This site is dedicated to the memory of Dr. Alan William Smolowe who gave birth to the creation of this database.
We can listen to the voice of the Earth as she shakes and sings her song expressing her tiredness. She is calling us to attention, to be alert, to recognize that now is the time to transform selfish thought and action to compassionate caretaking. Do we want a world of peace and harmony? Are we willing to make that peace within ourselves? Will we call it forth? It is your choice. Your thought and action make a difference.
Action | Attention | Choice | Earth | Harmony | Peace | Thought | Time | Will | Wisdom | World | Thought |
Earle Birney, fully Earle Alfred Birney
Love rests on the preservation of our species; art is our instinctive instrument for the preservation of the individual, of the unique man, woman and child, and the means of evolution of us all into something able and worthy of survival on the living earth.
Art | Earth | Evolution | Individual | Love | Man | Means | Survival | Unique | Woman | Art |
Louis K. Anspacher, fully Louis Kannan Anspacher
Marriage is that relation between man and woman in which the independence is equal, the dependence mutual, and the obligation reciprocal.
Dependence | Man | Marriage | Obligation | Woman |
For boredom speaks the language of time, and it is to teach you the most valuable lesson in your life--...the lesson of your utter insignificance. It is valuable to you, as well as to those you are to rub shoulders with. 'You are finite,' time tells you in a voice of boredom, 'and whatever you do is, from my point of view, futile.' As music to your ears, this, of course, may not count; yet the sense of futility, of limited significance even of your best, most ardent actions is better than the illusion of their consequence and the attendant self-satisfaction.
Better | Illusion | Language | Lesson | Life | Life | Music | Sense | Teach | Time |
We find it easy to ignore the inner voice of the soul in our pursuit of external happiness… because we are driven by our own materialistic passions and by our addictive need for quick, painless fixes for anything disturbing in our lives.
There is nothing real, lasting, imperishable in me, but these two elements: the voice of conscience, and my free obedience.
Conscience | Nothing | Obedience |
Temptation is the voice of the suppressed evil; conscience is the voice of the repressed good.
Conscience | Evil | Good | Temptation |
We have become so preoccupied with power and control over nature that we have lost an important dimension of our being, the disposition of thankfulness, of commemoration, of perceiving and enjoying something for its own sake. Instead of viewing these immediate objects of our environment in terms of their own being, we have come to regard them solely in terms of what they are for us. And to such an exploitative mentality, nature’s own voice becomes mute. Approached as material merely, to be worked up and pressed into the service of a self-styled lord of creation, she contains no revelation and no blessing.
Control | Important | Lord | Nature | Power | Regard | Revelation | Self | Service | Thankfulness |
In the midst of our applauding the feats of civilization, the Bible flings itself like a knife slashing our complacency; remind us that God, too, has a voice in history.
Bible | Civilization | Complacency | God | History | Bible |
Charlotte Perkins Gilman, a.k.a. Charlotte Anna (nee Perkins), Charlotte Perkins Stetson
It is not that women are really smaller-minded, weaker-minded, more timid and vacillating; but that whosoever, man or woman, lives always in a small, dark place, is always guarded, protected, directed, and restrained will become inevitably narrowed and weakened by it. The woman is narrowed by the home, and the man is narrowed by the woman.
Religion declined not because it was refuted but because it became irrelevant, dull, oppressive, insipid. When faith is completely replaced by creed, worship by discipline, love by habit; when the crisis of today is ignored because of the splendor of the past; when faith becomes an heirloom rather than a living fountain; when religion speaks only in the name of authority rather than with the voice of compassion – its message becomes meaningless.
Authority | Compassion | Creed | Discipline | Faith | Habit | Love | Past | Religion | Worship | Crisis |
[Groupthink] The dissenter was made to feel at home, providing he lived up to two restrictions: first, that he did not voice his doubts to outsiders and thus play into the hands of the opposition; and second, that he kept his criticisms within the bounds of acceptable deviation, not challenging any of the fundamental assumptions of the group’s prior commitments.
Deviation | Opposition | Play |