This site is dedicated to the memory of Dr. Alan William Smolowe who gave birth to the creation of this database.
John Dalberg-Acton, Lord Acton, fully John Emerich Edward Dalberg-Acton, 1st Baron Acton
The bonds of class are stronger than those of nationality.
John Dalberg-Acton, Lord Acton, fully John Emerich Edward Dalberg-Acton, 1st Baron Acton
The danger is not that a particular class is unfit to govern. Every class is unfit to govern.
If we fight a war and win it with H-bombs, what history will remember is not the ideals we were fighting for but the methods we used to accomplish them. These methods will be compared to the warfare of Genghis Khan who ruthlessly killed every last inhabitant of Persia.
The things in our civilization we most prize are not of ourselves. They exist by grace of the doings and sufferings of the continuous human community in which we are a link. Ours is the responsibility of conserving, transmitting, rectifying and expanding the heritage of values we have received, that those who come after us may receive it more solid and secure, more widely accessible and more generously shared that we have received it. Here are all the elements for a religious faith that shall not be confined to sect, class or race. Such a faith has always been implicitly the common faith of mankind.
Civilization | Faith | Grace | Mankind | Race | Receive | Responsibility |
At the bottom, people tend to believe that class is defined by the amount of money you have. In the middle, people grant that money has something to do with it, but think education and the kind of work you do almost equally important. Nearer the top, people perceive that taste, values, ideas, style, and behavior are indispensable criteria of class, regardless of money or occupation or education.
Behavior | Education | Ideas | Important | Indispensable | Money | Occupation | People | Style | Taste | Work | Think |
Erich Fromm, fully Erich Seligmann Fromm
All genuine ideals have one thing in common: they express the desire for something which is not yet accomplished but which is desirable for the purposes of the growth and happiness of the individual.
Desire | Growth | Ideals | Individual | Happiness |
Goldie Hawn, fully Goldie Jeanne Hawn
We humans have the capacity to change the world with acts of love and kindness. Let’s start by teaching our children the importance of compassion.
Capacity | Change | Children | Compassion | Kindness | Love | World |
God is the source and goal of ideals by which to live triumphantly in the face of starkest grief. The sufferer who finds God as the strength and mainstay of his life does not merely acquiesce before the inevitable with stoic fortitude. He looks the tragedy in the face, and looks up to new heights of spiritual beauty to which he may mount by using his grief as a stairway to God’s glory.
Beauty | Fortitude | Glory | God | Grief | Ideals | Inevitable | Life | Life | Looks | Stoic | Strength | Tragedy | Beauty | God |
To understand the teaching of the Bible, one must accept its premise that time has a meaning which is at least equal to that of space; that time has a significance and sovereignty of its own.
Bible | Meaning | Space | Time | Understand |
Reuel Howe, fully Reuel Lanphier Howe
Much marriage difficulty and unhappiness are due to the failure of the partners to accept the fact of their finiteness and its meaning. Instead, they hold themselves up to ideals of performance possible only to God.
Difficulty | Failure | God | Ideals | Marriage | Meaning | Unhappiness | Failure |
W. E. H. Lecky, fully William Edward Hartpole Lecky
Religions, considered as moral teachers, are realized and effective only when their moral teaching is in conformity with the teaching of their age.
Age | Conformity |
Not all ideas and beliefs and ideals have equal merit.
Jayaprakash Narayan, known as JP Narayan, Jayaprakash or Loknayak
A violent revolution has always brought forth a dictatorship of some kind or another… After revolution, a new privileged class of rulers and exploiters grows up in the course of time to which the people at large is once again subject.
People | Revolution | Time |