This site is dedicated to the memory of Dr. Alan William Smolowe who gave birth to the creation of this database.
Laughter, whether reconciled or terrible, always accompanies the moment when a fear is ended. It indicates a release, whether from physical danger or from the grip of logic. Reconciled laughter resounds with an echo of esc ape from power; wrong laughter copes with fear by defecting the agencies which inspire it…In wrong society laughter is a sickness infecting happiness and drawing into societie’s worthless totality…What is infernal about wrong laughter is that it compellingly parodies what is best…The culture industry replaces pain, which is present in ecstacy no less than in asceticism, with jovial denial. Its supreme law is that its consumers shall at no price be given what they desire.
Culture | Danger | Fear | Industry | Laughter | Law | Present | Price | Society | Wrong | Society | Danger | Happiness |
I'm talking about paying attention to your inner voice, paying attention to the heart. Science has shown us that the heart is made of 65% of the neurons that are in the brain. So there's scientific evidence to show that there is a thinking heart. And this has also been proven with heart transplant patients who are then thinking thoughts they've never thought before and saying things they've never said before. They would go back to a relative of the heart donor who would say, "My husband used to say that." We think as much with the hearts as we do with the brains. Our culture has emphasized the intellectual part, the rational part. It's ironic that the leading edge of science is showing that there's more to it than that! It just proves to me what the great traditions have taught from time immemorial: There's an invisible world, an inner world, and we all have that inside of us. Most of us are very good at covering up the inner voice that's speaking to us all the time. What we have to do is find ways to connect with that inner voice, and listen to it.
Attention | Culture | Evidence | Good | Heart | Husband | Science | Talking | Thinking | Thought | Time | Think | Thought |
Michelangelo Antonioni, Cavaliere di Gran Croce
We are saddled with a culture that hasn't advanced as far as science. Scientific man is already on the moon, and yet we are still living with the moral concepts of Homer. Hence this upset, this disequilibrium that makes weaker people anxious and apprehensive, that makes it so difficult for them to adapt to the mechanism of modern life. ... We live in a society that compels us to go on using these concepts, and we no longer know what they mean. In the future — not soon, perhaps by the twenty-fifth century — these concepts will have lost their relevance. I can never understand how we have been able to follow these worn-out tracks, which have been laid down by panic in the face of nature. When man becomes reconciled to nature, when space becomes his true background, these words and concepts will have lost their meaning, and we will no longer have to use them.
Culture | Future | Man | Panic | People | Society | Space | Will | Words | Society | Understand |
A way of life can be shared among individuals of different ages, status, and social activity. It can yield intense relations not resembling those that are institutionalized. It seems to me that a way of life can yield a culture and an ethics. To be "gay," I think, is not to identify with the psychological traits and the visible masks of the homosexual but to try and define and develop a way of life.
Mihaly Csikszentmihalyi, native form is Csíkszentmihályi Mihály
Wealth, status, and power have become in our culture all too powerful symbols of happiness... And we assume that if only we could acquire some of those same symbols, we would be much happier.
Mitch Albom, fully Mitchell David "Mitch" Albom
People are only mean when they're threatened, and that's what our culture does. That's what our economy does.
Culture |
Mitch Albom, fully Mitchell David "Mitch" Albom
Well, for one thing, the culture we have does not make people feel good about themselves. We're teaching the wrong things. And you have to be strong enough to say if the culture doesn't work, don't buy it. Create your own. Most people can't do it.
Mitch Albom, fully Mitchell David "Mitch" Albom
Morrie believed in the inherent good of people. But he also saw what they could become. People are only mean when they’re threatened, and that’s what our culture does. When you get threatened, you start looking out for only yourself.
There are, no doubt, a few who manage to acquire a high degree of modern culture and even to achieve distinction in some branches of modern knowledge without finding themselves intellectually at variance with Orthodoxy. They belong to those who see no need for welding tradition and experience into a unitary organised mental background. They willingly subscribe to the medieval principle that Torah and philosophy have nothing to do with each other, because it saves them a great deal of mental bother. But such is only a small eddy in the main current of Jewish life.
Culture | Distinction | Experience | Knowledge | Need | Nothing | Philosophy | Tradition | Torah |
Morrie Schwartz, fully Morris "Morrie" S. Schwartz
The culture doesn't encourage you to think about such things until you're about to die. We're so wrapped up with egostical things, career, family, having enough money, meeting the mortgage, getting a new car, fixing the radiator when it breaks. We're involved in trillions of little acts just to keep going . So we don't get into the habit of standing back and looking at our lives and saying, Is this all? Is this all I want? Is something missing?
Mohamed Iqbal or Sir Muhammad Iqbal, aka Allama Iqbal
I advise you to guard against atheism and materialism. The biggest blunder made by Europe was the separation of Church and State. This deprived their culture of moral soul and diverted it to the atheistic materialism.
Mother Teresa, born Agnes Gonxha Bojaxhiu NULL
Sacrifice, surrender, and suffering are not popular topics nowadays. Our culture makes us believe that we can have it all, that we should demand our rights, that with the right technology all pain and problems can be overcome. This is not my attitude toward sacrifice. I know that it is impossible to relieve the world's suffering unless God's people are willing to surrender to God, to make sacrifices, and to suffer along with the poor.
Culture | Pain | People | Problems | Right | Suffering | Surrender | Technology |
Mahatma Gandhi, fully Mohandas Karamchand Gandhi, aka Bapu
No culture can live, if it attempts to be exclusive.
Culture |
What we had to do to find the world was to enter our own world fully, first. We had to enter through the tragedy of our own particular place. If the Nobel awards have a special meaning, it is that they carry this concept further. In their global eclecticism they recognize that no single society, no country or continent can presume to create a truly human culture for the world. To be among laureates, past and present, is at least to belong to some sort of one world.
In the beginning was the Word. The Word was with God, signified God's Word, the word that was Creation. But over the centuries of human culture the word has taken on other meanings, secular as well as religious. To have the word has come to be synonymous with ultimate authority, with prestige, with awesome, sometimes dangerous persuation, to have Prime Time, a TV talk show, to have the gift of the gab as well as that of speaking in tongues. The word flies through space, it is bounced from satellites, now nearer than it has ever been to the heaven from which it was believed to have come.
But it is much later in the game now, and ignorance of the score is inexcusable. To be unaware that a technology comes equipped with a program for social change, to maintain that technology is neutral, to make the assumption that technology is always a friend to culture is, at this late hour, stupidity plain and simple.
Culture | Friend | Ignorance | Stupidity | Technology |
We do not measure a culture by its output of undisguised trivialities but by what it claims as significant.
Culture |
The term "mensch" literally means a "person" or "man," but it represents a moral ideal for all people, men and women alike. . . . It means being sensitive to other people's needs and seeking out ways to help them. It is acquired by living close to family and extending one's sense of obligation beyond the family to the broader community. In the Jewish culture of Eastern Europe where the term arose, to call someone a mensch was the highest compliment that could be given.