This site is dedicated to the memory of Dr. Alan William Smolowe who gave birth to the creation of this database.
With attention deficit democracy, I am trying to wake up people to how the combination of mass ignorance, fear mongering by the government, and lying politicians is putting our entire system of government to a death spiral.
Attention | Death | Fear | Government | Lying | People | System | Government |
Secrecy, being an instrument of conspiracy, ought never to be the system of a regular government.
System |
No power of government ought to be employed in the endeavor to establish any system or article of belief on the subject of religion.
Belief | Government | Power | System | Government |
John Rawls, fully John Bordley Rawls
In constant pursuit of money to finance campaigns, the political system is simply unable to function. Its deliberative powers are paralyzed.
Religion is more than a creed or a doctrine, more than faith or piety; it is an everlasting fact in the universe, something that exists outside knowledge and experience, an order of being, the holy dimension of existence. It does not emanate from the affections and moods, aspirations and visions of the soul. It is not a divine force in us, a mere possibility, left to the initiative of man, something that may or may not take place, but an actuality, the inner constitution of the universe, the system of divine values involved in every being and exposed to the activity of man, the ultimate in our reality. As an absolute implication of being, as an ontological entity, not as an adorning veneer for a psychical wish or for a material want, religion cannot be totally described in psychological or sociological terms.
Absolute | Creed | Faith | Force | Initiative | Knowledge | Order | Religion | System |
Better to die in the pursuit of civilized values, we believed, than in a flight underground. We were offering a value system couched in the language of science.
It’s absurd and anti-life to be part of a system that compels you to sit in confinement with people of exactly the same age and social class. That system effectively cuts you off from the immense diversity of life and the synergy of variety; indeed it cuts you off from your own past and future, sealing you in a continuous present much the same way television does.
Absurd | Age | Diversity | Life | Life | Past | People | Present | System | Television |
A large part of mathematics which becomes useful developed with absolutely no desire to be useful, and in a situation where nobody could possibly know in what area it would become useful; and there were no general indications that it ever would be so. By and large it is uniformly true in mathematics that there is a time lapse between a mathematical discovery and the moment when it is useful; and that this lapse of time can be anything from 30 to 100 years, in some cases even more; and that the whole system seems to function without any direction, without any reference to usefulness, and without any desire to do things which are useful.
Desire | Discovery | Mathematics | System | Time | Discovery |
Milton Friedman, fully John Milton Friedman
We have a system that increasingly taxes work and subsidizes nonwork.
How much reverence can you have for a Supreme Being who finds it necessary to include such phenomena as phlegm and tooth decay in His divine system of Creation? What in the world was running through that warped, evil, scatological mind of His when He robbed old people of the power to control their bowel movements?
Control | Mind | People | Phenomena | Power | Reverence | System | World | Old |
Is the system going to flatten you out and deny you your humanity, or are you going to be able to make use of the system to the attainment of human purposes?
Attainment | System |
It is doubtful whether our present system of popular education does not retard independent or self thinking as much as it promotes it. All genuine education is self-education. It will incite the individual to think for himself, by rethinking what the race's great thinkers have already thought for him, thus enabling him to go ahead under his own mental steam.
Education | Individual | Present | Self | System | Thinkers | Thinking | Thought | Will | Think | Thought |
Karl Popper, fully Sir Karl Raimund Popper
I think that we shall have to get accustomed to the idea that we must not look upon science as a 'body of knowledge', but rather as a system of hypotheses; that is to say, as a system of guesses or anticipations which in principle cannot be justified, but with which we work as long as they stand up to tests, and of which we are never justified in saying that we know they are 'true' or 'more or less certain' or even 'probable'.
I'm helping to create an economic system that will respect and protect the earth—one which would replace corporate globalization with a global network of local living economies. Business is beautiful when it's a vehicle for serving the common good.
Business | Global | Respect | System | Will | Respect | Business |
William O. Douglas, fully Judge William Orville Douglas
The challenge to our liberties comes frequently not from those who consciously seek to destroy our system of government, but from men of goodwill -- good men who allow their proper concerns to blind them to the fact that what they propose to accomplish involves an impairment of liberty.
Non-cooperation began for me by refusing to be part of the factory farm system. This motivated me to create an alternative system. What came first though was the moral obligation to non-cooperate with a system I saw as evil.
Obligation | System |
For me, atheism’s roots are in a sober and modest assessment of where reason and evidence lead us. That means the real enemy is not religion as such, but any kind of system of belief that does not respect these limits on our thinking. For that reason, I want to engage with thoughtful, intelligent believers, and isolate extremists. But if we demonise all religion, such coalitions of the reasonable are not possible. Instead, we are likely to see moderate religious believers join ranks with fundamentalists, the enemies of their enemy, to resist what they see as an attempt to wipe out all forms of religious belief.
Belief | Enemy | Evidence | Means | Reason | Religion | Respect | System | Respect |