This site is dedicated to the memory of Dr. Alan William Smolowe who gave birth to the creation of this database.
Percy W. Bridgman, fully Percy Williams Bridgman
It is profitable nevertheless to permit ourselves to talk about 'meaningless' terms in the narrow sense if the preconditions to which all profitable operations are subject are so intuitive and so universally accepted as to form an almost unconscious part of the background of the public using the term. Physicists of the present day do constitute a homogenous public of this character; it is in the air that certain sorts of operation are valueless for achieving certain sorts of result. If one wants to know how many planets there are one counts them but does not ask a philosopher what is the perfect number.
Peter F. Drucker, fully Peter Ferdinand Drucker
Throughout history, the great majority of people never had to ask the question, what should I contribute? They were told what to contribute, and their tasks were dictated either by the work itself by a master or a mistress. Knowledge workers have to learn to ask that question based on an understanding and melding of their strengths and passions. And the question must be revisited periodically: If I were not in this career today, would I have gotten into it? If not, what am I going to do about it?
Knowledge | Majority | People | Question | Understanding | Work | Learn |
There has been opposition to experimenting on animals for a long time. This opposition has made little headway because experimenters, backed by commercial firms that profit by supplying laboratory animals and equipment, have been able to convince legislators and the public that opposition comes from uninformed fanatics who consider the interests of animals more important than the interests of human beings.
Important | Little | Opposition | Public |
Peter F. Drucker, fully Peter Ferdinand Drucker
This society in which knowledge workers dominate is in danger of a new "class conflict" between the large minority of knowledge workers and the majority of workers who will make their livings through traditional ways, either by manual work...or by service work. The productivity of knowledge work--still abysmally low--will predictably become the economic challenge of the knowledge society. On it will depend the ability of the knowledge society to give decent incomes, and with them dignity and status, to non knowledge people.
Ability | Challenge | Danger | Dignity | Knowledge | Majority | Service | Society | Will | Society | Danger |
Simply put, philosophical counselling consists of a trained philosopher helping an individual deal with a problem or an issue that is of concern to that individual. Philosophical counselors know that the majority of people are quite capable of resolving most of their problems on a day-to-day basis either by themselves or with the help of significant others. It is when problems become too complex -- as, for example, when values seem to conflict, when facts appear contradictory, when reasoning about a problem becomes trapped within a circle, or when life seems unexpectedly meaningless -- that a trained philosopher can be of greater help than the average friend or family member.
Family | Friend | Individual | Life | Life | Majority | People | Problems |
Peter Kropotkin, fully Prince Pyotr Alexeyevich Kropotkin
In the animal world we have seen that the vast majority of species live in societies, and that they find in association the best arms for the struggle for life: understood, of course, in its wide Darwinian sense — not as a struggle for the sheer means of existence, but as a struggle against all natural conditions unfavorable to the species. The animal species, in which individual struggle has been reduced to its narrowest limits, and the practice of mutual aid has attained the greatest development, are invariably the most numerous, the most prosperous, and the most open to further progress. The mutual protection which is obtained in this case, the possibility of attaining old age and of accumulating experience, the higher intellectual development, and the further growth of sociable habits, secure the maintenance of the species, its extension, and its further progressive evolution. The unsociable species, on the contrary, are doomed to decay.
Age | Aid | Association | Growth | Individual | Majority | Means | Old age | Practice | Sense | Struggle | World | Association | Old |
Peter Medawar, fully Sir Peter Brian Medawar
Deductivism in mathematical literature and inductivism in scientific papers are simply the postures we choose to be seen in when the curtain goes up and the public sees us. The theatrical illusion is shattered if we ask what goes on behind the scenes. In real life discovery and justification are almost always different processes.
Discovery | Illusion | Justification | Life | Life | Literature | Public | Discovery |
Peter L. Berger, fully Peter Ludwig Berger
So I think one can say on empirical grounds – not because of some philosophical principle – that you can’t have democracy unless you have a market economy.
Peter L. Berger, fully Peter Ludwig Berger
Let me say again that the relationship is asymmetrical: there’s no democracy without a market economy, but you can have a market economy without democracy.
In all public asylums as well as in prisons and hospitals, the surest, and, perhaps, the only method of securing health, good order, and good manners, is to carry into decided and habitual execution the natural law of bodily labour, so contributive and essential to human happiness.
You have not, as good patriots should do, studied the public good, but your particular ends: Factious among yourselves; preferring such to offices and honors, as ne'er read the elements of saving policy; but deeply skill'd in all the principles that usher to destruction.
Good | Principles | Public |
Phyllis Schlafly, fully Phyllis McAlpin Stewart Schlafly
As our government takes democracy to unlikely places all over the world, how about a decent respect for self-government at home!
