This site is dedicated to the memory of Dr. Alan William Smolowe who gave birth to the creation of this database.
There is a principle that is guaranteed to keep man in everlasting ignorance. That principle is contempt prior to investigation.
James Froude, fully James Anthony Froude
To tell men that they cannot help themselves is to fling them into recklessness and despair.
Despair | Men | Recklessness |
The greatest service we can perform for others is to help them to help themselves.
Service |
Yes, we have in this country, dominated by corporate wealth and military power and two antiquated political parties, what a fearful conservative characterized as “a permanent adversarial culture” challenging the present, demanding a new future. It is a race in which we can all choose to participate, or to just watch. But we should know that our choice will help determine the outcome.
Choice | Culture | Future | Power | Present | Race | Wealth | Will |
Sweetness of spirit and sunshine is famous for dispelling fears and difficulties; patience is a mighty help to the burden-bearer.
[On children] Train them to virtue; habituate them to industry, activity, and spirit. Make them consider every vice as shameful and unmanly. Fire them with ambition to be useful. Make them disdain to be destitute of any useful knowledge. Fix their ambition upon great and solid objects, and their contempt upon little, frivolous, and useless ones.
Ambition | Children | Contempt | Disdain | Industry | Knowledge | Little | Spirit | Virtue | Virtue | Ambition | Vice |
John Holt, fully John Caldwell Holt
Man is by nature a learning animal. Birds fly, fish swim; man thinks and learns. Therefore, we do not need to “motivate” children into learning, by wheedling, bribing, or bullying. We do not need to keep picking away at their minds to make sure they are learning. What we need to do, and all we need to do, is bring as much of the world as we can into the school and the classroom; give children as much help and guidance as they need and ask for; listen respectfully when they feel like talking; and then get out of the way. We can trust them to do the rest.
Children | Guidance | Learning | Man | Nature | Need | Rest | Talking | Trust | World | Guidance |
We are all interconnected and help being one another into the expression of our full potential through words, thoughts, and deeds that are unimaginable in their simplicity and untraceable in their complexity…Integrity means wholeness. Actions are whole when they conform to inner believes.
Deeds | Integrity | Means | Simplicity | Wholeness | Words | Deeds |
There is no action so slight, nor so mean, but it may be done to a great purpose, and ennobled therefore; nor is any purpose so great but that slight actions may help it, and may be so done as to help it much, most especially that chief of all purposes, the pleasing of God.
Tradition is an important help to history, but its statements should be carefully scrutinized before we rely on them.
You will find that the mere resolve not to be useless, and the honest desire to help other people, will, in the quickest and delicatest ways, improve yourself.
The constant duty of every man to his fellows is to ascertain his own powers and special gifts, and to strengthen them for the help of others.
Without seeking, truth cannot be known to all. It can neither be declared from pulpits, nor set down in articles, nor in any wise prepared and sold in packages ready for use. Truth must be ground for every man by himself out of its husk, with such help as he can get, indeed, but not without stern labor of his own.