This site is dedicated to the memory of Dr. Alan William Smolowe who gave birth to the creation of this database.
"We must welcome the future, remembering that soon it will be the past; and we must respect the past, remembering that it was once all that was humanly possible." - George Santayana
"Self-respect permeates every aspect of your life." - Glenn Clark
"The public does not in the long run respect leaders who mirror its own insecurities or see only the symptoms of crises rather than the long-term trends. The role of the leader is to assume the burden of acting on the basis of a confidence in his own assessment of the direction of events and how they can be influenced. Failing that, crises will multiply, which is another way of saying that a leader has lost control over events." - Henry Kissinger, fully Henry Alfred Kissinger
"Most of the luxuries, and many of the so-called comforts of life, are not only not indispensable, but positive hindrances to the elevation of mankind. With respect to luxuries and comforts, the wisest have ever lived a more simple and meager life than the poor." - Henry David Thoreau, born David Henry Thoreau
"In dreams we see ourselves naked and acting out our real characters, even more clearly than we see others awake. But an unwavering and commanding virtue would compel even its most fantastic and faintest dreams to respect its ever wakeful authority; as we are accustomed to say carelessly, we should never have dreamed of such a thing." - Henry David Thoreau, born David Henry Thoreau
"Conceited men often seem a harmless kind of men, who, by an overweening self-respect, relieve others from the duty of respecting them at all." - Henry Ward Beecher
"The truest self-respect is not to think of self." - Henry Ward Beecher
"Amity itself can only be maintained by reciprocal respect, and true friends are punctilious equals." - Herman Melville
"Self-respect is the best of all." - Hosea Ballou
"Both love of mankind, and respect for their rights are duties; the former however is only a condition, the latter an unconditional, purely imperative duty, which he must be perfectly certain not to have transgressed who would give himself up to the secret emotions arising from benevolence." - Immanuel Kant
"Men can never acquire respect by benevolence alone, though they may gain love, so that the greatest beneficence only procures them honor when it is regulated by worthiness." - Immanuel Kant
"What action would promote happiness of a rational being is completely insoluble, and consequently no imperative respect it is possible which should, in the strict sense, command to do what makes happy; because happiness is not an ideal of reason but of imagination, resting solely on empirical grounds, and it is vain to expect that these should define an action by which one could attain the totality of a series of consequences which is really endless." - Immanuel Kant
"Duty is the necessity of acting out of respect for the law... An action from duty must eliminate entirely the influence of inclinations and thus every object of the will." - Immanuel Kant
"The quality of impeccability entails realizing how precious life is, even though it is transient, and how each of our actions and words does count, affecting all beings around us in a profound way. There is nothing inconsequential in this universe, and we need to personally respect this fact and act in accordance with it." - Jack Kornfield
"In my day, we didn't have self-esteem, we had self-respect, and no more of it than we had earned." - Jane Haddam
"I hate victims who respect their executioners." - Jean-Paul Sartre
"Although to be driven back upon oneself is an uneasy affair at best, rather like trying to cross a border with borrowed credentials, it seems to me now the one condition necessary to the beginnings of real self-respect. Most of our platitudes notwithstanding, self-deception remains the most difficult deception." - Joan Didion
"Character: the willingness to accept responsibility for one's own life – is the source from which self-respect springs." - Joan Didion
"To free us from the expectations of others, to give us back to ourselves--there lies the great, singular power of self-respect." - Joan Didion
"I regard utility as the ultimate appeal on all ethical questions; but it must be utility in the largest sense, grounded on the permanent interests of man as a progressive being. Those interests, I contend, authorize the subjection of individual spontaneity to external control only in respect to those actions of each which concern the interest of other people." - John Stuart Mill
"If you have some respect for people as they are, you can be more effective in helping them to become better than they are." - John W. Gardner, fully John William Gardner
"If you have respect for people as they are, you can be more effective in helping them to become better than they are." - John W. Gardner, fully John William Gardner
"To be capable of respect is almost as rare as to be worthy of it." - Joseph Joubert
"A virtue is an admirable character trait or disposition to habitually act in a manner that benefits ourselves and others. The actions of virtuous people stem from a respect and concern for the well-being of themselves and others." - Judith A. Boss
"Ethical subjectivism absolves people of ever having to deliberate before making a moral judgment, whereas cultural relativism absolves people from moral responsibility so long as they follow the crowd. At the same time, almost everyone wants others to treat them with respect and be held morally culpable for their hurtful actions." - Judith A. Boss
"Whoever would be a teacher of men let him begin by teaching himself before teaching others; and let him teach by example before teaching by word. For he who teaches himself and rectifies his own ways is more deserving of respect and reverence than he who would teach others and rectify their ways." - Kahlil Gibran
"Intuition is your link to the divine. And to stay in touch with your intuition, you must know, and respect, the limits of your mental energy. Life happens too fast for your ever to think about it all. If people could just be persuaded of this, but they insist on amassing information." - Kurt Vonnegut, Jr.
