Nietzsche, fully Friedrich Wilhelm Nietzsche
"Moral contempt is a far greater indignity and insult than any kind of crime. " - Friedrich Nietzsche, fully Friedrich Wilhelm Nietzsche
"There will be no room, here, for the smug myopia which views American civilization as the final solution to all world problems; which recommends our institutions for universal adoption and turns away with contempt from the serious study of the institutions of peoples whose civilizations may seem to us to be materially less advanced." - George F. Kennan
"No other profession is subject to the public contempt and derision that sometimes befalls lawyers; the bitter fruit of public incomprehension of the law itself and its dynamics." - Irving Robert Kaufman
"Religious discord has lost her sting; the cumbrous weapons of theological warfare are antiquated: the field of politics supplies the alchymists of our times with materials of more fatal explosion, and the butchers of mankind no longer travel to another world for instruments of cruelty and destruction. Our age is too enlightened to contend upon topics, which concern only the interests of eternity; and men who hold in proper contempt all controversies about trifles, except such as inflame their own passions, have made it a common-place censure against your ancestors, that their zeal was enkindled by subjects of trivial importance; and that however aggrieved by the intolerance of others, they were alike intolerant themselves." - John Quincy Adams
"I grew up to have my father's looks, my father's speech patterns, my father's posture, my father's opinions, and my mother's contempt for my father." - Jules Feiffer, fully Jules Ralph Feiffer
"Man ... differs from all other animals in having a brain which can and largely does bring all the various elements of experience into contact, instead of keeping them in a series of wholly or largely separate compartments or channels. This not only provides the basis for conceptual thought, and so for all man's ideas and philosophic systems, ideals and works of art and creative imagination, but also for his battery of complex sentiments unknown in animals, such as reverence and religious awe, moral feelings (including hate and contempt arising from moral abhorrence), and love in its developed form." - Julian Huxley, fully Sir Julian Sorell Huxley
"It is no accident that banks resemble temples, preferably Greek, and that the supplicants who come to perform the rites of deposit and withdrawal instinctively lower their voices into the registers of awe. Even the most junior tellers acquire within weeks of their employment the officiousness of hierophants tending an eternal flame. I don't know how they become so quickly inducted into the presiding mysteries, or who instructs them in the finely articulated inflections of contempt for the laity, but somehow they learn to think of themselves as suppliers of the monetarized DNA that is the breath of life. " - Lewis H. Lapham
"Our government... teaches the whole people by its example. If the government becomes the lawbreaker, it breeds contempt for law; it invites every man to become a law unto himself; it invites anarchy." - Louis D. Brandeis, fully Louis Dembitz Brandeis
"Decency, security, and liberty alike demand that government officials shall be subjected to the same rules of conduct that are commands to the citizen. In a government of laws, existence of the government will be imperiled if it fails to observe the law scrupulously. Our government is the potent, the omnipresent teacher. For good or for ill, it teaches the whole people by its example. Crime is contagious. If the government becomes a lawbreaker, it breeds contempt for law; it invites every man to become a law unto himself; it invites anarchy. To declare that in the administration of the criminal law the end justifies the means -- to declare that the government may commit crimes in order to secure the conviction of a private criminal -- would bring terrible retribution. Against that pernicious doctrine this court should resolutely set its face." - Louis D. Brandeis, fully Louis Dembitz Brandeis