This site is dedicated to the memory of Dr. Alan William Smolowe who gave birth to the creation of this database.
Lenin is said to have declared that the best way to destroy the Capitalist System was to debauch the currency. By a continuing process of inflation, Governments can confiscate, secretly and unobserved, an important part of the wealth of their citizens.
John Rawls, fully John Bordley Rawls
An economic system is not only an institutional device for satisfying existing wants and needs but a way of fashioning wants in the future.
John W. Gardner, fully John William Gardner
The ultimate goal of the educational system is to shift to the individual the burden of pursing his own education. This will not be a widely shared pursuit until we get over our odd conviction that education is what goes on in school buildings and nowhere else.
Education | Individual | System | Will |
Joseph Chilton Pearce, aka Joe
The worst is yet to come, however. Far more devastating that this pruning is that nature then brings about a corresponding increase of the connecting links of the emotional circuits in this cyngulate gyrus with the lower survival fight-or-flight structures of the amygdala, that neural module linked directly with our ancient defense and survival system in the reptilian brain. In this way, a sharp curtailment of connections with the higher, transcendent frequencies of mind and heart is brought about in order to shift growth toward the lower, protective survival systems.
Defense | Growth | Heart | Mind | Nature | Order | Survival | System |
Louis D. Brandeis, fully Louis Dembitz Brandeis
The margin between that which men naturally do, and that which they can do, is so great that a system which urges men on to action and develops individual enterprise and initiative is preferable, in spite of the wastes that necessarily attend their process.
Action | Individual | Initiative | Men | System |
Joseph Chilton Pearce, aka Joe
All hormonal function, including that of the immune system and even allergic responses, occur as a sophisticated memory system handled primarily by our emotional brain. Because learning and memory are emotional-cognitive functions, the neural pattern, imprint, or “structure of knowledge” (to use Piaget’s term) of specific learning events includes in its content the memory patterns of those emotional hormones prominent in the body at the time of that learning.
Body | Events | Knowledge | Learning | Memory | System | Time |
Marcel Proust, fully Valentin Louis Georges Eugène Marcel Proust
We feel in one world, we think and name in another. Between the two we can set up a system of references, but we cannot fill the gap.
Mihaly Csikszentmihalyi, native form is Csíkszentmihályi Mihály
Harmony is usually achieved by evolutionary changes involving an increase in an organism’s complexity, that is, an increase in both differentiation and integration. (Differentiation refers to the degree to which a system (i.e., an organ such as the brain, or an individual, a family, a corporation, a culture, or humanity as a whole) is composed of parts that differ in structure or function from one another. Integration refers to the extent to which the parts communicate and enhance one another’s goals. A system that is more differentiated and integrated than another is said to be more complex.)
Culture | Family | Goals | Harmony | Humanity | Individual | Integration | System |
Mihaly Csikszentmihalyi, native form is Csíkszentmihályi Mihály
Just as we have learned to separate ourselves from each other and from the environment, we now need to learn how to reunite ourselves with other entities around us without losing our hard-won individuality. The most promising faith for the future might be based on the realization that the entire universe is a system related by common laws and that it makes no sense to impose our dreams and desires on nature without taking them into account. Recognizing the limitations of human will, accepting a cooperative rather than a ruling role in the universe, we should feel the relief of the exile who is finally returning home. The problem of meaning will then be resolved as the individual's purpose merges with the universal flow.
Dreams | Faith | Future | Individual | Individuality | Meaning | Nature | Need | Purpose | Purpose | Sense | System | Universe | Will | Learn |
Noam Chomsky, fully Avram Noam Chomsky
The [United States] educational system is geared toward obedience.
Paramahansa Yogananda, born Mukunda Lal Ghosh
Truth is no theory, no speculative system of philosophy. Truth is exact correspondence with Reality. For man, truth is unshakable knowledge of his real nature, his Self as soul.
Knowledge | Man | Nature | Philosophy | Reality | Self | Soul | System | Truth |
Our system of morality is a body of imperfect social generalizations expressed in terms of emotion.