"To secure respect for law, we must make the law respectable." - Louis D. Brandeis, fully Louis Dembitz Brandeis
"Self-reliance and self-respect are about as valuable commodities as we can carry in our pack through life." - Luther Burbank
"We are obligated to respect, defend, and maintain the common bonds of union and fellowship that exist among all members of the human race." - Cicero, fully Marcus Tullius Cicero, anglicized as Tully NULL
"In what respect are we superior to brute creation, if intellect is not allowed to be the guide of passion? Brutes hope and fear, love and hate; but, without a capacity to improve, a power of turning these passions to good or evil, they neither acquire virtue nor wisdom. - Why? Because the Creator has not given them reason." - Mary Wollstonecraft
"When Descartes said, “I think, therefore I am,” he uttered a very profound thought. But there are times in the history of peoples when thought alone does not prove their existence. A people may “think”: and yet its sons, with their thoughts and in spite of them, may be turned into a herd of slaves - or into soap. There are times when everything in you cries out: your very self-respect as a human being lies in your resistance to evil. We fight, therefore we are!" - Menachem Begin
"To feed men and not to love them is to treat them as if they were barnyard cattle. To love them and not to respect them is to treat them as if they were household pets." - Mencius, born Meng Ke or Ko NULL
"We certainly have no ethical duty to hold all people in high esteem, but we should treat everyone with respect, regardless of who they are and what they have done." - Michael S. Josephson
"Our first work must be the annihilation of everything as it now exists. The old world must be destroyed and replaced by a new one. When you have freed your mind from the fear of God, and that childish respect for the fiction of right, then all the remaining changes that bind you-property, marriage, morality, and justice-will snap asunder like threads... Any dictatorship can have only one aim; self-perpetuation." - Mikhail Bakunin, fully Mikhail Alexandrovich Bakunin
"Respect for the freedom of others is the highest duty of man. To love this freedom and to serve it – such is the only virtue. That is the basis of all morality; and there can be no other." - Mikhail Bakunin, fully Mikhail Alexandrovich Bakunin
"We cannot achieve self-respect if we are afraid of self-knowledge." - Morris Raphael Cohen
"He has achieved success who has lived well, laughed often and loved much: Who has gained the respect of intelligent men, and the love of little children: Who has filled his niche and accomplished his task: Who has left the world better than he has found it, whether by an improved poppy, a perfect poem or a rescued soul: Who has never lacked appreciation of earth's beauty or failed to express it: Who has looked for the best in others and given the best he had: Whose life was an inspiration: whose memory is a benediction." - Bessie Anderson Stanley, fully Elizabeth-Anne "Bessie" Anderson Stanley
"The feeling that "I am enough" does not mean that I have nothing to learn, nothing further to achieve, and nowhere to grow to. It means I accept myself. It means I am not on trial in my own eyes. It means I value and respect myself. This is not an act of indulgence but of courage." - Nathaniel Branden
"There is overwhelming evidence that the higher the level of self-esteem, the more likely one will be to treat others with respect, kindness, and generosity." - Nathaniel Branden
"Every individual has a place to fill in the world, and is important in some respect, whether he chooses to be so or not." - Nathaniel Hawthorne
"The author who penetrates the deepest into the human soul is the one who has the strongest respect for the awakening power of conscience and the stretching power of commitment." - Norman Cousins
"Respect for the fragility and importance of an individual life is still the mark of an educated man." - Norman Cousins
"The first person one must learn to love is oneself. If you do not love yourself, and by that is meant respect and esteem for your own self, you will not be able to love anyone else." - Norman Vincent Peale
"Now, we shall be able to judge the extent of the spiritual undernourishment if we look at all these movements from another angle: not as errors but rather as attempts to find healing. I use this comparison: For a long time medical men combated fever as if it itself constituted the illness. Medicine today inclines rather to respect it, not only as a symptom of the disease but of the struggle of the organism against the disease. True, it is this struggle which makes it ill, and yet this very struggle is also the proof of its vitality and is the necessary way to healing." - Paul Tournier
"He who wants a rose must respect the thorn." - Persian Proverbs