This site is dedicated to the memory of Dr. Alan William Smolowe who gave birth to the creation of this database.
Work at ridding yourself of the esteem you have had up to now for the glitter and sparkle of virtue and the vain applause of the world, which Our Lord so assiduously avoided and so often recommends us to shun, and that you labor in earnest to acquire true and solid virtues.
It is a very great mistake to imagine that the object of loyalty is the authority and interest of one individual man, however dignified by the applause or enriched by the success of popular actions.
Sigmund Freud, born Sigismund Schlomo Freud
Analogies prove nothing, that is quite true, but they can make one feel more at home.
Sigmund Freud, born Sigismund Schlomo Freud
Humor is a means of obtaining pleasure in spite of the distressing effects that interface with it.
Individual | Life | Life | Majority | Opposition | Power |
Sigmund Freud, born Sigismund Schlomo Freud
The impression forces itself upon one that men measure by false standards, that everyone seeks power, success, riches for himself, and admires others who attain them, while undervaluing the truly precious thing in life.
Nothing can ever justify the assumption that any man, whoever he may be, has been deprived of this power. It is a power which is only real in this world in so far as it is exercised. The sole condition for exercising it is consent. This act of consent may be expressed, or it may not be, even tacitly; it may not be clearly conscious, although it has really taken place in the soul. Very often it is verbally expressed although it has not in fact taken place. But whether expressed or not, the one condition suffices: that it shall in fact have taken place. To anyone who does actually consent to directing his attention and love beyond the world, towards the reality that exists outside the reach of all human faculties, it is given to succeed in doing so. In that case, sooner or later, there descends upon him a part of the good, which shines through him upon all that surrounds him.
Choice | God | Good | Majority | Necessity | Pious | Thought | God | Thought |
Simcha Zissel of Kelm, fully Rabbi imcha Zissel Ziv Broida, aka the Elder of Kelm
The person who can feel joy because he is not ill or injured lives a happy life.
Entertainment | Majority | People | Sadness |
Justice for crimes against humanity must have no limitations.
Science is a method for testing claims about the natural world, not an immutable compendium of absolute truths. The fundamentalists, by knowing the answers before they start, and then forcing nature into the straitjacket of their discredited preconceptions, lie outside the domain of science—or of any honest intellectual inquiry.
Stendhal, pen name of Marie Henn Beyle or Marie-Henri Beyle NULL
The man of genius is he and he alone who finds such joy in his art that he will work at it come hell or high water.
Theodor W. Adorno, born Theodor Ludwig Wiesengrund
The only decent marriage would be one allowing each partner to lead an independent life, in which, instead of a fusion derived from an enforced community of economic interest, both freely accepted mutual responsibility.
Experience | Majority | Means | Object | Think |
In every wise struggle for human betterment one of the main objects, and often the only object, has been to achieve in large measure equality of opportunity. In the struggle for this great end, nations rise from barbarism to civilization, and through it people press forward from one stage of enlightenment to the next. One of the chief factors in progress is the destruction of special privilege. The essence of any struggle for healthy liberty has always been, and must always be, to take from some one man or class of men the right to enjoy power, or wealth, or position, or immunity, which has not been earned by service to his or their fellows. That is what you fought for in the Civil War, and that is what we strive for now.
Old age is like everything else. To make a success of it, you've got to start young.
Discovery | Government | Growth | Majority | World | Government | Discovery | Old |