This site is dedicated to the memory of Dr. Alan William Smolowe who gave birth to the creation of this database.
All of us confronts limits of body, talent, temperament. But that is not all. We are, all of us, also constrained by our time, our place, our civilization. We are bound by the culture we have in common, that culture which distinguishes us from other people in other times. Cultural constraints condition and limit our choices, shaping our characters with their imperatives.
John Morley, 1st Viscount Morely of Blackburn, Lord Morley
A sudden lie may be sometimes only manslaughter upon truth; but by a carefully constructed equivocation, truth always is with malice a forethought deliberately murdered.
Equivocation | Forethought | Malice | Truth | Wisdom |
Friedrich Nietzsche, fully Friedrich Wilhelm Nietzsche
The sphere of poetry does not lie outside the world as a fantastic impossibility spawned by a poet’s brain: it desires to be just the opposite, the unvarnished expression of the truth, and must precisely for that reason discard the mendacious finery of that alleged reality of the man of culture. The contrast between this real truth of nature and the lie of culture that poses as if it were the only reality is similar to that between the eternal core of things, the thing-in-itself, and the whole world of appearances.
Contrast | Culture | Eternal | Impossibility | Man | Nature | Poetry | Reality | Reason | Truth | Wisdom | World |
William Paley, Archdeacon of Saragossa
No man’s spirits were ever hurt by doing his duty; on the contrary, one good action, one temptation resisted and overcome, one sacrifice of desire or interest, purely for conscience’ sake, will prove a cordial for weak and low spirits, far beyond what either indulgence or diversion or company can do for them.
Action | Conscience | Desire | Diversion | Duty | Good | Indulgence | Man | Sacrifice | Temptation | Will | Wisdom | Temptation |
Robert Oppenheimer, fully Julius Robert Oppenheimer
This world of ours is a new world, in which the unit of knowledge, the nature of human communities, the order of society, the order of ideas, the very notions of society and culture have changed, and will not return to what they have been in the past. What is new is new, not because it has never been there before, but because it has changed in quality.
Culture | Ideas | Knowledge | Nature | Order | Past | Society | Will | Wisdom | World | Society |
Research teaches a man to admit he is wrong and to be proud of the fact that he does so, rather than try with all his energy to defend an unsound plan because he is afraid that admission of error is a confession of weakness when rather it is a sign of strength.
Energy | Error | Man | Plan | Research | Strength | Weakness | Wisdom | Wrong | Afraid |
Behavior Research Project NULL
People in our culture have a morbid tendency to avoid blame, because they do not wish to take the trouble to change their conduct in any way: blame-avoidance and blame-transference are therefore endemic amongst us. These are substitutes for repentance and renewal.
Blame | Change | Conduct | Culture | People | Repentance | Trouble |
Books of quotations are an elemental model of how culture is perpetuated, the wisdom of the tribe passed on to posterity, to be added to, edited, and modified by subsequent generations.
Perhaps the biggest danger is the way a culture of self-help fosters both feelings of inadequacy and hopes for unattainable ideals… foolproof prescriptions for fulfillment and meaningful lives. The futile quest to become a complete all-round wonderful person, fully in control of our health, wealth and happiness.
Control | Culture | Danger | Feelings | Fulfillment | Health | Ideals | Self | Wealth | Danger |
Men and women are biological facts. Ladies and gentleman - citizens - are social artifacts, works of political art. They carry the culture that is sustained by wise laws, and traditions of civility. A the end of the day we are right to judge a society by the character of the people it produces. That is why statecraft is, inevitably, soulcraft.
Art | Character | Civility | Culture | Day | Men | People | Right | Society | Wisdom | Wise | Society |
To lead, you have to make a declaration of independence against the estimation of others, the culture, the age. You have to decide to live in the world, but outside existing conceptions of it. Leaders do not merely do well by the terms of their culture they create new contexts, new things, new ways of doing and being.
Age | Culture | Estimation | World |
Robert E. Carter, fully Robert Edgar Carter
What is wrong with our culture is that it often offers us an inaccurate conception of the self. It depicts the personal self as existing in competition with and in opposition with and in opposition to nature. We thereby fail to realize that if we destroy our environment, we are destroying what is in fact our larger self.
Competition | Culture | Destroy | Nature | Opposition | Self | Wrong |
There is not any memory with less satisfaction than the memory of some temptation we resisted.
Memory | Temptation | Temptation |
The temptation of Protestantism has always been to magnify freedom at the expense of unity. The temptation of Roman Catholicism, on the other hand, has been to magnify unity at the expense of freedom.
Freedom | Temptation | Unity | Temptation |
Lowering consumption need not deprive people of goods and services that really matter. To the contrary, life’ most meaningful and pleasant activities are often paragons of environmental virtue. The preponderance of things that people name as their most rewarding pastimes are infinitely sustainable. Religious practice, conversation, family and community gatherings, theater, music, dance, literature, sports, poetry, artistic and creative pursuits, education, and appreciation of nature all fit readily into a culture of permanence – a way of life that can endure through countless generations.
Appreciation | Conversation | Culture | Education | Family | Life | Life | Literature | Music | Nature | Need | People | Poetry | Practice | Virtue | Virtue | Appreciation |
Charles Darwin, fully Charles Robert Darwin
The highest possible stage in moral culture is when we recognize that we ought to control our thoughts.