This site is dedicated to the memory of Dr. Alan William Smolowe who gave birth to the creation of this database.
A telescope, a telephone, or a typewriter is a complex mechanism serving a particular function. Obviously, its manufacturer had a purpose in mind, and the machine was designed and built in order to serve that purpose. An eye, an ear, or a hand is also a complex mechanism serving a particular function. It, too, looks as if it had been made for a purpose. This appearance of purposefulness is pervading in nature, in the general structure of animals and plants, in the mechanisms of their various organs, and in the give and take of their relationships with each other. Accounting for this apparent purposefulness is a basic problem for any system of philosophy or of science.
Appearance | Looks | Order | Philosophy | Purpose | Purpose | System |
The virgin fertility of our soils and the vast amount of unskilled labor have been more of a curse than a blessing to agriculture. This exhaustive system for cultivation, the destruction of forest, the rapid and almost constant decomposition of organic matter, have made our agricultural problem one requiring more brains than of the North, East or West.
There is no accountability in the public school system - except for coaches. You know what happens to a losing coach. You fire him. A losing teacher can go on losing for 30 years and then go to glory.
But the poor person does not exist as an inescapable fact of destiny. His or her existence is not politically neutral, and it is not ethically innocent. The poor are a by-product of the system in which we live and for which we are responsible. They are marginalized by our social and cultural world. They are the oppressed, exploited proletariat, robbed of the fruit of their labor and despoiled of their humanity. Hence the poverty of the poor is not a call to generous relief action, but a demand that we go and build a different social order.
Richard Niebuhr, fully Helmut Richard Niebuhr
Institutions can never conserve without betraying the movements from which they proceed. The institution is static, whereas its parent movement has been dynamic; it confines men within its limits, while the movement had liberated them from the bondage of institutions; it looks to the past, [although] the movement had pointed forward. Though in content the institution resembles the dynamic epoch whence it proceeded, in spirit it is like the [state] before the revolution. So the Christian church, after the early period, often seemed more closely related in attitude to the Jewish synagogue and the Roman state than to the age of Christ and his apostles; its creed was often more like a system of philosophy than like the living gospel.
Age | Creed | Dynamic | Looks | Men | Philosophy | Spirit | System | Parent |
A cell of a higher organism contains a thousand different substances, arranged in a complex system. This great organized system was not discovered by chemical or physical methods; they are inadequate to its refinement and delicacy and complexity.
Refinement | System |
The whole educational system has become one massive quiz program, with the prizes going to the most enterprising, most repulsively well-informed person—the man with his hand up first.
No one can possibly simulate you or me with a system that is less complex than you or me. The products that we produce may be viewed as a simulation, and while products can endure in ways that our bodies cannot, they can never capture the richness, complexity, or depth of purpose of their creator. Beethoven once remarked that the music he had written was nothing compared with the music he had heard.
The great advantage of our system of government over all others, is, that we have a written constitution, defining its limits, and prescribing its authorities; and that, however, for a time, faction may convulse the nation, and passion and party prejudice sway its functionaries, the season of reflection will recur, when calmly retracing their deeds, all aberrations from fundamental principle will be corrected.
Government | Passion | Prejudice | Reflection | System | Will | Government |
The judicial system is the most expensive machine ever invented for finding out what happened and what to do about it.
System |
If nonsatiety were the natural state of human nature then aggressive want-stimulating advertising would not be necessary, nor would the barrage of novelty aimed at promoting dissatisfaction with last year's model. The system attempts to remake people to fit its own presuppositions. If people's wants are not naturally insatiable we must make them so, in order to keep the system going.
Advertising | Human nature | Nature | Novelty | Order | People | System | Wants | Novelty |
The test of every religious, political, or educational system is the man which it forms. If it injures the intelligence, it is bad; if it injures the character, it is vicious; if it injures the conscience it is criminal.
Conscience | Man | System |
The Enneagram is a psychological and spiritual system with roots in ancient traditions. Traces of it can be found in Sufism, Judaism, and specifically, in the seven capital tendencies of early Christianity. These seven capital tendencies, anger, pride, envy, avarice, gluttony, lust, and sloth, along with two general traits everyone shares, deceit and fear, make up the nine personality types of the Enneagram. Each personality type on the nine-pointed star of the Enneagram can be seen as a pointer to a constellation of tendencies, perspectives, and habitual perceptions characteristic to each type. In Enneagram study, these constellations of motivation are called passions, and each one colors how we experience ourselves, our relationships and the world around us. The purpose of Enneagram studies is gain insight into how these passions and compulsions operate in ourselves and others, thereby fostering self-understanding and empathy, giving rise to improved relationships.
Deceit | Experience | Giving | Insight | Personality | Purpose | Purpose | System | World |
Ilya, Viscount Prigogine, fully Ilya Romanovich Prigozhin
The main character of any living system is openness.
Propaganda tries to surround man by all possible routes in the realm of feelings as well as ideas, by playing on his will or on his needs, through his conscious and his unconscious, assailing him in both his private and his public life. It furnishes him with a complete system for explaining the world, and provides immediate incentives to action. We are here in the presence of an organized myth that tries to take hold of the entire person. Through the myth it creates, propaganda imposes a complete range of intuitive knowledge, susceptible of only one interpretation, unique and one-sided, and precluding any divergence. This myth becomes so powerful that it invades every arena of consciousness, leaving no faculty or motivation intact. It stimulates in the individual a feeling of exclusiveness, and produces a biased attitude.
Feelings | Individual | Man | Myth | Public | System | Unique | Will | Propaganda |
J. W. Fulbright, fully James William Fulbright
It is not our affluence, or our plumbing, or our clogged freeways that grip the imagination of others. Rather, it is the values upon which our system is built. These values imply our adherence not only to liberty and individual freedom, but also to international peace, law and order, and constructive social purpose. When we depart from these values, we do so at our peril.
Imagination | Individual | Law | Liberty | System |
When the teacher regards each student as a unique individual and therefore not to be compared with any other, he is then not concerned with system or method. His sole concern is with `helping' the student to understand the conditioning influences about him and within himself, so that he can face intelligently without fear, the complex process of living and not add more problems to the already existing mess.
Individual | Problems | System | Unique | Teacher | Understand |
Osho, born Chandra Mohan Jain, also known as Acharya Rajneesh and Bhagwan Shree Rajneesh NULL
Love says respect the other as an end unto himself or herself; never use the other as a means. Nobody is a means for you, everybody is an end. But then ambition will flop, and our whole educational system depends on ambitiousness, our politics depends on ambition, our religions depend on ambition.
Ambition | Means | Politics | Respect | System | Will | Ambition | Respect |
Jacob Burckhardt, fully Carl Jacob (or Jakob) Christoph Burckhardt
It seems that an essential condition for crises is to be found in the existence of a highly developed system of communications and the spreading of a homogenous mentality over vast areas.