This site is dedicated to the memory of Dr. Alan William Smolowe who gave birth to the creation of this database.
The arts of power and its minions are the same in all countries and in all ages. It marks its victim; denounces [him]; and excites the public odium and the public hatred, to conceal its own abuses and encroachments.
We narratively represent our selves in part in order to answer certain questions of identity. It is useful to distinguish two different aims of self-representation that in the end are deeply intertwined. First, there is self-representation for the sake of self-understanding. This is the story we tell ourselves to understand ourselves for who we are. The ideal here is convergence between self-representation and an acceptable version of the story of our actual identity. Second, there is self-representation for public dissemination, whose aim is underwriting successful social interaction.
Aims | Distinguish | Order | Public | Self | Story | Understanding | Understand |
Erich Fromm, fully Erich Seligmann Fromm
Words can become idols, and machines can become idols; leaders, the state, power, and political groups may also serve. Science and the opinion of one’s neighbors can become idols, and God has become an idol for many.
We are at ease with a moral judgment made against someone’s private sin - lust or greed. We are much less comfortable judging someone’s public ethic - those decisions that can lead to such outcomes as aggression, the abuse of the environment, the neglect of the needy.
Abuse | Aggression | Greed | Judgment | Lust | Neglect | Public | Sin |
F. A. Hayek, fully Friedrich August Hayek or von Hayek
Responsibility, not to a superior, but to one’s conscience, the awareness of a duty not exacted by compulsion, the necessity to decide which of the things one values are to be sacrificed to others, and to beat the consequences of one’s own decision, are the very essence of any morals which deserve the name.
Awareness | Conscience | Consequences | Decision | Duty | Necessity | Responsibility | Awareness |
How a report is framed, which facts it contains and emphasizes and which it ignores, and in what context, are as important to sharing opinion as the bare facts themselves.
B. H. Liddell Hart, fully Captain B. H. Liddell
Be very careful never to show your own bias to anyone who is giving you information, or passing it on to you. Once he sees that you have a particular inclination he will instinctively tend to tell you what he thinks will suit you, and enhance your opinion of him.
Giving | Inclination | Opinion | Will |
Our pursuit of knowledge involves exploring the consequences of our initial assumptions, both our conceptual assumptions and empirical ones
Nothing makes the multitude angrier than when someone forces them to change their opinion of him.
Error of opinion may be tolerated where reason is left free to combat it.
Samuel Johnson, aka Doctor Johnson
The greatest part of mankind have no other reason for their opinion than that they are in fashion.
Samuel Johnson, aka Doctor Johnson
The mischief of flattery is not that it persuades any man that he is what he is not, but that it suppresses the influence of honest ambition, by raising an opinion that honor may be gained without the toil of merit.
Ambition | Flattery | Honor | Influence | Man | Merit | Opinion |
Every difference of opinion is not a difference of principle. We have called by different names brethren of the same principle. We are all Republicans, we are all Federalists.
Opinion |
John Kane, fully John L. Lane Jr.
The public interest is best served by the free exchange of ideas.
Carl Jung, fully Carl Gustav Jung
Deep down, below the surface of the average man’s conscience, he hears a voice whispering. “There is something not right,” no matter how much his rightness is supported by public opinion or by the moral code.
Conscience | Man | Opinion | Public | Right |
The art of crisis management, now widely acknowledged to be the essence of statecraft, owes its vogue to the merger of politics and spectacle. Propaganda seeks to create in the public a chronic sense of crisis, which in turn justifies the expansion of executive power and the secrecy surrounding it.
Art | Politics | Power | Public | Secrecy | Sense | Art | Crisis | Propaganda |