This site is dedicated to the memory of Dr. Alan William Smolowe who gave birth to the creation of this database.
In really hard times the rules of the game are altered. The inchoate mass begins to stir. It becomes potent, and when it strikes, it strikes with incredible emphasis. Those are the rare occasions when a national will emerges from the scattered, specialized, or indifferent blocs of voters who ordinarily elect the politicians. Those are for good or evil the great occasions in a nation's history.
Experiment | People | Power |
In making the great experiment of governing people by consent rather than by coercion, it is not sufficient that the party in power should have a majority. It is just as necessary that the party in power should never outrage the minority.
Government | Luxury | Men | News | Office | Passion | Public | Sentiment | Truth | Vehemence | Wrong | Government | Trial |
Walt Whitman, fully Walter "Walt" Whitman
There is, in sanest hours, a consciousness, a thought that rises, independent, lifted out from all else, calm, like the stars, shining eternal. This is the thought of identity – yours for you, whoever you are, as mine for me. Miracle of miracles, beyond statement, most spiritual and vaguest of earth’s dreams, yet hardest basic fact, and only entrance to all facts. In such devout hours, in the midst of the significant wonders of heaven and earth, (significant only because of the Me in the center), creeds, conventions, fall away and become of no account before this simple idea. Under the luminousness of real vision, it alone takes possession, takes value. Like the shadowy dwarf in the fable, once liberated and look’d upon, it expands over the whole earth, and spreads to the roof of heaven.
Power | Unconsciousness |
The poets speak only poetry, not program, not policy, not even advocacy, only poetry. But the poetry exists in order to make available what the ideologues are unable to see and what the policy makers are unable to grasp.
It was in the recognition that there is in each man a final essence, that is to say an immortal soul, which only God can judge, that a limit was set upon the dominion of men over men.
Administration | Government | Habit | Office | Opposition | Power | Stupidity | Government |
Walt Whitman, fully Walter "Walt" Whitman
Touch me, touch the palm of your hand to my body as I pass, be not afraid of my body.
Better | Body | Fear | Imperfection | Justice | Love | Man | Nothing | Soul | Will | Woman | Understand |
Israel was an experimental social revolution in that ancient world, to see whether social relationships could be organized in human, egalitarian, communitarian ways.
Enough | Knowledge | Power | Resilience | Terror |
If school success were a reliable index of human capacity, we should be able to go a step further and say that the intelligence test is a general measure of human capacity. But of course no such claim can be made for school success, for that would be to say that the purpose of the schools is to measure capacity. It is impossible to admit this. The child’s success with school work cannot be a measure of a child’s success in life. On the contrary, his success in life must be a significant measure of the school’s success in developing the capacities of the child. If a child fails in school and then fails in life, the school cannot sit back and say: you see how accurately I predicted this. Unless we are to admit that education is essentially impotent, we have to throw back the child’s failure at the school, and describe it as a failure not by the child but by the school.
It is impossible to abolish either with a law or an ax the desires of men.
Power |
In government offices which are sensitive to the vehemence and passion of mass sentiment public men have no sure tenure. They are in effect perpetual office seekers, always on trial for their political lives, always required to court their restless constituents. They are deprived of their independence. Democratic politicians rarely feel they can afford the luxury of telling the whole truth to the people. And since not telling it, though prudent, is uncomfortable, they find it easier if they themselves do not have to hear too often too much of the sour truth. The men under them who report and collect the news come to realize in their turn that it is safer to be wrong before it has become fashionable to be right.
The disesteem into which moralists have fallen is due at bottom to their failure to see that in an age like this one the function of the moralist is not to exhort men to be good but to elucidate what the good is. The problem of sanctions is secondary.
Belief | Conduct | Doubt | Good | Law | Man | Power | Rebellion | Rights |
Society can only exist on the basis that there is some amount of polished lying and that no-one says exactly what he thinks.
At the core of every moral code there is a picture of human nature, a map of the universe, and a version of history. To human nature (of the sort conceived), in a universe (of the kind imagined), after a history (so understood), the rules of the code apply.
Power |
We have been sent dangerously by God's address-called by name, entrusted with risky words, and empowered with authority. We are to tell the truth openly, work for justice, and stand in solidarity with our neighbors. The cost is high, but the purposes are those of the Holy God.
So come, I will send you to Pharaoh to bring my people, the Israelites, out of Egypt. (v. Io) It is of immense importance that the most difficult, most dangerous task in emancipation is not undertaken by YHWH as divine deliverance. Rather, emancipation is a human task to be undertaken amid the risky problematics of Pharaoh's political reality. The mission of Moses is nothing less than the confrontation of political power that no longer has anything of a human face. More than that, Moses' mandate is to confront exploitative economic power that is understood to be an embodiment of false theology,...
Control | Work | Old Testament | Old |
Walter Reuther, fully Walter Philip Reuther
There's a direct relationship between the ballot box and the bread box, and what the union fights for and wins at the bargaining table can be taken away in the legislative halls.
In the very best poetry there is often an under-song of sense which none but the poetic mind… can comprehend.
Earth | Power | Friendship |