This site is dedicated to the memory of Dr. Alan William Smolowe who gave birth to the creation of this database.
Leo Tolstoy, aka Count Lev Nikolayevich Tolstoy or Tolstoi
The aim and end of war is murder; the weapons employed in war are espionage, treachery and the encouragement of treachery, the ruining of a country, the plundering and robbing of its inhabitants for the maintenance of the army, and trickery and lying which all appear under the heading of the art of war. The military world is characterized by the absence of freedom – in other words, a rigorous discipline – enforced inactivity, ignorance, cruelty, debauchery, and drunkenness.
Absence | Art | Cruelty | Discipline | Freedom | Ignorance | Inactivity | Lying | Murder | Treachery | War | Weapons | Words | World | Art |
Angus Wilson, fully Sir Angus Frank Johnstone Wilson
All the seven deadly sins are self destroying, morbid appetites, but in their early stages at least, lust and gluttony, avarice and sloth know some gratification, while anger and pride have power, even though that power eventually destroys itself. Envy is impotent, numbed with fear, never ceasing in its appetite, and it knows no gratification, but endless self torment. It has the ugliness of a trapped rat, which gnaws its own foot in an effort to escape.
Anger | Appetite | Avarice | Effort | Envy | Fear | Gluttony | Lust | Power | Pride | Self | Sloth |
The pioneers of a warless world are the [youth] who refuse military service.
At the present time, global interdependence is celebrated as a self-evident good. The royal road to development, peace, and harmony is thought to be the unrelenting conquest of each nation's market by all other nations.
Conquest | Global | Good | Harmony | Nations | Peace | Present | Self | Thought | Time | Thought |
[Plato's ideal society] guarantees to all people the right to an education that diagnoses and perfects their unique talents, plus a work role that conveys a sense of self-esteem, saving them from the neuroses of megalomania and the lust for power. It forbids privilege and sexism and all other criteria irrelevant to merit. It eliminates conflict of interest from those who hold office and gives the masses a potent checklist they can use to hold their rulers to account. Best of all, it eliminates all traces of "might makes right" and serves as a pattern laid up in heaven to rank actual societies in terms of what corrupts them. Society becomes more corrupt as the struggle for power becomes more brutal.
Education | Esteem | Heaven | Lust | Merit | Office | People | Power | Rank | Right | Self | Self-esteem | Sense | Society | Struggle | Unique | Work | Society | Privilege |
Bhagavad Gītā, simply known as Gita NULL
When he has no lust, no hatred, a man walks safely among the things of lust and hatred.
Avarice has ruined more men than prodigality, and the blindest thoughtlessness of expenditure has not destroyed so many fortunes as the calculating but insatiable lust of accumulation.
Avarice | Lust | Men | Prodigality |
Man is here to experience the unity of his own consciousness, to rise from suffering to perfection, and in the triumph of enlightenment to reclaim the earth as a heaven designed from him. Beneath the mask of suffering, the meaning of life is limitless freedom and the conquest of death.
Conquest | Consciousness | Death | Earth | Enlightenment | Experience | Freedom | Heaven | Life | Life | Man | Meaning | Perfection | Suffering | Unity |
I wonder whether even in the past total victory was not really an illusion from the standpoint of the victors. In a sense, there is not total victory short of genocide, unless it be a victory over the minds of men. But the total military victories are rarely victories over the minds of men.
Marriage is like a war. There are moments of chivalry and gallantry that attend the victorious advances and strategic retreats, the birth or death of children, the momentary conquest of loneliness, the sacrifice that ennobles him who makes it. But mostly there are the long dull sieges, the waiting, the terror and boredom. Women understand this better than men; they are better able to survive attrition.
Better | Birth | Children | Conquest | Death | Loneliness | Marriage | Men | Sacrifice | Terror | Waiting | War | Understand |
Who are the really disloyal? Those who inflame racial hatreds, who sow religious and class dissensions. those who subvert the Constitution by violating the freedom of the ballot box. Those who make a mockery of majority rule by the use of the filibuster. Those who impair democracy by denying equal educational facilities. Those who frustrate justice by lynch law or by making a farce of jury trials. Those who deny freedom of speech and of the press and of assembly. Those who demand special favors against the interest of the commonwealth. Those who regard public office as a source of private gain. Those who exalt the military over the civil. Those who for selfish and private purposes stir up national antagonisms and expose the world to the ruin of war.
Democracy | Freedom of speech | Freedom | Justice | Law | Majority | Mockery | Office | Public | Regard | Rule | Speech | Trials | War | World |
We should take our example not from our political and military leaders shouting “Retaliate!” and “War!” but from the doctors and nurses and medical students and firefighters and police officers who have been saving lives in the midst of mayhem – whose first thoughts are not violence, but healing; not vengeance, but compassion.
Compassion | Example | Vengeance | War |