This site is dedicated to the memory of Dr. Alan William Smolowe who gave birth to the creation of this database.
Air pollution is not merely a nuisance and a threat to health. It is a reminder that our most celebrated technological achievements - the automobile, the jet plane, the power plant, industry in general, and indeed the modern city itself - are, in the environment, failures.
Anatole France, pen name of Jacques Anatole Francois Thibault
A people living under the... threat of war and invasion is very easy to govern. It demands no social reforms. It doesn't not haggle over armaments and military expenditures. It pays without discussion, it ruins itself, and that is a fine thing for the financiers and manufacturers for whom patriotic terrors are an abundant source of gain.
Discussion | People | War | Wisdom |
I had a "near death experience" and remember thinking, "If only people knew what it was like to die, they wouldn't be afraid." I reached a point at which a voice began to ask me if I thought I'd completed what I'd come to do. was I going to leave my son, then age three, behind? There was no sense of threat or coercion. An absolute acceptance that whatever I did was all right, but pointing out that the moment of choice was now. The relief and release from the fear of dying changed my life. The reminder that "I am not my body" freed me to live my life in a different way. The understanding that no matter what is going on in our bodies, the essence of who we are is unaffected; this wisdom has enabled me to help other see their bodies in a different way. To see the body in illness not as an enemy, but as a faithful fried, programmed by; the soul to react in that exact way. To see illness as a confrontation in the physical of what one is reluctant to confront on the mental or emotional levels. In other words, a message, a communication, a time to listen and therefore a unique and powerful opportunity for transformation.
Absolute | Acceptance | Age | Body | Choice | Coercion | Death | Enemy | Experience | Fear | Life | Life | Opportunity | People | Right | Sense | Soul | Thinking | Thought | Time | Understanding | Unique | Wisdom | Words | Thought |
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 |
In deciding what course of action is moral, you should act as if there were no God. You should act as if there were no threat of earthly punishment or reward. You should be a person of good character because it is right to be such a person.
Action | Character | God | Good | Punishment | Reward | Right |
The truly moral person is the one who does the right thing without any promise of reward or threat of punishment - without engaging in a cost-benefit analysis.
Cost | Promise | Punishment | Reward | Right |
If you leave a group of people so far outside the social commonwealth that they nothing to contribute to it, you alienate them from the social practices and institutions of which they are part; and they will almost certainly become adversaries who pose a threat to those institutions.
Henry Kissinger, fully Henry Alfred Kissinger
Facing down a nonexistent threat is an easy way to enhance a nation’s standing.
Thomas Szasz, fully Thomas Stephen Szasz
The plague of mankind is the fear and rejection of diversity: monotheism, monarchy, monogamy and, in our age, mono-medicine. The belief that there is only one right way to live only one right way to regulate religious, political, sexual, medical affairs is the root cause of the greatest threat to man: members of his own species, bent on ensuring his salvation, security, and sanity.
Age | Belief | Cause | Diversity | Fear | Man | Mankind | Right | Salvation | Sanity | Security |
Harry Blackmun, fully Harold "Harry" Andrew Blackmun
By placing discretion in the hands of an official to grant or deny a license, such a statute creates a threat of censorship that by its very existence chills free speech.
Discretion | Existence |
John Rawls, fully John Bordley Rawls
Thus I assume that to each according to his threat advantage is not a conception of justice.
José Bergamin, fully José Bergamín Gutiérrez
A piece of advice always contains an implicit threat, just as a threat always contains an implicit piece of advice.
Advice |
Kofi Annan, fully Kofi Atta Annan
On this International Day for the Eradication of Poverty, let us recognize that extreme poverty anywhere is a threat to human security everywhere. Let us recall that poverty is a denial of human rights. For the first time in history, in this age of unprecedented wealth and technical prowess, we have the power to save humanity from this shameful scourge. Let us summon the will to do it.
Age | Day | Extreme | Humanity | Poverty | Power | Security | Time | Wealth | Will |
L. Ron Hubbard, fully Lafayette Ron Hubbard
If attacked on some vulnerable point by anyone or anything or any organization, always find or manufacture enough threat against them to cause them to sue for peace.
Marcel Proust, fully Valentin Louis Georges Eugène Marcel Proust
Were it not for habit, life would seem delightful to beings constantly under threat of dying, in other words to all humankind.
Heywood Broun, fully Matthew Heywood Campbell Broun
The great threat to the young and pure in heart is not what they read but what they don't read.
Heart |
The contingency of the world must not be understood as a deficiency in being, a break in the stuff of necessary being, a threat to rationality, nor as a problem to be solved as soon as possible by the discovery of some deeper-laid necessity. That is ontic contingency, contingency within the bounds of the world.