This site is dedicated to the memory of Dr. Alan William Smolowe who gave birth to the creation of this database.
A mother is not a person to lean on, but a person to make leaning unnecessary.
Mother |
How can man be intelligent, happy, or useful, without the culture and discipline of education? It is this that unlocks the prison-house of his mind, and releases the captive.
Culture | Discipline | Man |
My mother used to say, "He who angers you, conquers you!" But my mother was a saint.
Mother |
Erich Fromm, fully Erich Seligmann Fromm
In erotic love, two people who were separate become one. In motherly love, two people who were one become separate. The mother must not only tolerate, she must wish and support the child’s separation.
It is a fundamental truth that the responsibilities of motherhood cannot be successfully delegated. No, not to day-care centers, not to schools, not to nurseries, not to babysitters. We become enamored with men’s theories such as the idea of preschool training outside the home for young children. Not only does this put added pressure on the budget, but it places young children in an environment away from mother’s influence. Too often the pressure for popularity, on children and teens, places an economic burden on the income of the father, so mother feels she must go to work to satisfy her children’s needs. That decision can be most shortsighted. It is mother’s influence during the crucial formative years that forms a child’s basic character. Home is the place where a child learns faith, feels love, and thereby learns from mother’s loving example to choose righteousness. How vital are mother’s influence and teaching in the home—and how apparent when neglected!
Children | Decision | Example | Influence | Mother | Theories | Training | Truth | Work | Child |
Erich Fromm, fully Erich Seligmann Fromm
By incestuous symbiosis is meant the tendency to stay tied to the mother and to her equivalents — blood, family, tribe — to fly from the unbearable weight of responsibility, of freedom, of awareness, and to be protected and loved in a state of certainty dependence that the individual pays for with the ceasing of his own human development.
Dependence | Individual | Mother |
Erich Fromm, fully Erich Seligmann Fromm
What most people in our culture mean by being lovable is essentially a mixture between being popular and having sex appeal.
Humans have the ability to act consciously, and collectively, [exercising foresight to] choose their own evolutionary path. In our crucial epoch we cannot leave the selection of the next step in the evolution of human society and culture to chance. We must plan for it, consciously and purposefully.
Ability | Culture | Evolution | Foresight | Plan | Society | Society |
Every word of tongue is love telling a story to her own ears. Every thought in every mind, she whispers a secret to her own Self. Every vision in every eye, she knows her beauty to her own sight. Every smile on every face, she reveals her own joy for herself to enjoy. Love courses through everything, no, love is everything. How can you say, there is no love, when nothing but Love exists? All that you see has appeared because of Love. All shines from Love, all pulses from Love, all flows from Love - no, once again, all is Love.
Beauty | Joy | Love | Nothing | Smile | Story | Thought | Vision | Beauty | Thought |
The type of fig leaf which each culture employs to cover its social taboos offers a twofold description of its morality. It reveals that certain unacknowledged behavior exists and it suggests the form that such behavior takes.
Giordano Bruno, born Filippo Bruno
Time is the father of truth, its mother is our mind.
George Steiner, fully Francis George Steiner
There is something terribly wrong with a culture inebriated by noise and gregariousness.
Holbrook Jackson, fully George Holbrook Jackson
A mother never realizes that her children are no longer children.
There is the past and its continuing horrors: violence, war, prejudices against those who are different, outrageous monopolization of the good earth's wealth by a few, political power in the hands of liars and murderers, the building of prisons instead of schools, the poisoning of the press and the entire culture by money. It is easy to become discouraged observing this, especially since this is what the press and television insist that we look at, and nothing more. But there is also the bubbling of change under the surface of obedience: the growing revulsion against endless wars, the insistence of women all over the world that they will no longer tolerate abuse and subordination… There is civil disobedience against the military machine, protest against police brutality directed especially at people of color.
Abuse | Brutality | Change | Civil disobedience | Culture | Disobedience | Good | Nothing | Past | People | Power | Protest | Television | Wealth | Will | World |