This site is dedicated to the memory of Dr. Alan William Smolowe who gave birth to the creation of this database.
Politicians fascinate because they constitute such a paradox; they are an elite that accomplishes mediocrity for the public good.
Mediocrity | Public |
Golda Meir, originally named Goldie Mabovitch, later Goldie Myerson
It’s no accident many accuse me of conducting public affairs with my heart instead of my head. Well, what if I do? . . . Those who don’t know how to weep with their whole heart don’t know how to laugh either.
George Marshall, fully George Catlett Marshall, Jr.
I need not tell you that the world situation is very serious. That must be apparent to all intelligent people. I think one difficulty is that the problem is one of such enormous complexity that the very mass of facts presented to the public by press and radio make it exceedingly difficult for the man in the street to reach a clear appraisement of the situation. Furthermore, the people of this country are distant from the troubled areas of the earth and it is hard for them to comprehend the plight and consequent reactions of the long-suffering peoples, and the effect of those reactions on their governments in connection with our efforts to promote peace in the world.
Difficulty | Earth | Man | Need | Peace | People | Public | World | Think |
Haim Ginott, fully Haim G. Ginott, orignially Ginzburg
Children are never sure of their abilities. A public attack on intelligence hits their most vulnerable spot. Virulent criticism doesn't motivate children to improve; on the contrary, it ruins their initiative.
Children | Criticism | Intelligence | Public |
There is no accountability in the public school system - except for coaches. You know what happens to a losing coach. You fire him. A losing teacher can go on losing for 30 years and then go to glory.
Herbert Hoover, fully Herbert Clark Hoover
Only a few rare souls in a century, to whose class I make no pretension, count much in the great flow of this Republic. The life stream of this nation is the generations of millions of human particles acting under the impulses of advancing ideas and national ideals gathered from a thousand springs... We are but transitory officials in government whose duty is to keep these channels clear and to strengthen and extend these dikes. What counts toward the honor of public officials is that they sustain the national ideals upon which are patterned the design of these channels of progress and the construction of these dikes of safety.
Design | Duty | Government | Honor | Ideals | Ideas | Life | Life | Progress | Public | Government |
More is given to us than to any people at any time before; and, therefore, more is required of us. We have made, and still are making, enormous advances on material lines. It is necessary that we commensurately advance on moral lines. Civilization, as it progresses, requires a higher conscience, a keener sense of justice, a warmer brotherhood, a wider, loftier, truer public spirit. Failing these, civilization must pass into destruction. It cannot be maintained on the ethics of savagery. For civilization knits men more and more closely together, and constantly tends to subordinate the individual to the whole, and to make more and more important social conditions.
Civilization | Ethics | Important | Individual | Men | People | Public | Sense | Time |
Marshall McLuhan, fully Herbert Marshall McLuhan
Only puny secrets need protection. Big discoveries are protected by public incredulity.
No other profession is subject to the public contempt and derision that sometimes befalls lawyers; the bitter fruit of public incomprehension of the law itself and its dynamics.
Propaganda tries to surround man by all possible routes in the realm of feelings as well as ideas, by playing on his will or on his needs, through his conscious and his unconscious, assailing him in both his private and his public life. It furnishes him with a complete system for explaining the world, and provides immediate incentives to action. We are here in the presence of an organized myth that tries to take hold of the entire person. Through the myth it creates, propaganda imposes a complete range of intuitive knowledge, susceptible of only one interpretation, unique and one-sided, and precluding any divergence. This myth becomes so powerful that it invades every arena of consciousness, leaving no faculty or motivation intact. It stimulates in the individual a feeling of exclusiveness, and produces a biased attitude.
Feelings | Individual | Man | Myth | Public | System | Unique | Will | Propaganda |
The public school has become the established church of secular society.
When one uses another for psychological purposes, then exploitation begins. All exploitation is based on psychological poverty of being. There will be no exploitation of man by man when this poverty of being is understood. Exploitation will not cease through mere legislation. There will be exploitation in different forms - at home, in public - as long as this psychological emptiness exists. You will be content with little, with the necessities of life, when you are inwardly rich.
We often take for granted the notion that some people are insiders, while others are outsiders. But such a notion is a social contrivance, that, like virtually every public construct, is a legacy of a primordial and tribal mentality.
If a radical devolution of powers was possible, it would have been done before. The assumption of states' rights is gone. There's no support for it in the Supreme Court and there's no support for it in public opinion.