This site is dedicated to the memory of Dr. Alan William Smolowe who gave birth to the creation of this database.
The mind is never passive; it is a perpetual activity, delicate, receptive, responsive to stimulus. You cannot postpone its life until you have sharpened it. Whatever interest attaches to your subject-matter must be evoked here and now; whatever powers you are strengthening in the pupil, must be exercised here and now; whatever possibilities of mental life your teaching should impart, must be exhibited here and now. That is the golden rule of education, and a very difficult rule to follow.
Education | Golden Rule | Life | Life | Mind | Rule | Golden Rule |
We suppress the child’s curiosity (for example, there are questions one should not ask), and then when he lacks a natural interest in learning he is offered special coaching for his scholastic difficulties.
Journalists are, in the very nature of their calling, alarmists; and this is their way of giving interest to what they write. Herein they are like little dogs; if anything stirs, they immediately set up a shrill bark.
The public have more interest in the punishment of an injury than he who receives it.
Public | Punishment |
Never expect to find perfection in men, in my commerce with my contemporaries I have found much human virtue. I have seen not a little public spirit; a real subordination of interest to duty; and a decent and regulated sensibility to honest fame and reputation. The age unquestionably produces daring profligates and insidious hypocrites. What then? Am I not to avail myself of whatever good is to be found in the world because of the mixture of evil that will always be in it? The smallness of the quantity in currency only heightens the value. They who raise suspicions on the good, on account of the behavior of ill men, are of the party of the latter.
Age | Behavior | Commerce | Daring | Duty | Evil | Fame | Good | Little | Men | Perfection | Public | Reputation | Sensibility | Spirit | Virtue | Virtue | Will | World | Commerce |
An enlightened self-interest, which, when well understood, they tell us will identify with an interest more enlarged and public.
Public | Self | Self-interest | Will |
Personal interest is often the standard of our belief, as well as of our practice.
All wars are wars among thieves who are too cowardly to fight and who therefore induce the young manhood of the whole world to do the fighting for them.
Wisdom consists in the highest use of the intellect for the discernment of the largest moral interest of humanity. It is the most perfect willingness to do the right combined with the utmost attainable knowledge of what is right… Wisdom consists in working for the better from the love of the best.
Better | Discernment | Humanity | Knowledge | Love | Right | Wisdom | Intellect |
When a man argues for victory and not for truth, he is sure of just one ally, that is the devil. Not the defeat of intellect, but the acceptance of the heart is the only true object in fighting with the sword of spirit.
Acceptance | Defeat | Devil | Fighting | Heart | Man | Object | Spirit | Truth |
A man's interest in the world is only an overflow from his interest in himself.
Georg Hegel, fully Georg Wilhelm Friedrich Hegel
The history of the world begins with its general aim, the realization of the idea of spirit, only in an implicit form, that is, as nature; a hidden, most profoundly hidden, unconscious instinct; and the whole process of history (as already observed) is directed to rendering this unconscious impulse a conscious one... This vast congeries of volitions, interest and activities, constitute the instruments and means of the world-spirit for attaining its object; bringing it to consciousness, and realizing it.
Consciousness | History | Impulse | Instinct | Means | Nature | Object | Spirit | World |
Wilson said that America’s doughboys fought for the Fourteen Points. Roosevelt said the GI was fighting for the Four Freedoms. Johnson and Humphrey sent men out to die for the planting of dams in Vietnam. Nixon preaches a war of generosity. Each time we have fought in this century, our leaders have denied that we did it for ourselves.
Fighting | Generosity | Men | Time | War |
Henry Kissinger, fully Henry Alfred Kissinger
Empires have no interest in operating within an international system; they aspire to be the international system.
System |