This site is dedicated to the memory of Dr. Alan William Smolowe who gave birth to the creation of this database.
When we speak of man, we have a conception of humanity as a whole, and before applying scientific methods to the investigation of his movement we must accept this as a physical fact. But can anyone doubt to-day that all the millions of individuals and all the innumerable types and characters constitute an entity, a unit? Though free to think and act, we are held together, like the stars in the firmament, with ties inseparable. These ties cannot be seen, but we can feel them. I cut myself in the finger, and it pains me: this finger is a part of me. I see a friend hurt, and it hurts me, too: my friend and I are one. And now I see stricken down an enemy, a lump of matter which, of all the lumps of matter in the universe, I care least for, and it still grieves me. Does this not prove that each of us is only part of a whole?
These features chiefly interest the scientific man, the thinker and reasoner. There is another feature which affords us still more satisfaction and enjoyment, and which is of still more universal interest, chiefly because of its bearing upon the welfare of mankind. Gentlemen, there is an influence which is getting strong and stronger day by day, which shows itself more and more in all departments of human activity, and influence most fruitful and beneficial—the influence of the artist. It was a happy day for the mass of humanity when the artist felt the desire of becoming a physician, an electrician, an engineer or mechanician or—whatnot—a mathematician or a financier; for it was he who wrought all these wonders and grandeur we are witnessing. It was he who abolished that small, pedantic, narrow-grooved school teaching which made of an aspiring student a galley-slave, and he who allowed freedom in the choice of subject of study according to one's pleasure and inclination, and so facilitated development.
Choice | Day | Desire | Freedom | Happy | Humanity | Influence | Pleasure | Study |
Otto von Bismarck, Otto Eduard Leopold, Prince of Bismarck, Duke of Lauenburg
The three signs of great men are generosity in the design, humanity in the execution, moderation in success.
Generosity | Humanity | Men | Moderation | Moderation |
Otto von Bismarck, Otto Eduard Leopold, Prince of Bismarck, Duke of Lauenburg
A really great man is known by three signs - generosity in the design, humanity in the execution, moderation in success.
Generosity | Humanity | Man | Moderation | Moderation |
Zeal without humanity is like a ship without a rudder, liable to be stranded at any moment.
Humanity |
Paul Ehrlich, fully Paul Ralph Ehrlich
Few problems are less recognized, but more important than, the accelerating disappearance of the earth's biological resources. In pushing other species to extinction, humanity is busy sawing off the limb on which it is perched.
Wade David sees languages the way a biologist sees species diversity: “Distinct cultures represent unique visions of life itself, morally inspired and inherently right. And those different voices become part of the overall repertoire of humanity for coping with challenges confronting us in the future. As we drift toward a blandly amorphous, generic world, as cultures disappear and life becomes more uniform, we as a people and a species, and Earth itself, will be deeply impoverished.”
Five hundred years of ecological mayhem and social tyranny is a relatively short time for humanity to have learned to understand its self-created patterns of systematic pillage. The insanity of human destructiveness may be matched by an older grace and intelligence that is fastening us together in ways we have never before seen or imagined... We live in community, not alone, and any sense of separateness that we harbor is illusion.
Grace | Humanity | Insanity | Intelligence | Sense | Time | Tyranny | Understand |
It includes everything. If there is suffering, then it is best to accept it, because it won't go away because you pretend it is not there. If there is joy, then it is best to accept that too, even though you are afraid it might end someday. Some people can only relate to life through sacrifice and renunciation. Some people only feel part of humanity when they think they are happy… It is always important to know when something has reached its end. Closing circles, shutting doors, finishing chapters, it doesn’t matter what we call it; what matters is to leave in the past those moments in life that are over. Slowly, I began to realize that I could not go back and force things to be as they once were: those two years, which up until then had seemed an endless inferno, were now beginning to show me their true meaning.
Beginning | Force | Humanity | Important | Life | Life | Past | People | Sacrifice | Afraid | Think |
It is not the unloved who initiate disaffection, but those who cannot love because they love only themselves. It is not the helpless, subject to terror, who initiate terror, but the violent, who with their power create the concrete situation which begets the 'rejects of life.' It is not the tyrannized who initiate despotism, but the tyrants. It is not those whose humanity is denied them who negate humankind, but those who denied that humanity (thus negating their own as well). Force is used not by those who have become weak under the preponderance of the strong, but by the strong who have emasculated them.
