This site is dedicated to the memory of Dr. Alan William Smolowe who gave birth to the creation of this database.
Robert E. Carter, fully Robert Edgar Carter
What is wrong with our culture is that it often offers us an inaccurate conception of the self. It depicts the personal self as existing in competition with and in opposition with and in opposition to nature. We thereby fail to realize that if we destroy our environment, we are destroying what is in fact our larger self.
Competition | Culture | Destroy | Nature | Opposition | Self | Wrong |
Kenneth Boulding, fully Kenneth Ewart Boulding
There are three basic types of human transactions: (1) the threat system – “Give it to me or I’ll kill you” or today’s more sophisticated version: “How much will you pay me to stop harming or annoying you?”… (2) the exchange system, the narrow waveband of market transactions with which economics concerns itself, and (3) the integrative system, i.e., the transactions based on the love, sharing, and altruism of which human beings are capable in spite of the denial of these phenomena in economic theory.
Altruism | Economics | Kill | Love | Phenomena | System | Will |
The apportioning of blame [is] the means by which society obtains a modicum of revenge for the wrong it has suffered, expiates its own guilt for such responsibility as it may have had for the event in question, and finally seeks to prevent a repetition of the disaster.
Blame | Guilt | Means | Question | Responsibility | Revenge | Society | Wrong | Society |
The first things to be disputed by our commitment to nonviolence will be not the system but our own lives.
Commitment | System | Will |
Every new idea will… be troublesome to [the individual’s] entire being. He will defend himself against it because it threatens to destroy his certainties. He thus actually comes to hate everything opposed to what propaganda has made him acquire. Propaganda has created in him a system of opinions and tendencies which may not be subjected to criticism… Incidentally, this refusal to listen to new ideas usually takes on a vigorous propaganda will declare that all new ideas are propaganda.
Criticism | Destroy | Hate | Ideas | Individual | System | Will | Propaganda |
It is not impossible that to some infinitely superior being the whole universe may be as one plain, the distance between planet and planet being only as the pores in a grain of sand, and the spaces between system and system no greater than the intervals between one grain and the grain adjacent.
James Frazer, aka James George Frazer
The old view that the principles of right and wrong are immutable and eternal is no longer tenable. The moral world is as little exempt as the physical world from the law of ceaseless change, of perpetual flux.
Change | Eternal | Law | Little | Principles | Right | World | Wrong | Old |
When thinking of sinners we shall never go wrong to include ourselves.
Langdon Gilkey, fully Langdon Brown Gilkey
Idealism tends to absorb all of objective reality into a system made up solely of experience… Sooner or later the idealist has to admit that his experience touches something beyond its own content.
Experience | Idealism | Reality | System |
The school system can’t make up for family failure. The total education of our children is a cooperative effort requiring community solidarity. Apathetic parents who foster a permissive home atmosphere create a problem for everyone.
Children | Education | Effort | Failure | Family | Parents | System |
There is nothing wrong with questioning the teachings of one’s religion. It is an act of spiritual maturity, not of disobedience or disrespect. Religions may have been inspired by God, but they have evolved as human institutions. So, they are not infallible.
Disobedience | Disrespect | God | Nothing | Religion | Wrong |
Huston Smith, fully Huston Cummings Smith
Life is like a tapestry that we view from the wrong side. We see all the strands and knots, and it makes no sense from the back. But there is a different view of the whole things to which we are assured some day we will be privy. In the meanwhile, there are all these knots we have to deal with existentially; the path has been charted – compassion and justice – imbued by vision. And it’s up to the individual.
Compassion | Day | Individual | Justice | Life | Life | Sense | Vision | Will | Wrong |