This site is dedicated to the memory of Dr. Alan William Smolowe who gave birth to the creation of this database.
Helen Keller. aka Helen Adams Keller
A man can't make a place for himself in the sun if he keeps taking refuge under the family tree.
Jack L. Nelson & William B. Stanley
Most teachers do not like controversy. A study some years ago found that 92 percent of teachers did not initiate discussion of controversial issues, 89 percent didn't discuss controversial issues when students brought them up, and 79 percent didn't believe they should. Among the topics that teachers felt children were interested in discussing but that most teachers believed should not be discussed in the classroom were the Vietnam War, politics, race relations, nuclear war, religion, and family problems such as divorce.
Children | Controversy | Discussion | Family | Politics | Problems | Race | Religion | Study | War |
The most powerful lessons about ethics and morality do not come from school discussions or classes in character-building. They come from family life where people treat one another with respect, consideration, and love.
Character | Consideration | Ethics | Family | Life | Life | Love | Morality | People | Respect |
If you want a place in the sun, you must leave the shade of the family tree.
Family |
All social and political problems are interwoven – that energy, for example, affects economics, which in turn affects health, which in turn, affects education, work, family life, and a thousand other things. The attempt to deal with neatly defined problems in isolation from one another… creates only confusion and disaster.
Economics | Education | Energy | Example | Family | Health | Isolation | Life | Life | Problems | Work |
Allan Bloom, fully Allan David Bloom
The family requires the most delicate mixture of nature and convention, of human and divine, to subsist and perform its function. Its base is merely bodily reproduction, but its purpose is the formation of civilized human beings.
Convention | Family | Nature | Purpose | Purpose |
Arnold J. Toynbee, fully Arnold Joseph Toynbee
Though sixteen civilizations may have perished already to our knowledge, and nine others may be now at the point of death, we - the twenty-sixty - are not compelled to submit the riddle of our fate to the blind arbitrament of statistics. The divine spark of creative power is still alive in us, and, if we have the grace to kindle it into flame, then the stars in their courses cannot defeat our efforts to attain the goal of human endeavor.
Death | Defeat | Fate | Grace | Knowledge | Power | Statistics | Fate |
Our eyes see only by permission of the mind... Truly our minds can be barriers, not because of the knowledge they acquire, but because of the intellectual habit of interpreting the unknown in terms of the known. The spiritual transcendent and the mind not only suffers defeat in trying to interpret it, but also blocks reception of the formless Real
If you begin the day with love in your heart, peace in your nerves, and truth in your mind, you not only benefit by their presence but also bring them to others, to your family and friends, and to all those whose destiny draws across your path that day.
Day | Destiny | Family | Heart | Love | Mind | Peace | Truth |
Benjamin Disraeli, 1st Earl of Beaconsfield
Self-love is a principle of action; but among no class of human beings has nature so profusely distributed this principle of life and action as through the whole sensitive family of genius.
Action | Family | Genius | Life | Life | Love | Nature | Self | Self-love |
Marriage is a great institution, and no family should be without it.
We strive as hard to hide our hearts from ourselves as from others, and always with more success; for in deciding upon our own case we are both judge, jury, and executioner, and where sophistry cannot overcome the first, or later the second, self-love is always ready to defeat the sentence by bribing the mind.
Defeat | Love | Mind | Self | Self-love | Sophistry | Success |
Confucius, aka Kong Qiu, Zhongni, K'ung Fu-tzu or Kong Fuzi NULL
The general of a large army may be defeated, but you cannot defeat the determined mind of a peasant.
The power of perpetuating our property in our families is one of the most valuable and interesting circumstances belonging to it, and that which tends the most to perpetuation of society itself. It makes our weakness subservient to our virtue; it grafts benevolence even upon avarice. The possession of family wealth and of the distinction which attends hereditary possessions (as most concerned into it), are the natural securities for this transmission.
Avarice | Benevolence | Circumstances | Distinction | Family | Possessions | Power | Property | Society | Virtue | Virtue | Weakness | Wealth | Society |