This site is dedicated to the memory of Dr. Alan William Smolowe who gave birth to the creation of this database.
In reality, the difference is, that the savage lives within himself while social man lives outside himself and can only live in the opinion of others, so that he seems to receive the feeling of his own existence only from the judgment of others concerning him. It is not to my present purpose to insist on the indifference to good and evil which arises from this disposition, in spite of our many fine works on morality, or to show how, everything being reduced to appearances, there is but art and mummery in even honor, friendship, virtue, and often vice itself, of which we at length learn the secret of boasting; to show, in short, how abject we are, and never daring to ask ourselves in the midst of so much philosophy, benevolence, politeness, and of such sublime codes of morality, we have nothing to show for ourselves but a frivolous and deceitful appearance, honor without virtue, reason without wisdom, and pleasure without happiness.
Art | Daring | Evil | Existence | Good | Honor | Indifference | Judgment | Man | Nothing | Opinion | Pleasure | Present | Purpose | Purpose | Reason | Receive | Art | Learn | Vice |
Remember, democracy never lasts long. It soon wastes, exhausts, and murders itself. There never was a democracy yet that did not commit suicide.
Vietnam presumably taught us that the United States could not serve as the world's policeman; it should also have taught us the dangers of trying to be the world's midwife to democracy when the birth is scheduled to take place under conditions of guerrilla war.
Were the judgments of mankind correct, custom would be regulated by the good. But it is often far otherwise in point of fact; for, whatever the many are seen to do, forthwith obtains the force of custom. But human affairs have scarcely ever been so happily constituted as that the better course pleased the greater number. Hence the private vices of the multitude have generally resulted in public error, or rather that common consent in vice which these worthy men would have to be law.
A democracy is more than a form of government; it is primarily a mode of associated living, of conjoint communicated experience. The extension in space of the number of individuals who participate in an interest so that each has to refer his own action to that of others, and to consider the action of others to give point and direction to his own, is equivalent to the breaking down of those barriers of class, race, and national territory which kept men from realizing the full import of their activity. These more numerous and more varied points of contact denote a greater diversity of stimuli to which an individual has to respond; they consequently put a premium on variation in action. They secure a liberation of powers which remain suppressed as long as the incitations to action are partial, as they must be in a group which in its exclusiveness shuts out many interests.
Loud indignation against vice often stands for virtue with bigots.
Indignation | Virtue | Virtue | Vice |
Pure democracy cannot subsist long nor be carried far into the departments of state - it is very subject to caprice and the madness of popular rage
Megatrends: Ten New Directions Transforming Our Lives… From an Industrial Society to an Information Society... From Forced Technology to High Tech/High Tech/High Touch... From a National Economy to a World Economy… From Short Term to Long Term… From Centralization to Decentralization… From Institutional Help to Self-Help… From Representative Democracy to Participatory Democracy… From Hierarchies to Networking… From North to South… From Either/Or to Multiple Option.
Democracy | Society | Technology | World | Society |
Slander is perhaps the only vice which no circumstance can palliate, as well as being one which we are most ingenious in concealing from ourselves.
Circumstance | Vice |
Content thyself to be obscurely good. When vice prevails and impious men bear away, The post of honor is a private station.
In the democracy of the dead all men at last are equal. There is neither rank nor station nor prerogative in the republic of the grave.
Bureaucracy is not an obstacle to democracy but an inevitable complement to it.
Democracy | Inevitable | Obstacle |
The non-spatial nature of consciousness makes it possible for any apparently unconscious entity to be conscious, and vice versa.
Consciousness | Nature | Vice |
John Dalberg-Acton, Lord Acton, fully John Emerich Edward Dalberg-Acton, 1st Baron Acton
The common vice of democracy is disregard for morality.
Louis D. Brandeis, fully Louis Dembitz Brandeis
What are the American ideals? They are the development of the individual for his own and the common good; the development of the individual through liberty, and the attainment of the common good through democracy and social justice.
Attainment | Democracy | Good | Individual |