This site is dedicated to the memory of Dr. Alan William Smolowe who gave birth to the creation of this database.
Che Guevara, fully Ernesto “Che” Guevara
Silence is argument carried out by other means.
If you want to find out how well you are living up to your spiritual values and higher principles, pay close attention to how you behave in the middle of an argument or a tense moment involving someone you live with, work with, or are in love with.
Argument | Attention | Love | Principles | Work |
Most religions are absolutist. Claims to revelation militate against rational argument and compromise. In this sense all religions contain totalitarian possibilities; for totalitarianism, which welds the state into a single body “knit together as one man” is really the religious impulse, the worship of leadership and ideology, the cult of Person or Book, directed towards secular ends.
Argument | Body | Cult | Ends | Impulse | Man | Revelation | Sense | Worship | Leadership |
Aubrey de Vere, fully Aubrey Albericus de Vere NULL
It is easy to be honest enough not to be hanged. To be really honest means to subdue one’s prepossessions, ideals - stating things fairly, not humoring your argument - doing justice to your enemies... making confession whether you can afford it or not; refusing unmerited praise; looking painful truths in the face.
Argument | Enough | Ideals | Justice | Means | Praise | Truths |
Discussion is an exchange of knowledge; argument is an exchange of ignorance."
Argument | Discussion | Ignorance | Knowledge |
Bertrand Russell, fully Bertrand Arthur William Russell, 3rd Earl Russell
If you think your belief is based upon reason, you will support it by argument rather than by persecution, and will abandon it if the argument goes against you. But if your belief is based upon faith, you will realize that argument is useless, and will therefore resort to force either in the form of persecution or by stunting or distorting the minds of the young in what is called 'education.'
Argument | Belief | Education | Faith | Force | Reason | Will | Think |
The soundest argument will produce no more conviction in an empty head than the most superficial declamation; a feather and a guinea fall with equal velocity in a vacuum.
Against the formidable array of cumulative evidence for Determinism, there is but one argument of real force: the immediate affirmation of consciousness in the moment of deliberate action.
Action | Argument | Consciousness | Evidence | Force |
The end of argument or discussion should be, not victory, but enlightenment.
Argument | Discussion | Enlightenment |
The aim of an argument or discussion should not be victory, but progress.
Argument | Discussion | Progress |
Louis D. Brandeis, fully Louis Dembitz Brandeis
Behind every argument is someone's ignorance.
We must conclude that education is not what it is said to be by some, who profess to put into a soul knowledge that was not there before - rather as if they could but sight into blind eyes. On the contrary, our argument indicates that this is a capacity which is innate in each man’s soul, and that the faculty by which he learns is like an eye which cannot be turned from darkness to light unless the whole body is turned; in the same way the entire soul must be turned away from this world of change until its eye can bear to look straight at reality, and at the brightest of all realities which we have called the Good.
Argument | Body | Capacity | Change | Darkness | Education | Good | Knowledge | Light | Man | Reality | Soul | World |
Education is not in reality what some people proclaim it to be in their professions. What they aver is that they can put true knowledge into a soul that does not possess it, as if they were inserting vision into blind eyes… But our present argument indicates that the true analogy for this indwelling power in the soul and the instrument whereby each of us apprehends is that of an eye that could not be converted to the light from the darkness except by turning the whole body.
Argument | Body | Darkness | Education | Knowledge | Light | People | Power | Present | Reality | Soul | Vision |
Majorities, the argument of fools, the strength of the weak.