This site is dedicated to the memory of Dr. Alan William Smolowe who gave birth to the creation of this database.
The central event of the twentieth century is the overthrow of matter. In technology, economics, and the politics of nations, wealth in the form of physical resources is steadily declining in value and significance. The powers of mind are everywhere ascendant over the brute force of things.
Economics | Force | Mind | Nations | Politics | Technology | Wealth | Wisdom | Value |
The most shocking fact about war is that its victims and its instruments are individual human beings, and that these individual beings are condemned by the monstrous convention of politics to murder or be murdered in quarrels not their own.
Convention | Individual | Murder | Politics | War | Wisdom | Murder |
R. D. Laing, fully Ronald David Laing
Violence attempts to constrain the other's freedom, to force him to act in the way we desire, but with ultimate lack of concern, with indifference to the other's own existence or destiny.
Desire | Destiny | Existence | Force | Freedom | Indifference | Wisdom |
It is clear that property in itself owes allegiance to no particular form of government, and is bound by no dynastic or legal ties. Its politics may be summed up in a single word: exploitation, or even anarchy. It is the most formidable enemy and most treacherous ally of any form of power. In short, in its relation to the State it is governed by only one principle, one sentiment, one concern: self-interest, or egoism... That is why all governments, all utopias, and all Churches distrust property... We can conclude that property is the greatest existing revolutionary force, with an unequaled capacity for setting itself against authority.
Anarchy | Authority | Capacity | Distrust | Enemy | Force | Government | Politics | Power | Property | Self | Self-interest | Sentiment | Wisdom |
James Reston, fully James Barrett Reston
All politics are based on indifference of the majority.
Indifference | Majority | Politics | Wisdom |
High theory and mere mind-stimulation are secondary; living itself - in the real world, among people - is the essence... I hereby promise to attempt to be a mensh, a decent, caring human being. Neutrality, noncommitment, indifference have no place in life. To be fully human, we are committed to being caring, sensitive, aggressively compassionate people. Our lives are defined by how we act. We are alive because we perform just and righteous deeds, deeds of gentle loving kindness.
Deeds | Indifference | Kindness | Life | Life | Mind | Neutrality | People | Promise | Wisdom | World | Deeds |
William V. Shannon, fully William Vincent Shannon
Experience suggests that the first rule of politics is never to say never. The ingenious human capacity for maneuver and compromise may make acceptable tomorrow what seems outrageous or impossible today.
Capacity | Experience | Politics | Rule | Tomorrow | Wisdom |
Alexis de Tocqueville, fully Alexis-Charles-Henri Clérel de Tocqueville
In politics a community of hatred is almost always the foundation of friendships.
Unless we insist that politics is imagination and mind, we will learn that imagination and mind are politics, and of a kind we will not like.
Peter Weiss, fully Peter Ulrich Weiss
Every death even the cruelest death drowns in the total indifference of Nature. Nature herself would watch unmoved if we destroyed the entire human race.
Death | Human race | Indifference | Nature | Race | Wisdom |
If ignorance and passions are foes of popular morality, it must be confessed that moral indifference is the malady of the cultivated classes.
Ignorance | Indifference | Morality |
Walt Whitman, fully Walter "Walt" Whitman
Not from successful love alone, nor wealth, nor honor’d middle age, nor victories of politics or war; but as life wanes, and all the turbulent passions calm, as gorgeous, vapory, silent hues cover the evening sky, as softness, fulness, rest, suffuse the frame, like fresher, balmier air, as days take on a mellower light, and the apple at last hangs really finish’d and indolent-ripe on the tree, then for the teeming quietest, happiest days of all! The brooding and blissful halcyon days!
Age | Honor | Life | Life | Light | Love | Politics | Rest | War | Wealth | Wisdom |
Perhaps there is no property in which men are more distinguished from each other, than in the various degrees in which they possess the faculty of observation. The great herd of mankind pass their lives in listless inattention and indifference as to what is going on around them, being perfectly content to satisfy the mere cravings of nature, while those who are destined to distinction have lynx-eyed vigilance that nothing can escape.
Distinction | Inattention | Indifference | Mankind | Men | Nature | Nothing | Observation | Property | Vigilance | Wisdom |