This site is dedicated to the memory of Dr. Alan William Smolowe who gave birth to the creation of this database.
Most people have convictions about what is right and wrong based on religious beliefs, cultural roots, family background, personal experiences, laws, organizational values, professional norms and political habits. These are not the best values to make ethical decisions by--not because they are unimportant, but because they are not universal.
Convictions | Family | People | Right | Wrong |
Mikhail Bakunin, fully Mikhail Alexandrovich Bakunin
All temporal or human authority stems directly from spiritual and/or divine authority. But authority is the negation of freedom. God, or rather the fiction of God, is the consecration and the intellectual and moral source of all slavery on earth, and the freedom of mankind will never be complete until the disastrous and insidious fiction of a heavenly master is annihilated.
Authority | Consecration | Earth | Freedom | God | Mankind | Slavery | Will |
Mikhail Bakunin, fully Mikhail Alexandrovich Bakunin
Our first work must be the annihilation of everything as it now exists. The old world must be destroyed and replaced by a new one. When you have freed your mind from the fear of God, and that childish respect for the fiction of right, then all the remaining changes that bind you-property, marriage, morality, and justice-will snap asunder like threads... Any dictatorship can have only one aim; self-perpetuation.
Fear | God | Justice | Marriage | Mind | Morality | Property | Respect | Right | Self | Will | Work | World | Respect | Old |
Panchatantra or The Panchatantra NULL
For the sake of a family an individual may be sacrificed; for the sake of a village a family may be sacrificed; for the sake of a nation a village may be sacrificed; for the sake of one's self the world may be sacrificed.
Family | Individual | Self | World |
We might as well give up the fiction that we can argue any view. For what in me is pure Conviction is simple Prejudice in you.
No matter how idealistic our hopes... we eventually learn that spirituality is not about leaving life's problems behind, but about continually confronting them with honesty and courage. It is about ending our feeling of separation from others by healing our relationships with parents, co-workers, and friends. it is about bringing heightened awareness and compassion to our family life, careers, and community service.
Awareness | Compassion | Courage | Family | Honesty | Life | Life | Parents | Problems | Service | Spirituality | Awareness | Learn |
Robert Ingersoll, fully Robert Green "Bob" Ingersoll
The greatest test of courage is to bear defeat without losing heart.
Walter Raleigh, fully Sir Walter Raleigh
A person must first govern themself ere they be fit to govern a family, and his family ere they be fit to bear the government of the commonwealth.
Family | Government | Government | Govern |
Arthur Helps, fully Sir Arthur Helps
If you understand your own age, read the works of fiction produced in it. People in disguise speak freely.
Age | Disguise | People | Understand |
Stephen Covey, fully Stephen Richards Covey
Creating the unity to run an effective business or a family or a marriage requires great personal strength and courage. No amount of technical administrative skill in laboring for the masses can make up for lack of nobility of personal character in developing relationships. It is a t a very essential, one-on-one level, that we live the primary laws of love and life.
Business | Character | Courage | Family | Life | Life | Love | Marriage | Nobility | Skill | Strength | Unity | Business |
Will Durant, fully William James "Will" Durant
The family is the nucleus of civilization.
Civilization | Family |
Doris Lessing, fully Doris May Lessing, born Doris May Tayler
There is no doubt fiction makes a better job of the truth.
Edward Albee, fully Edward Franklin Albee
A play is fiction - and fiction is fact distilled into truth.
Play |
If we see the universe as not simply a bunch of dead matter and empty space but actually a living system, then our story may well be one of learning how to live together in a living universe. If we don't have a story to guide us into the future, we're going to pull back into our smaller life stories of the past--stories of nationalism, of ethnic groups, of tribal groups, of geographic groups--and instead of pulling together in cooperation we're going to pull apart in conflict. What I am suggesting is to step back and see the universe as our original, larger home. If we are going to pull together as a human family for a promising future, this is an inclusive project; no one is left out.
Cooperation | Family | Future | Learning | Life | Life | Past | Space | Story | System | Universe |