This site is dedicated to the memory of Dr. Alan William Smolowe who gave birth to the creation of this database.
The working of great institutions is mainly the result of... routine, petty malice, self-interest, carelessness, and sheer mistakes. Only a small fraction is thought.
Malice | Self | Self-interest | Thought |
Since trifles make the sum of human things, and half our misery from our foibles springs; since life’s best joys consist in peace and ease, and few can save or serve, but all may please; Oh! let th’ ungentle spirit learn from hence a small unkindness is a great offense, large bounties to restore we wish in vain, but all may shun the guilt of giving pain.
Giving | Guilt | Life | Life | Offense | Pain | Peace | Spirit | Trifles | Unkindness | Learn |
How wonderful is the human voice! It is indeed the organ of the soul! The intellect of man sits enthroned visibly upon his forehead and in his eye; and the heart of man is written upon his countenance. But the soul reveals itself in the voice only, as God in “the still, small voice,” and in a voice from the burning bush. The soul of man is audible, not visible. A sound alone betrays the flowing of the eternal fountain, invisible to man!
Eternal | God | Heart | Man | Soul | Sound | God | Intellect |
[Paraphrase] The professional artist is morally suspect, even socially dangerous, conman, who from a deliberately chosen position of spiritual alienation, yet offers the ambiguous, self-serving products of his art, in expectation not only of support and remuneration, but also of social approval and even adoration as genius.
Alienation | Art | Expectation | Genius | Position | Remuneration | Self | Approval | Expectation |
Missing from [history] are the countless small actions of unknown people that led up to those great moments. When we understand this, we can see that the tiniest acts of protest in which we engage may become the invisible roots of social change.
Change | History | People | Protest | Understand |
A just security to property is not afforded by that government under which unequal taxes oppress one species of property and reward another species; where arbitrary tax invade the domestic sanctuaries of the rich and excessive taxes grind the faces of the poor; where the keenness and competitions of want are deemed an insufficient spur to labor, and taxes are again applied by an unfeeling policy as another spur; in violation of that sacred property which heaven, in decreeing man to earn his bread by the sweat of his brow, kindly reserved to him in the small repose that could be spared from the supply of his necessities.
Government | Heaven | Labor | Man | Policy | Property | Repose | Reward | Sacred | Security | Government |
Small miseries, like small debts, hit us in so many places and meet us at so many turns and corners, that what they want in weight they make up in number, and render it less hazardous to stand one cannon ball than a volley of bullets.
John Cage, fully John Milton Cage, Jr.
Food, one assumes, provides nourishment; but Americans eat it fully aware that small amounts of poison have been added to improve its appearance and delay its putrefaction.
Appearance | Delay |
He who can take no interest in what is small will take false interest in what is great.
Will |
To be surprised, to wonder, is to begin to understand. This is the sport, the luxury, special to the intellectual man... If anyone in a discussion with us is not concerned with adjusting himself to truth, if he has no wish to find the truth, he is intellectually a barbarian. That, in fact, is the position of the mass-man when he speaks, lectures or writes... The man who discovers a new scientific truth has previously had to smash to atoms almost everything he had learnt, and arrives at the new truth with hands bloodstained from the slaughter of a thousand platitudes.
Discussion | Luxury | Man | Platitudes | Position | Truth | Wonder |
How can great minds be produced in a country where the test of great minds is agreeing in the opinion of small minds?
Opinion |