This site is dedicated to the memory of Dr. Alan William Smolowe who gave birth to the creation of this database.
The arts of power and its minions are the same in all countries and in all ages. It marks its victim; denounces [him]; and excites the public odium and the public hatred, to conceal its own abuses and encroachments.
We narratively represent our selves in part in order to answer certain questions of identity. It is useful to distinguish two different aims of self-representation that in the end are deeply intertwined. First, there is self-representation for the sake of self-understanding. This is the story we tell ourselves to understand ourselves for who we are. The ideal here is convergence between self-representation and an acceptable version of the story of our actual identity. Second, there is self-representation for public dissemination, whose aim is underwriting successful social interaction.
Aims | Distinguish | Order | Public | Self | Story | Understanding | Understand |
We are at ease with a moral judgment made against someone’s private sin - lust or greed. We are much less comfortable judging someone’s public ethic - those decisions that can lead to such outcomes as aggression, the abuse of the environment, the neglect of the needy.
Abuse | Aggression | Greed | Judgment | Lust | Neglect | Public | Sin |
John Kane, fully John L. Lane Jr.
The public interest is best served by the free exchange of ideas.
Carl Jung, fully Carl Gustav Jung
Deep down, below the surface of the average man’s conscience, he hears a voice whispering. “There is something not right,” no matter how much his rightness is supported by public opinion or by the moral code.
Conscience | Man | Opinion | Public | Right |
The art of crisis management, now widely acknowledged to be the essence of statecraft, owes its vogue to the merger of politics and spectacle. Propaganda seeks to create in the public a chronic sense of crisis, which in turn justifies the expansion of executive power and the secrecy surrounding it.
Art | Politics | Power | Public | Secrecy | Sense | Art | Crisis | Propaganda |
It is loyalty to great ends, even though forced to combine the small and opposing motives of selfish men to accomplish them; it is the anchored cling to solid principles of duty and action, which knows how to swing with the tide, but is never carried away by it – that we demand in public men, and not sameness of policy, or a conscientious persistency in what is impracticable.
Action | Duty | Ends | Loyalty | Loyalty | Men | Motives | Policy | Principles | Public |
James A. Michener, fully James Albert Michener
Self-respect cannot be purchased. It is never for sale. It cannot be fabricated out of public relations. It comes to us when we are alone, in quiet moments, in quiet places, when we suddenly realize that knowing the good, we have gone for the great.
[McClaughry’s Law of Public Policy] Politicians who vote huge expenditures to alleviate problems get reelected; those who propose structural changes to prevent problems get early retirement.
Law | Policy | Problems | Public | Retirement |
Luxury either comes of riches or makes them necessary; it corrupts at once rich and poor, the rich by possession and the poor by covetousness; it sells the country to softness and vanity, and takes away from the state all its citizens, to make them slaves one to another, and one and all to public opinion.
A new public opinion must be created privately and unobtrusively. The existing one is maintained by the Press, by propaganda, by organization, and by financial and other influences which are at its disposal. This unnatural way of spreading ideas must be opposed by the natural one, which goes from man to man and relies solely on the truth of the thoughts and the hearer’s receptiveness for new truth.
It is the supreme test of government whether its machinery is adequate for repressing the selfish undertakings of cliques formed on special interests and saving the public from raids of plunderers.
Government | Public | Government |
Article 18 - Everyone has the right to freedom of thought, conscience and religion; this right includes freedom to change his religion or belief, and freedom, either alone or in community with others, and in public or in private, to manifest his religion or belief in teaching, practice, worship and observance.
Belief | Change | Conscience | Freedom of thought | Freedom | Practice | Public | Religion | Right | Thought | Worship |
Pachacutec Inca Yupanqui, sometimes referred to as Pachacuti
Governors must never forget that he who is unable to run his own house and family is still less competent to be entrusted with public matters.
People seldom become famous for what they say until after they are famous for what they've done.