This site is dedicated to the memory of Dr. Alan William Smolowe who gave birth to the creation of this database.
Heaven is always pictured as a community – never as made up of individuals who live in boxes, which they call homes, where they lock themselves in by locking others out.
Heaven |
Georg Hegel, fully Georg Wilhelm Friedrich Hegel
Only that will which obeys law is free; for it obeys itself - it is independent and so free. When the state or our country constitutes a community of existence; when the subjective will of man submits to laws - the contradiction between liberty and necessity vanishes.
Contradiction | Existence | Law | Liberty | Man | Necessity | Will |
Georg Hegel, fully Georg Wilhelm Friedrich Hegel
Patriotism is often understood to mean only a readiness for exceptional sacrifices and actions. Essentially, however, it is the sentiment which, in the relationships of our daily life and under ordinary conditions, habitually recognizes that the community is one’s substantive groundwork and end. It is out of this consciousness, which during life’s daily round stands the test in all circumstances, that there subsequently also arises the readiness for extraordinary exertions. But since men would often rather be magnanimous than law-abiding, they readily persuade themselves that they possess this exceptional patriotism in order to be sparing in the expression of a genuine patriotic sentiment or to excuse their lack of it. If again this genuine patriotism is looked upon as that which may begin of itself and arise from subjective ideas and thoughts, it is being confused with opinion, because so regarded patriotism is deprived of its true ground, objective reality.
Circumstances | Consciousness | Ideas | Law | Life | Life | Men | Opinion | Order | Patriotism | Reality | Sentiment |
As Mankind becomes more liberal, they will be more apt to allow that all those who conduct themselves as worthy members of the community are equally entitled to the protections of civil government. I hope ever to see America among the foremost nations of justice and liberality.
Conduct | Government | Hope | Justice | Mankind | Nations | Will |
Henry David Thoreau, born David Henry Thoreau
You may raise money enough to tunnel a mountain, but you cannot raise money enough to hire a man who is minding his own business. An efficient and valuable man does what he can, whether the community pay him for it or not.
Henry Kissinger, fully Henry Alfred Kissinger
[Central Intelligence Agency] analysts were only too aware that no one has ever been penalized for not having foreseen an opportunity, but that many careers have been blighted for not predicting a risk. Therefore the intelligence community has always been tempted to forecast dire consequences for any conceivable course of action, an attitude that encourages paralysis rather than adventurism.
Action | Consequences | Intelligence | Opportunity | Risk |
Act only on that maxim [intention] whereby you can at the same time will that it should become a universal law. Act as if the maxim of your action were to become by your will a universal law of nature. Always act so as to treat humanity, whether in yourself or in others, as an end in itself, never merely as a means. Act always as if to bring about, and as a member of, a Kingdom of Ends [that is, an ideal community in which everyone is always moral].
Action | Ends | Humanity | Intention | Law | Means | Nature | Time | Will |
I recognize, as the all-comprehensive, and only right and proper end of Government, the greatest happiness of the members of the community in question: the greatest happiness - of all of them, without exception , in so far as possible.: the greatest happiness of the greatest number of them...
Government | Question | Right | Happiness |
John Kenneth Galbraith, aka "Ken"
In a community where public services have failed to keep abreast of private consumption things are very different. Here, in an atmosphere of private opulence and public squalor, the private goods have full sway.
Public |
A man of a right spirit is not a man of narrow and private views, but is greatly interested and concerned for the good of the community to which he belongs, and particularly of the city or village in which he resides, and for the true welfare of the society of which he is a member.
Whatever crushes individuality is despotism... I am not aware that any community has a right to force another to be civilized.
Force | Individuality | Right |
Customs are made for customary circumstances; even in what people do for pleasure, conformity is the first thing thought of; they live in crowds: they exercise choice only among things commonly done: peculiarity of taste, eccentricity of conduct, are shunned equally with crimes: until by dint of not following their own nature they have not nature to follow. Whatever crushes individuality is despotism. [And] I am not aware that any community has a right to force another to be civilized.
Choice | Circumstances | Conduct | Conformity | Eccentricity | Force | Individuality | Nature | Peculiarity | People | Pleasure | Right | Taste | Thought | Following | Thought |
M. Scott Peck, fully Morgan Scott Peck
The degree to which we can develop world community and thereby save our skins is going to depend primarily on the degree to which we human beings can learn to empty ourselves.
Mythology is a control system, on the one hand framing its community to accord with an intuited order of nature and, on the other hand, by means of its symbolic pedagogic rites, conducting individuals through the ineluctable psychophysiological stages of transformation of a human lifetime - birth, childhood and adolescence, age, old age, and the release of death - in unbroken accord simultaneously with the requirements of this world and the rapture of participation in a manner of being beyond time. For all the symbolic narratives, images, rites, and festivals by which life within the cultural monad is controlled and defined are of the order of the way of art. Their effect, therefore, is to wake the intellect to realizations equivalent to those of the insights that produced them.
Adolescence | Age | Art | Birth | Childhood | Control | Death | Life | Life | Means | Nature | Old age | Order | Rites | System | Time | World | Intellect | Old |