This site is dedicated to the memory of Dr. Alan William Smolowe who gave birth to the creation of this database.
Gabriel García Márquez, aka Gabo
Human beings are not born once and for all on the day their mothers give birth to them, but...life obliges them over and over again to give birth to themselves.
Self-interest is but the survival of the animal in us. Humanity only begins for man with self-surrender.
God has given you your country as cradle, and humanity as mother; you cannot rightly love your brethren of the cradle if you love not the common mother.
Saki, pen name for Hector Hugh Munro or H.H. Munro NULL
There was something alike terrifying and piteous in the spectacle of these frail old morsels of humanity consecrating their last flickering energies to the task of making each other wretched. Hatred seemed to be the one faculty which had survived in undiminished vigor where all else was dropping into ordered and symmetrical decay.
Hazrat Pir-o-Murshid Inayat Khan
The solution to the problem of the day is the awakening of the consciousness of humanity to the divinity within.
Awakening | Consciousness | Day | Divinity | Humanity |
To speak of the love for humanity is meaningless. There is no such thing as humanity. What we call humanity has a name, was born, lives on a street, gets hungry, needs all the particular things we need. As an abstract, it has no reality whatsoever.
Liberty, equality - bad principles! The only true principle for humanity is justice, and justice towards the feeble becomes necessarily protection or kindness.
Life is a spark between two identical voids, the darkness before birth and the one after death.
All death in nature is birth, and at the moment of death appears visibly the rising of life. There is no dying principle in nature, for nature throughout is unmixed life, which, concealed behind the old, begins again and develops itself. Death as well as birth is simply in itself, in order to present itself ever more brightly and more like to itself.
Isaac Asimov, born Isaak Yudovich Ozimov
The Earth faces environmental problems right now that threaten the imminent destruction of civilization and the end of the planet as a livable world. Humanity cannot afford to waste its financial and emotional resources on endless, meaningless quarrels between each group and all others. there must be a sense of globalism in which the world unites to solve the real problems that face all groups alike.
Civilization | Earth | Humanity | Problems | Right | Sense | Waste | World |
Not satisfied with great principles, they were avaricious of great achievements. They subdued forests, organized emigration, marched westward under the star of empire. They achieved Louisburg and Concord and Lexington, and Paul Revere's ride and the Charter Oak and Bennington and Gaspee Point, and Harvard and Yale and Bowdoin and Dartmouth. They preserved the union, annihilated slavery, crushed repudiation, made the promises of the nation equal to gold. They have spoken the word of protest and pleading in behalf of the Chinaman and the Indian and the African, in behalf of a reformed civil service, and of honest elections. And where has there been a battle for God and humanity that they and their sons have not been in it?
In truth the right to the use of land is not a joint or common right, but an equal right; the joint or common right is to rent, in the economic sense of the term. Men must have rights before they can have equal rights. Each man has a right to use the world. The equality of this right is merely a limitation arising from the presence of others with like rights. Society, in other words, does not grant, and cannot equitably withhold from any individual, the right to the use of land. That right exists before society and independently of society, belonging at birth to each individual, and ceasing only with his death. Society itself has no original right to the use of land. The function of society with regard to the use of land only begins where individual rights clash, and is to secure equality between these clashing rights of individuals.
Birth | Equality | Individual | Land | Man | Men | Regard | Right | Rights | Sense | Society | Truth | Society |
Osho, born Chandra Mohan Jain, also known as Acharya Rajneesh and Bhagwan Shree Rajneesh NULL
Intelligence belongs to the watching consciousness; memory belongs to the mind. Memory is one thing -- memory is not intelligence. But the whole of humanity has been deceived for centuries and told indirectly that the memory is intelligence. Your schools, your colleges, your universities are not trying to find your intelligence; they are trying to find out who is capable of memorizing more. And now we know perfectly well that memory is a mechanical thing. A computer can have memory, but a computer cannot have intelligence.
J. G. Fichte, fully Johann Gottlieb Fichte
All death in nature is birth, and at the moment of death appears visibly the rising of life. There is no dying principle in nature, for nature throughout is unmixed life, which, concealed behind the old, begins again and develops itself. Death as well as birth is simply in itself, in order to present itself ever more brightly and more like to itself.
To understand yourself is to understand the giver of values. Without understanding yourself, there is no renunciation of the world; without self-knowledge there can be only escape, called renunciation, which gives birth to endless problems and miseries.
Birth | Problems | Self-knowledge | Understanding | Understand |
Technique has taken over the whole of civilization. Death, procreation, birth all submit to technical efficiency and systemization.
Birth | Efficiency |
Some degree of abuse is inseparable from the proper use of every thing; and in no instance is this more true than in that of the press. It has accordingly been decided, by the practice of the states, that it is better to leave a few of its noxious branches to their luxuriant growth, than, by pruning them away, to injure the vigor of those yielding the proper fruits. And can the wisdom of this policy be doubted by any one who reflects that to the press alone, checkered as it is with abuses, the world is indebted for all the triumphs which have been gained by reason and humanity over error and oppression?
Abuse | Better | Error | Humanity | Policy | Practice | Reason | Wisdom | World | Yielding |
A few great minds are enough to endow humanity with monstrous power, but a few great hearts are not enough to make us worthy of using it.
Every child, every person needs to know that they are a source of joy; every child, every person, needs to be celebrated. Only when all of our weaknesses are accepted as part of our humanity can our negative, broken self-images be transformed.
Humanity |