This site is dedicated to the memory of Dr. Alan William Smolowe who gave birth to the creation of this database.
The benefit of proverbs, or maxims, is that they separate those who act on principle from those who act on impulse; and they lead to promptness and decision in acting. Their value deepens on four things; do they embody correct principles; are they on important subjects; what is the extent, and what is the ease of their application?
Decision | Important | Impulse | Maxims | Principles | Promptness | Proverbs | Wisdom | Value |
Science can only ascertain what is, but not what should be, and outside of its domain value judgments of all kinds remain necessary.
Frederic Eggleston, fully Sir Frederic William Eggleston
The great task of peace is to work morals into it. The only sort of peace that will be real is one in which everybody takes his share or responsibility. World organizations and conferences will be of no value unless there is improvement in the relation of men to men.
Improvement | Men | Peace | Responsibility | Will | Wisdom | Work | World | Value |
The most important kind of tolerance is tolerance of the individual by society and the state.
Important | Individual | Society | Wisdom | Society |
Truth isn’t outside power, or lacking in power: contrary to a myth whose history and functions would repay further study, truth isn’t the reward of free spirits, the child of protracted solitude, nor the privilege of those who have succeeded in liberating themselves. Truth is a thing of this world: it is produced only by virtue of multiple forms of constraint. And it induces regular effects of power. Each society has its regime of truth, its ‘general politics’ of truth: that is, the types of discourse which it accepts and makes function as true; the mechanisms and instances which enable one to distinguish true and false statements, the means by which each is sanctions; the techniques and procedures accorded value in the acquisition of truth; the status of those who are charged with saying what counts as true.
Constraint | Distinguish | History | Means | Myth | Politics | Power | Reward | Society | Solitude | Study | Truth | Virtue | Virtue | Wisdom | World | Society | Child | Privilege | Value |
The central event of the twentieth century is the overthrow of matter. In technology, economics, and the politics of nations, wealth in the form of physical resources is steadily declining in value and significance. The powers of mind are everywhere ascendant over the brute force of things.
Economics | Force | Mind | Nations | Politics | Technology | Wealth | Wisdom | Value |
Sigmund Freud, born Sigismund Schlomo Freud
Wars can never cease so long as nations live under such widely differing conditions, so long as the value of individual life is in each nation so variously computed, and so long as the animosities which divide them represent such powerful instinctual forces in the mind.
Individual | Life | Life | Mind | Nations | Wisdom | Value |
Carolyn Gold Heilbrun, pen name Amanda Cross
Marriage today must... be concerned not with the inviolable commitment of constancy and unending passion, but with the changing patterns of liberty and discovery.
Commitment | Constancy | Discovery | Liberty | Marriage | Passion | Wisdom |
We crave freedom, but freedom is never an end in itself; it is a means to be used for further aims. Its value lies in the extent to which it can assist the development of life. To possess freedom with no life for which to use it is but the bitterest farce. Life never means complete freedom, and every action and relation is an added bond. Life is to be attained, not through a non-moral freedom of caprice, but through a glad welcoming and loyal fulfillment of every bond and obligation which comes in the daily path of life.
Action | Aims | Freedom | Fulfillment | Life | Life | Means | Obligation | Wisdom | Value |
Abbie Hoffman, fully Abbot Howard "Abbie" Hoffman
It’s universally wrong to steal from your neighbor, but once you get the one-to-one level, and pit the individual against the multinational conglomerate, the federal bureaucracy, the modern plantation of agro-business, or the utility company, it becomes strictly a value judgment to decide exactly who is stealing from whom. One person’s crime is another person’s profit. Capitalism is license to steal; the government simply regulates who steals and how much.
Business | Capitalism | Crime | Government | Individual | Judgment | Wisdom | Wrong | Government | Value |
A great man is a gift, in some measure of a revelation of God. A great man, living for high ends, is the divinest thing that can be seen on earth. The value and interest of history are derived chiefly from the lives and services of the eminent men whom it commemorates.
Earth | Ends | God | History | Man | Men | Revelation | Wisdom | Value |
As children we all possess a natural, uninhibited curiosity, a hunger for explanation, which seems to die slowly as we age - suppressed, I suppose, by the high value we place on conformity and by the need not to appear ignorant. It betokens a conviction that somehow science is innately incomprehensible. It precludes reaching deeper, thereby denying the profound truth that understanding enriches experience, that explanation vastly enhances beauty of the natural world in the eye of the beholder.
Age | Beauty | Children | Conformity | Curiosity | Experience | Hunger | Need | Science | Truth | Understanding | Wisdom | World | Beauty | Value |