Democracy | Government | Respect | Government | Respect |
Phyllis Schlafly, fully Phyllis McAlpin Stewart Schlafly
Our public school system is our country's biggest and most inefficient monopoly, yet it keeps demanding more and more money.
I have made every effort to obtain exact information, comparing doctrines, replying to objections, continually constructing equations and reductions from arguments, and weighing thousands of syllogisms in the scales of the most rigorous logic. In this laborious work, I have collected many interesting facts which I shall share with my friends and the public as soon as I have leisure. But I must say that I recognized at once that we had never understood the meaning of these words, so common and yet so sacred: Justice, equity, liberty; that concerning each of these principles our ideas have been utterly obscure; and, in fact, that this ignorance was the sole cause, both of the poverty that devours us, and of all the calamities that have ever afflicted the human race.
Effort | Ideas | Ignorance | Meaning | Poverty | Principles | Public | Friends |
Pierre-Simon Laplace, Compte de Laplace, Marquis de Laplace
The present state of the system of nature is evidently a consequence of what it was in the preceding moment, and if we conceive of an intelligence that at a given instant comprehends all the relations of the entities of this universe, it could state the respective position, motions, and general effects of all these entities at any time in the past or future. Physical astronomy, the branch of knowledge that does the greatest honor to the human mind, gives us an idea, albeit imperfect, of what such an intelligence would be. The simplicity of the law by which the celestial bodies move, and the relations of their masses and distances, permit analysis to follow their motions up to a certain point; and in order to determine the state of the system of these great bodies in past or future centuries, it suffices for the mathematician that their position and their velocity be given by observation for any moment in time. Man owes that advantage to the power of the instrument he employs, and to the small number of relations that it embraces in its calculations. But ignorance of the different causes involved in the production of events, as well as their complexity, taken together with the imperfection of analysis, prevents our reaching the same certainty about the vast majority of phenomena. Thus there are things that are uncertain for us, things more or less probable, and we seek to compensate for the impossibility of knowing them by determining their different degrees of likelihood. So it was that we owe to the weakness of the human mind one of the most delicate and ingenious of mathematical theories, the science of chance or probability.
Chance | Future | Honor | Ignorance | Imperfection | Impossibility | Intelligence | Knowing | Knowledge | Law | Majority | Man | Mind | Nature | Observation | Order | Past | Position | Power | Present | Science | Simplicity | System | Time | Weakness |
To be governed is to be watched, inspected, spied upon, directed, law-ridden, regulated, penned up, indoctrinated, preached at, checked, appraised, seized, censured, commanded, by beings who have neither title, nor knowledge, nor virtue. To be governed is to have every operation, every transaction, every movement noted, registered, counted, rated, stamped, measured, numbered, assessed, licensed, refused, authorized, endorsed, admonished, prevented, reformed, redressed, corrected. To be governed is, under pretext of public utility and in the name of the general interest, to be laid under contribution, drilled, fleeced, exploited, monopolized, extorted from, exhausted, hoaxed and robbed; then, upon the slightest resistance, at the first word of complaint, to be repressed, fined, vilified, annoyed, hunted down, pulled about, beaten, disarmed, bound, imprisoned, shot, judged, condemned, banished, sacrificed, sold, betrayed, and, to crown all, ridiculed, derided, outraged, dishonored.
Public |
Pitirim A. Sorokin, fully Pitirim Alexandrovich (Alexander) Sorokin
Millions of singular sociocultural phenomena that make the superorganic world of reality appear to us in the form of the integrated systems and unintegrated congeries. If two or more singular superorganic phenomena are related to one another only by chance (by mere spatial or time adjacency) they are congeries having no real unity and interdependence between them. If two or more singular sociocultural facts are tied together meaningfully and causally in such a way that they articulate consistently the same set of meanings (values, norms) and empirically-in their vehicles and human members-show tangible (causal) interdependence of its important parts, such combination of any number of singular sociocultural phenomena makes an integrated cultural system or organized social system (Ganzbuten). Though overlooked by the majority of sociologists, the distinction between the systems and congeries is basic and important in many respects and especially for the purposes of adequate study of the sociocultural phenomena.
Chance | Distinction | Important | Majority | Phenomena | Reality | Study | System | Time | Unity | World |
Rhetoric, it seems, is a producer of persuasion for belief, not for instruction in the matter of right and wrong ... And so the rhetorician's business is not to instruct a law court or a public meeting in matters of right and wrong, but only to make them believe.
Business | Law | Persuasion | Public | Right | Wrong | Business | Instruction |
The price good men pay for indifference to public affairs is to be ruled by evil men [the wicked].