This site is dedicated to the memory of Dr. Alan William Smolowe who gave birth to the creation of this database.
Real goodness does not attach itself merely to this life - it points to another world. Political or professional reputation cannot last forever, but a conscience void of offense before God and man is an inheritance for eternity.
Conscience | Eternity | God | Inheritance | Life | Life | Man | Offense | Reputation | Wisdom | World | God |
E. B. White, fully Elwyn Brooks White
I have yet to see a piece of writing, political or non-political, that doesn’t have a slant. All writing slants the way a writer leans, and no man is born upright. The beauty of the American free press is that the slants and the twists and the distortions come from so many directions, and the special interests are so numerous, the reader must sift and sort and check and countercheck in order to find out what the score is.
Beauty | Free press | Man | Order | Wisdom | Writing | Beauty |
The punditocracy is a tiny group of highly visible political pontificators who make their living offering “inside political opinions and forecasts” in the elite national media. And it is their debate, rather than any semblance of a democratic one, that determines the parameters of political discourse in the nation today.
Nikolai Berdyaev, fully Nikolai Alexandrovich Berdyaev, also spelled Nichlas Berdiaev
The political organization of the state rests both on force and on faith.
Faith | Force | Organization |
Men and women are biological facts. Ladies and gentleman - citizens - are social artifacts, works of political art. They carry the culture that is sustained by wise laws, and traditions of civility. A the end of the day we are right to judge a society by the character of the people it produces. That is why statecraft is, inevitably, soulcraft.
Art | Character | Civility | Culture | Day | Men | People | Right | Society | Wisdom | Wise | Society |
Subhas Chandra Bose, aka Netaji
The secret of political bargaining is to look more strong than what you really are.
The political function of the crisis-man [e.g., Napoleon, Mussolini, Hitler]… is to suspend the democratic constitution, replacing it with dictatorship in the interests of the ruling class.
Man |
Rachel Carson, fully Rachel Louise Carson
I believe natural beauty has a necessary place in the spiritual development of any individual or any society. I believe that whenever we destroy beauty, or whenever we substitute something man-made and artificial for a natural feature of the earth, we have retarded some part of man’s spiritual growth.
Beauty | Destroy | Earth | Growth | Individual | Man | Society | Beauty |
T. Berry Brazelton, fully Thomas Berry Brazelton
Reading to children at night, responding to their smiles, with a smile, returning their vocalizations with one of your own, touching them, holding them – all of these further a child’s brain development and future potential, even in the earliest months. Research demonstrates that the early responsiveness of caring parents sets the tone for future self-esteem, trust, problem solving, ability to communicate successfully and motivation for future learning.
Ability | Children | Esteem | Future | Learning | Parents | Reading | Research | Self | Self-esteem | Smile | Trust |
E. L. Doctorow, fully Edgar Lawrence Doctorow
Religion is a private matter. Religious thought, to have any kind of integrity at all, must be the most private, tremblingly sacred kind of awareness we have. When religious terminology is bandied about, it loses its religious character and becomes entirely political and coercive.
Awareness | Character | Integrity | Religion | Sacred | Thought | Awareness |
Cultures can mix with one another. Explicit design is introduced to promote, improve, advance, and accelerate the evolutionary process of culture. A change brought about by a science and technology of behavior would correspond to a `biological mutation’ towards the better… Yet the final determining cause, whether genetic or cultural, is never an ethical or moral one, but always leads back to the environment. The world is a large-scale laboratory. Both the controller and the controlled are subject to conditioning. All life is conditioning.
Behavior | Better | Cause | Change | Culture | Design | Life | Life | Science | Technology | World |
Uncontrolled technology can certainly bring down disaster, perhaps irreparable, as our race. The only protection against it is a growth in man’s spiritual and moral maturity proportionate to his growth in technical skill and power.
Transcend political correctness and strive for human righteousness.
Rudolf Diesel, fully Rudolf Christian Karl Diesel
The hope that technology will save us or will miraculously effect our moral improvement is a kind of modern idolatry.
Hope | Improvement | Technology | Will |
H.A.L. Fisher, fully Herbert Albert Laurens Fisher
Men wiser and more learned than I have discerned in history a plot, a rhythm, a predetermined pattern. These harmonies are concealed from me. I can see only one emergency following upon another as wave follows upon wave, only one great fact with respect to which, since it is unique, there can be no generalizations, only one safe rule for the historian: that they should recognize in the development of human destinies the play of the contingent and the unforeseen.
History | Men | Play | Respect | Rule | Safe | Unique | Following | Respect |
A grand meta-narrative is a story of the development and purpose of human history in which we as individual can find a place and play a role. Four basic meta-narratives: (1) Platonic Christian is the idea of life as a journey to another unchanging realm. (2) Hegel’s view that history is the unfolding of the consciousness of God. (3) Marx’s notion of another revolution ushering in a new era. (4) Nietzsche’s idea that there is no “beyond” and that the only meaning comes through creative activities through which we shape a life for ourselves.
Consciousness | Era | God | History | Individual | Journey | Life | Life | Meaning | Play | Purpose | Purpose | Revolution | Story |