This site is dedicated to the memory of Dr. Alan William Smolowe who gave birth to the creation of this database.
Reinhold Niebuhr, fully Karl Paul Reinhold Niebuhr
The brotherhood of the community is indeed the ground in which the individual is ethically realized. But the community is the frustration as well as the realization of individual life. Its collective egotism is an offense to his conscience; its institutional injustices negate the ideal of justice; and such brotherhood as it achieves is limited by ethnic and geographic boundaries. Historical communities are, in short, more deeply involved in nature and time than the individual.
Brotherhood | Individual | Nature | Offense | Time |
Reinhold Niebuhr, fully Karl Paul Reinhold Niebuhr
All social cooperation on a larger scale than the most intimate social group requires a measure of coercion.
Pandurang Shastri Athavale, fully Pandurang Vaijnath Shastri Athavale
An enlightened society is one where all people - the rich and the poor, the literate and the illiterate, the black and the white, men and women - live happily as children of the same Lord. Thus experiencing the brotherhood of men under the fatherhood of God.
Richard Feynman, fully Richard Phillips Feynman
The basis of action on love, the brotherhood of all men, the value of the individual... the humility of the spirit.
Action | Brotherhood | Humility | Value |
Robert Service, fully Robert William Service
It's coming soon and soon, mother, it's nearer every day, When only men who work and sweat will have a word to say; When all who earn their honest bread in every land and soil Will claim the Brotherhood of Man, the Comradeship of Toil; When we, the Workers, all demand: `What are we fighting for?' . . . Then, then we'll end that stupid crime, that devil's madness -- War
Brotherhood | Fighting | Land | Madness | Men | Will | Work |
Essentially Americanism, which in democracy, is a moraland spiritual adventure, concerned primarily with a sound and workable philosophy of life, summed up in the fatherhood of God and the brotherhood of man, respect for human personality, and recognition of the dignity and value of the individual. In his brilliant statement on The Coming Victory of Democracy, Thomas Mann tells us he believes in democracy because he believes in freedom, and he believes in freedom because he believes in human nature and the dignity of man, who is more than a depersonalized unit in the state. Man is a spiritual being whom it is the duty of the state to serve. He is more than a slave to be kept in order and submission by the crack of a master's whip. "The essential man," says he, "is not the creature who hurls down bombs on children, but the mind that devised the flying machine, the seeker and builder, not the destroyer."
Brotherhood | Democracy | Dignity | Duty | Freedom | God | Human nature | Man | Mind | Nature | Order | Philosophy | Respect | Sound | Submission | Respect | God | Value |
Ronald Reagan, fully Ronald Wilson Reagan
Someone must stand up to those who say, “Here's the key, there's the Treasury, just take as many of those hard-earned tax dollars as you want.”
Cooperation | Freedom | Good | Justice | Liberty | People | Right | Will |
Salvador de Madariaga, fully Salvador de Madariaga y Rojo
To-day, in more than half of Europe, man is at the mercy of the police; in 1900 even the most conservative and reactionary Prussian Junker would have been unable to imagine, let alone approve, that a citizen could be arrested and kept in prison at the pleasure of the Government.
Cooperation | Opinion | World |
The formation of unions is the expression on the part of the workers of a feeling which seems to me to be close kindred of the feeling which possessed the men who first battled against the control of political institutions by a few and the exclusion from political expression of the many. If there is any truth at all in democracy, if democracy has any real justification, it is as thoroughly justified in our industrial life as it ever was in our political life. (SG to Newton Baker, Jan. 3, 1923)
Cooperation | Dependence | Indispensable | War |
Taxonomy (the science of classification) is often undervalued as a glorified form of filing—with each species in its folder, like a stamp in its prescribed place in an album; but taxonomy is a fundamental and dynamic science, dedicated to exploring the causes of relationships and similarities among organisms. Classifications are theories about the basis of natural order, not dull catalogues compiled only to avoid chaos.
Cooperation | Future | Thinking |
Mythology is wondrous, a balm for the soul. But its problems cannot be ignored. At worst, it buys inspiration at the price of physical impossibility […]. At best, it purveys the same myopic view of history that made this most fascinating subject so boring and misleading in grade school as a sequential take of monarchs and battles.
Brotherhood | Equality | History | Hope | People | Perception | Think |
Unjust war is to be abhorred; but woe to the nation that does not make ready to hold its own in time of need against all who would harm it! And woe thrice over to the nation in which the average man loses the fighting edge, loses the power to serve as a soldier if the day of need should arise!
Battle | Brotherhood | Future | Good | Men | Speech | Spirit |
Whenever I hear a man or women express hatred for any race, I wonder just what it is in themselves they hate so much. You can always be sure of this: You cannot express hatred for anything or anybody unless you make use of the supply of hatred within yourself. The only hatred you can express is your own personal possession. To hate is to be enslaved by evil.
Cooperation | Man | Nothing | Think |
The secret of my full identity is hidden in Him. He alone can make me who I am, or rather who I will be when at last I fully begin to be. But unless I desire this identity and work to find it with Him and in Him, the work will never be done
Capacity | Cooperation | Life | Life | Surrender | Wisdom | Work |
Virginia Gildersleeve, fully Virginia Crocheron Gildersleeve
At this stage in the advancement of women the best policy for them is not to talk much about the abstract principles of women's rights but to do good work in any job they get, better work if possible than their male colleagues.
Brotherhood | Faith | Nations | Work | World |
Wilkie Collins, fully William Wilkie Collins
Nothing in this world is hidden forever. The gold which has lain for centuries unsuspected in the ground, reveals itself one day on the surface. Sand turns traitor, and betrays the footstep that has passed over it; water gives back to the tell-tale surface the body that has been drowned. Fire itself leaves the confession, in ashes, of the substance consumed in it. Hate breaks its prison-secrecy in the thoughts, through the doorway of the eyes; and Love finds the Judas who betrays it by a kiss. Look where we will, the inevitable law of revelation is one of the laws of nature: the lasting preservation of a secret is a miracle which the world has never yet seen.
Betrayal | Brotherhood | Doubt | Mind | Purpose | Purpose | Question |