Pema Chödrön, born Deirdre Blomfield-Brown
Better to join in with humanity than to set ourselves apart.
Humanity |
Our most imperial and stupendous qualities — those on which the majesty and the power of humanity is erected — are, relatively to the inferior portion of its mechanism, active and imperial; but they are the passive slaves of some higher and more omnipotent Power. This Power is God; and those who have seen God have, in the period of their purer and more perfect nature, been harmonized by their own will to so exquisite consentaneity of power as to give forth divinest melody, when the breath of universal being sweeps over their frame. That those who are pure in heart shall see God, and that virtue is its own reward, may be considered as equivalent assertions. The former of these propositions is a metaphorical repetition of the latter. The advocates of literal interpretation have been the most efficacious enemies of those doctrines whose nature they profess to venerate.
God | Heart | Humanity | Nature | Power | Qualities | Virtue | Virtue | Will | God |
Peter F. Drucker, fully Peter Ferdinand Drucker
For the social ecologist language is not "communication." It is not just "message." It is substance. It is the cement that holds humanity together. It creates community and communication. ...Social ecologists need not be "great" writers; but they have to be respectful writers, caring writers.
Pitirim A. Sorokin, fully Pitirim Alexandrovich (Alexander) Sorokin
As in other cultural systems, the ideology of each supersystem is based upon certain major premises or certain ultimate principles whose development, differentiation, and articulation makes the total ideology of a supersystem." Since the ideologies of the supersystems are the vastest, their major premises or ultimate principles deal with the ultimate and most general truth, proposition, or value. An ultimate or most general truth concerns the nature of the ultimate true reality or of the ultimate true value. Three main consistent answers have been given by humanity to the question 'What is the nature of the true, ultimate reality-value?' One is: 'The ultimate, true reality-value is sensory. Beyond it there is neither other reality nor any other non-sensory value'. Such a major premise and the gigantic supersystem built upon it is called Sensate... Another solution to this problem is: 'The ultimate, true reality-value is a supersensory and superrational God (Brahma, and other equivalents of God). Sensory and any other reality or value are either a mirage or represent an infinitely more inferior and shadow pseudo-reality and pseudo-value.' Such a major premise and the corresponding cultural system is called Ideational... The third answer to the ultimate question is: 'The ultimate, true reality-value is the Manifold Infinity which contains all differentiations and which is infinite qualitatively and quantitatively. The finite human mind cannot grasp it or define it or describe it adequately. This Manifold Infinity is ineffable and unutterable. Only by a very remote approximation can we discern three main aspects in it: the rational or logical, the sensory, and the superrational-supersensory. All three of these aspects harmoniously united in it are real; real also are its superrational-supersensory, rational, and sensory values.' It has many names: God, Tao, Nirvana, the Divine Nothing of mystics, the Supra-Essence of Dionysius and Northrop's ‘undifferentiated aesthetic continuum'. This typically mystic conception of the ultimate, true reality and value and the supersystem built upon are described as Integral.
Aesthetic | God | Humanity | Mind | Nature | Nothing | Principles | Question | Reality | System | Truth | God | Value |
Peter Kropotkin, fully Prince Pyotr Alexeyevich Kropotkin
The millions of laws which exist for the regulation of humanity appear upon investigation to be divided into three principal categories: protection of property, protection of persons, protection of government. And by analyzing each of these three categories, we arrive at the same logical and necessary conclusion: the uselessness and hurtfulness of law.
Humanity | Regulation |
Peter McWilliams, fully Peter Alexander McWilliams
All the good, fine, noble, and creative acts of humanity were conceived as a spark in a single human consciousness.
Humanity |
In grafting we divide and open up the trunk, which will receive the graft. Now the fruit of this graft, selected by the gardener, is not the ordinary fruit of the tree to be grafted. In a similar fashion, the eternal Father whom the gospel mentions as the divine cultivator of the gospel, chose a wild plant from the earth (if we consider it in its origin and nature), which is humanity bearing the likeness of sinful flesh. God separated the nature from the person that would have been proper and connatural to it and that would have flowed out of its essence once it was actuated and existing. He substituted the heavenly graft, and the divine subsistence, the very person of his Son in the place of the human subsistence, which had been negated. Therefore this plant, divided in this way and wounded in what is most intimate, most appropriate and most connatural to its being, bears fruits that are different and do not belong to it, but rather to what was grafted onto it.
Earth | Eternal | Father | God | Humanity | Nature | Receive | Will | God |