This site is dedicated to the memory of Dr. Alan William Smolowe who gave birth to the creation of this database.
Mahatma Gandhi, fully Mohandas Karamchand Gandhi, aka Bapu
In true democracy every man and women is taught to think for himself or herself.
Mahatma Gandhi, fully Mohandas Karamchand Gandhi, aka Bapu
If we want to cultivate a true spirit of democracy we cannot afford to be intolerant. Intolerance betrays want of faith in one’s cause.
Democracy | Faith | Intolerance | Spirit |
Mahatma Gandhi, fully Mohandas Karamchand Gandhi, aka Bapu
Liberty and democracy become unholy when their hands are dyed red with innocent blood.
Mahatma Gandhi, fully Mohandas Karamchand Gandhi, aka Bapu
To safeguard democracy the people must have a keen sense of independence, self-respect, and their oneness.
Charles De Montesquieu, formally Charles-Louis de Secondat, Baron de La Brède et de Montesquieu
The love of democracy is that of equality.
Mahatma Gandhi, fully Mohandas Karamchand Gandhi, aka Bapu
The spirit of democracy cannot be established in the midst of terrorism, whether governmental or popular.
There is no vice in nature more debasing and destructive to men than intemperance. It robs them of their reason, reputation, and interest. It renders them unfit for human society. It degrades them below the beasts that perish, and justly exposes them to universal odium and contempt.
Nelson Mandela, fully Nelson Rolihlahla Mandela
The victory of democracy in South Africa is the common achievement of all humanity.
Achievement | Democracy |
Nelson Mandela, fully Nelson Rolihlahla Mandela
There was much in such a society that was primitive and insecure and it certainly could never measure up to the demands of the present epoch. But in such a society are contained the seeds of revolutionary democracy in which none will be held in slavery.
Niels Bohr, fully Neils Henrik David Bohr
The best weapon of a dictatorship is secrecy, but the best weapon of a democracy should be the weapon of openness.
Oswald Spengler, fully Oswald Manuel Arnold Gottfried Spengler
Through money, democracy becomes its own destroyer, after money has destroyed intellect.
Otto Kahn, fully Otto Hermann Kahn
The deadliest foe of democracy is not autocracy but liberty frenzied. Liberty is not foolproof. For its beneficent working it demands self-restraint, a sane and clear recognition of the practical and attainable, and of the fact that there are laws of nature which are beyond our power to change.
Osho, born Chandra Mohan Jain, also known as Acharya Rajneesh and Bhagwan Shree Rajneesh NULL
But nobody’s approval can make anything real. Even if the whole world denies your enlightenment you will still be enlightened, there will be no difference. Or vice versa: even if the whole world approves your enlightenment and you are not enlightened, all that approval is not going to make you enlightened.
Enlightenment | Will | World | Approval | Vice |
Pamela Oliver and Gerald Maxwell
Our central thesis is that technologies for mobilizing resources impose tight constraints on the forms of action that are possible. Once a person or group is using one technology, it is not easy to switch to another. Groups that are structured to raise money are not well structured to mobilize volunteers, and vice versa. Raising money through direct mail tends to concentrate power in a central national office, while raising money through canvassing creates large cadre of canvassers in local areas who need to be managed and motivated. Volunteers mobilized for a protest demonstration are not usually available for volunteer fund-raising
Authority has always attracted the lowest elements in the human race. All through history, mankind has been bullied by scum. Those who lord it over their fellows and toss commands in every direction and would boss the grass in the meadow about which way to bend in the wind are the most depraved kind of prostitutes. They will submit to any indignity, perform any vile act, do anything to achieve power. The worst off-sloughings of the planet are the ingredients of sovereignty. Every government is a parliament of whores. The trouble is, in a democracy the whores are us.
Democracy | Government | Lord | Mankind | Will | Government | Trouble |
Paul Feyerabend, fully Paul Karl Feyerabend
Every profession has an ideology and a drive for power that goes far beyond its achievements and it is the task of democracy to keep this ideology and this drive under control. Science is here no different from other institutions.
Pat Buchanan, fully Patrick Joseph "Pat" Buchanan
Our intellectual, cultural, and political elites are today engaged in one of the most audacious and ambitious experiments in history. They are trying to transform a Western Christian republic into an egalitarian democracy made up of all the tribes, races, creeds, and cultures of planet Earth. They have dethroned our God, purged our cradle faith from public life, and repudiated the Judeo-Christian moral code by which previous generations sought to live.
Well, one of the things we’ve done at my institute is we’ve created a website called wiserearth.org precisely to create, in a sense, an information commons for this unnamed movement that is also the fastest-growing movement in the world, and where you can put in your organization profiles, events and so forth, and a website, Democracy Now! or any other, can sit right on top of the data and pull it up, so that we’re trying to create more or less something that feeds these NGOs and the ability for them to recognize, contact, connect and collaborate or coalesce in different ways. That is missing right now.
Ability | Democracy | Events | Organization | Right |
The question that continues to reverberate to this day is whether human rights trump the rights of business, or vice versa, a conflict that has been ongoing for more than three hundred years... From an economic viewpoint, what citizens have been trying to do for two hundred years is to force business to pay full freight, to internalize their costs to society instead of externalizing them onto a river, a town, a single patient, or a whole generation.
Business | Day | Force | Question | Rights | Society | Society | Business | Vice |
Nature rejects the monarch, not the man; The subject, not the citizen; for kings And subjects, mutual foes, forever play A losing game into each other's hands, Whose stakes are vice and misery. The man Of virtuous soul commands not, nor obeys. Power, like a desolating pestilence, Pollutes whate'er it touches; and obedience, Bane of all genius, virtue, freedom, truth, Makes slaves of men, and of the human frame A mechanized automaton.