This site is dedicated to the memory of Dr. Alan William Smolowe who gave birth to the creation of this database.
All love is probationary, a fact which frightens women and exhilarates men.
Love |
Mikhail Bakunin, fully Mikhail Alexandrovich Bakunin
Freedom is the absolute right of all adult men and women to seek permission for their action only from their own conscience and reason, and to be determined in their actions only by their own will, and consequently to be responsible only to themselves, and then to the society to which they belong, but only insofar as they have made a free decision to belong to it.
Absolute | Action | Conscience | Decision | Men | Right | Society | Society |
Milton Friedman, fully John Milton Friedman
The reign of tears is over. The slums will be only a memory. We will turn our prisons into factories and our jails into storehouses and corncribs. Men will walk upright now, women will smile, and the children will laugh. Hell will be forever for rent." That is how Billy Sunday, noted evangelist and leading crusader aginst Demon Rum, greeted the onset of Prohibition in 1920, enacted in a burst of moral righteousness at the end of the First World War. That episode is a stark reminder of where drives to protect us from ourselves can lead. Prohibition was imposed for our own good. Alcohol is a dangerous substance. More lives are lost each year from alcohol than from all the dangerous substances the FDA controls put together. But where did Prohibtion lead? New prisons and jails had to be built to house the criminals spawned by converting the drinking of spirits into a crime against the state. Al Capone, Bugs Moran became notorious for their exploits - murder, extortion, hijacking, bootlegging.Who were their customers? Respectable citizens who would never themselves have approved or engaged in, the activites that Al Capone and his fellow gangsters made infamous. They simply wanted a drink. In order to have a drink, they had to break the law. Prohbition didnt stop drinkin. It did convert a lot of otherwise law-obedient citizens into lawbreakers. It did suppress many of the disciplinary forces of the market that ordinarily protect the consumer from shoddy, adulterated, and dangerous products. It did corrupt the minions of the law and create a decadent moral climate. It did not stop the consumption of alcohol.
Children | Crime | Hell | Law | Men | Order | Righteousness | Tears | Will | World |
Milton Friedman, fully John Milton Friedman
Government has appropriately financed general education for citizenship, but in the process it has been led also to administer most of the schools that provide such education. Yet, as we have seen, the administration of schools is neither required by the financing of education, nor justifiable in its own right in a predominantly free enterprise society. Government has appropriately been concerned with widening the opportunity of young men and women to get professional and technical training, but it has sought to further this objective by the inappropriate means of subsidizing such education, largely in the form of making it available free or at a low price at governmentally operated schools.
Administration | Education | Free enterprise | Government | Means | Men | Opportunity | Price | Right | Government |
Mitch Albom, fully Mitchell David "Mitch" Albom
We've got a sort of brainwashing going on in our country, Morrie sighed. Do you know how they brainwash people? They repeat something over and over. And that's what we do in this country. Owning things is good. More money is good. More property is good. More commercialism is good. More is good. More is good. We repeat it--and have it repeated to us--over and over until nobody bothers to even think otherwise. The average person is so fogged up by all of this, he has no perspective on what's really important anymore. Wherever I went in my life, I met people wanting to gobble up something new. Gobble up a new car. Gobble up a new piece of property. Gobble up the latest toy. And then they wanted to tell you about it. 'Guess what I got? Guess what I got?' You know how I interpreted that? These were people so hungry for love that they were accepting substitutes. They were embracing material things and expecting a sort of hug back. But it never works. You can't substitute material things for love or for gentleness or for tenderness or for a sense of comradeship. Money is not a substitute for tenderness, and power is not a substitute for tenderness. I can tell you, as I'm sitting here dying, when you most need it, neither money nor power will give you the feeling you're looking for, no matter how much of them you have.
Gentleness | Important | Love | Money | Need | People | Power | Property | Sense | Tenderness | Will | Think |
Morrie Schwartz, fully Morris "Morrie" S. Schwartz
These were people so hungry for love that they were accepting substitutes. They were embracing material things and expecting a sort of hug back. But it never works. You can’t substitute material things for love or for gentleness or for tenderness or for a sense of comradeship.
Gentleness | Love | People | Sense | Tenderness |
Mother Jones, referring to Mary Harris Jones
No matter what the fight, don't be ladylike! God almighty made women and the Rockefeller gang of thieves made the ladies.
Mahatma Gandhi, fully Mohandas Karamchand Gandhi, aka Bapu
In true democracy every man and women is taught to think for himself or herself.
Fearless gentleness is the most beautiful of feminine attractions born of modesty and love.
Gentleness | Modesty |
He who is deprived of gentleness is deprived of good.
This is the old fear …. that truth will not prevail, that the moral structure of a nation is so fragile that it needs elaborate defences. Christians, it seems to me, have to choose between the safety of ‘morals’ and the danger of love. It is my own belief that Christ’s teaching was principally about the latter, but that if you do teach men and women to love God and love their neighbours then morals take care of themselves.
Belief | Care | Danger | Fear | God | Love | Men | Teach | Truth | Will | Danger | God | Old |
Mahatma Gandhi, fully Mohandas Karamchand Gandhi, aka Bapu
Men and women approaching retirement age should be recycled for public service work, and their companies should foot the bill. We can no longer afford to scrap-pile people.
Age | Public | Retirement | Service |
Elizabeth Fry, fully Elizabeth "Betsy" Fry, née Gurney
"Take Back the Night' isn't just about domestic violence, 'Take Back the Night' is also about being safe going back to your car safety, child's safety, women' safety, men's safety - it's just about not being afraid to be out in the evening. It's for everybody not just women and children, it's for everybody."
The charms of women were never more powerful never inspired such achievements, as in those immortal periods, when they could neither read nor write.
Perhaps the best definition of progress would be the continuing efforts of men and women to narrow the gap between the convenience of the powers that be and the unwritten charter.
Nancy Astor, fully Lady Nancy Witcher Astor, Viscountess Astor
I married beneath me. All women do.
In a year when it felt at times as if we had nothing in common anymore, we were united in this hope: that our men and women at arms might soon come safely home, because their job was done. They are the bright, sharp instrument of a blunt policy, and success or failure in a war unlike any in history ultimately rests with them.
Failure | History | Men | Nothing | Success | War | Failure |
Close friends and relatives, while not meaning to do so, often handicap one through "opinions" and sometimes through ridicule, which is meant to be humorous. Thousands of men and women carry inferiority complexes with them all through life, because some well-meaning but ignorant person destroyed their confidence through "opinions" or ridicule.
Confidence | Inferiority | Meaning | Men | Friends |
She had wandered, without rule or guidance, into a moral wilderness. Her intellect and heart had their home, as it were, in desert places, where she roamed as freely as the wild Indian in his woods. The scarlet letter was her passport into regions where other women dared not tread. Shame, Despair, Solitude! These had been her teachers - stern and wild ones - and they had made her strong, but taught her much amiss.
The scarlet letter was her passport into regions where other women dared not tread. Shame, Despair, Solitude! These had been her teachers — stern and wild ones, — and they had made her strong, but taught her much amiss.