This site is dedicated to the memory of Dr. Alan William Smolowe who gave birth to the creation of this database.
The whole design of men’s preservation hath been beaten in pieces by some unforeseen circumstance, so that judgments have broken in upon them without control, and all their subtleties been outwitted; the strange crossing of some in their estates, though the most wise, industrious, and frugal persons, and that by strange and unexpected ways; and it is observable how often everything contributes to carry on a judgment intended, as if they rationally designed it: all those loudly proclaim a God in the world; if there were no God, there would be no sin; if no sin, there would be no punishment.
Government | Knowledge | Memory | Understanding | Will | Government |
Do not men then disown God when they will walk in ways edged with thorns, wherein they meet with the arrows of conscience, at every turn, in their sides; and slide down to an everlasting punishment, sink under an intolerable slavery, to contradict the will of God? when they will prefer a sensual satisfaction, with a combustion in their consciences, violation of their reasons, gnawing cares and weary travels before the honor of God, the dignity of their natures, the happiness of peace and health, which might be preserved at a cheaper rate than they are at to destroy them?
Conscience | Duty | God | Judgment | Knowledge | Law | Lord | Love | Man | Mind | Nature | Nothing | Power | Practice | Rule | God |
The human capacity for guilt is such that people can always find ways to blame themselves
The tenets of deep ecology are part of human consciousness by dint of the fact that we evolved, co-evolved with entire biotic communities.
Compassion | Knowledge | Life | Life | Sense | Understanding |
We could call order by the name of God, but it would be an impersonal God. There's not much personal about the laws of physics.
Human race | Knowledge | People | Race | Technology |
Dream research is a wonderful field. All you do is sleep for a living.
Dreams | Experience | Knowledge | Learning | People |
That which hath power to give itself being cannot want power to preserve that being. Preservation is not more difficult than creation. If the first man made himself, why did he not preserve himself? He is not now among the living in the world. How came he to be so feeble as to sink into the grave? Why did he not inspire himself with new heat and moisture, and fill his languishing limbs and declining body with new strength?
Can he explained that certain individuals, who do not even know how to swim, try to jump from the top of a bridge to save someone who is drowning? These individuals simply move to a magical force pulses, a force impels them before they have time to realize is foolishly reckless, and just like that, without thinking, without conscious thought, I kept to that unfortunate from the living Casino game lobby and from the lobby to the terrace.
Consciousness | Humanity | Knowledge | Usefulness | Value |
In chess, as a purely intellectual game, where randomness is excluded, - for someone to play against himself is absurd.
Theodor W. Adorno, born Theodor Ludwig Wiesengrund
The organic composition of man refers by no means only to his specialized technical faculties, but - and this the usual cultural criticism will not at any price admit - equally to their opposite, the moments of naturalness which once themselves sprung from the social dialectic and are now succumbing to it. Even what differs from technology in man is now being incorporated into it as a kind of lubrication. -
Day | Despair | Knowledge | Light | Philosophy | Present | Will | World |
Theodor W. Adorno, born Theodor Ludwig Wiesengrund
Running in the street conveys an impression of terror. The victim's fall is already mimed in his attempt to escape it. The position of the head, trying to hold itself up, is that of a drowning man, and the straining face grimaces as if under torture. He has to look ahead, can hardly glance back without stumbling, as if treading the shadow of a foe whose features freeze the limbs. Once people ran from dangers that were too desperate to turn and face, and someone running after a bus unwittingly bears witness to past terror. Traffic regulations no longer need allow for wild animals, but they have not pacified running. It estranges us from bourgeois walking. The truth becomes visible that something is amiss with security, that the unleashed powers of life, be they mere vehicles, have to be escaped. The body's habituation to walking as normal stems from the good old days. It was the bourgeois form of locomotion: physical demythologization, free of the spell of hieratic pacing, roofless wandering, breathless flight. Human dignity insisted on the right to walk, a rhythm not extorted from the body by command or terror. The walk, the stroll, were private ways of passing time, the heritage of the feudal promenade in the nineteenth century.
The claim of the theatre as a school of morals is false; not because it is immoral, but because it cannot, from its own nature, be a teacher of morals. - The abuses that have clustered about it are enormous. - In evil days it sinks to the bottom of the scale of decency, and in best days it hardly rises to the average.
Finally, this world movement of civilization, this movement which is now felt throbbing in every corner of the globe, should bind the nations of the world together while yet leaving unimpaired that love of country in the individual citizen which in the present stage of the world's progress is essential to the world's well-being.
Authority | Difficulty | Existence | Force | Knowledge | Men | Peace | Power | Size | Work |
The joy in life is his who has the heart to demand it.
Conservation | Defeat | Efficiency | Government | Knowledge | Problems | Public | Regret | Government |
Théophile Gautier, fully Pierre Jules Théophile Gautier, aka Le Bon Theo
I have kept thee long in waiting, dear Romuald, and thou mayst well have thought that I had forgotten thee. But I have come from a long distance and from a place from which no one has ever before returned; there is neither moon nor sun in the country from which I come; there is naught but space and shadow; neither road nor path; no ground for the foot, no air for the wing; and yet here I am, for love is stronger than death, and it will end by vanquishing it. Ah! what gloomy faces and what terrible things I have seen in my journeying! What a world of trouble my soul, returned to this earth by the power of my will, has had in finding its body and reinstating itself therein! What mighty efforts I had to put forth before I could raise the stone with which they had covered me! See! the palms of my poor hands are all blistered from it. Kiss them to make them well, dear love!
Théophile Gautier, fully Pierre Jules Théophile Gautier, aka Le Bon Theo
The famous courtesan Clarimonde died recently, as the result of an orgy which lasted eight days and eight nights. It was something infernally magnificent. They revived the abominations of the feasts of Belshazzar and Cleopatra. Great God! what an age this is in which we live! The guests were served by swarthy slaves speaking an unknown tongue, who to my mind had every appearance of veritable demons; the livery of the meanest among them might have served as a gala-costume for an emperor. There have always been current some very strange stories concerning this Clarimonde, and all her lovers have come to a miserable or a violent end. It has been said that she was a ghoul, a female vampire; but I believe that she was Beelzebub in person.
Critic | Day | Erudition | Knowledge | Magnanimity | Men | Patience | People |
Of recent years... representative government all over the world has been threatened with a growing paralysis. Legislative bodies have tended more and more to become wholly inefficient for the purposes of legislation. The prime feature in causing this unhealthy growth has been the discovery by minorities that under the old rules of parliamentary procedure they could put a complete stop to all legislative action... If the minority is as powerful as the majority there is no use of having political contests at all, for there is no use in having a majority.
It is a bad thing for a nation to raise and to admire a false standard of success; and their can be no falser standard than that set by the deification of material well-being in and for itself.
Government | Knowledge | Government |
The first essential of civilization is law. Anarchy is simply the handmaiden and forerunner of tyranny and despotism. Law and order enforced with justice and by strength lie at the foundations of civilization. Law must be based upon justice, else it cannot stand, and it must be enforced with resolute firmness, because weakness in enforcing it means in the end that there is no justice and no law, nothing but the rule of disorderly and unscrupulous strength. Without the habit of orderly obedience to the law, without the stern enforcement of the laws at the expense of those who defiantly resist them, there can be no possible progress, moral or material, in civilization. There can be no weakening of the law-abiding spirit here at home, if we are permanently to succeed; and just as little can we afford to show weakness abroad.
Existence | Government | Knowledge | Law | Public | Right | Government |
Might but the sense of moral evil be as strong in me as is my delight in external beauty!