This site is dedicated to the memory of Dr. Alan William Smolowe who gave birth to the creation of this database.
J. P. Stern, fully Joseph Peter Maria Stern
Nietzsche’s approach developed eventually into a program for radically questioning all the foundations of Western thought. We are slaves to convention, he says - we base our whole lives on attitudes and ideas whose premises, if we ever get round to actually examining them, we reject. This makes ours an inauthentic way of living, a dead way of living. We must re-evaluate our values in the light of what we honestly do believe and feel.
Convention | Ideas | Light | Thought |
Beyond the logic concerned with things, education must provide the possibility of awakening and cultivating moral aesthetic intuitions. It is the neglect of these higher values that has reduced life to a mere struggle for existence and to the detriment of social and human values in economic and political life.
Aesthetic | Awakening | Education | Existence | Life | Life | Logic | Neglect | Struggle |
You should remember that though another may have more money, beauty, and brains than you, when it comes to the rarer spiritual values such as charity, self-sacrifice, honor and nobility of heart, you have an equal chance with everyone to be the most beloved and honored of all people.
Beauty | Chance | Charity | Heart | Honor | Money | Nobility | People | Sacrifice | Self | Self-sacrifice |
Your values are your belief systems about right and wrong, good and bad. Our values are the things we all fundamentally need to move toward... Our values change when we change goals or self-image... There is no real success except in keeping your basic values.
Belief | Change | Goals | Good | Need | Right | Self | Success | Wrong |
Ayn Rand, born Alisa Zinovyevna Rosenbaum
Love is an expression and assertion of self-esteem, a response to one’s own values in the person of another. One gains a profoundly personal, selfish joy fro the mere existence of the person one loves. It is one’s own personal, selfish happiness that one seeks, earns, and derives from love.
Assertion | Esteem | Existence | Joy | Love | Self | Self-esteem | Happiness |
Ayn Rand, born Alisa Zinovyevna Rosenbaum
In the name of the best within you, do not sacrifice this world to those who are its worst. In the name of the values that keep you alive, do not let your vision of man be distorted by the ugly, the cowardly, the mindless in those who have never achieved his title.
Dwight Eisenhower, fully Dwight David "Ike" Eisenhower
A people that values its privileges above its principles soon loses both.
People | Principles |
Realizing that no simple formulas apply to everyone, we develop the courage to live a unique spiritual life, in our own idiosyncratic way. While archetypal patterns exist to guide seekers, in the West individuals can find their won way within these deeper patterns by honoring their unique backgrounds, temperaments, values and creative capacities... We commit ourselves to passionate action in the world, without becoming overly attached to the success or failure of our endeavors... In spiritual maturity, recognizing that such an attitude of indifference stems from a fear of life, we commit to our spouses, professions, and social action, developing compassion and equanimity through a balanced engagement with life.
Action | Compassion | Courage | Equanimity | Failure | Fear | Indifference | Life | Life | Success | Unique | World | Engagement | Failure |
Isaac Asimov, born Isaak Yudovich Ozimov
Humanists recognize that it is only when people feel free to think for themselves, using reason as their guide, that they are best capable of developing values that succeed in satisfying human needs and serving human interests.
Indira Gandhi, fully Indirā Priyadarśinī Gāndhī
Without courage, you cannot practice any other virtue. You have to have courage – courage of different kinds: first, intellectual courage, to sort out different values and make up your mind about which is the one which is right for you to follow. You have to have moral courage to stick up to that – no matter what comes in your way, no matter what the obstacle and the opposition is.
Courage | Mind | Opposition | Practice | Right | Virtue | Virtue | Obstacle |
We should remember that the social utility of free speech is in giving us the informational base from which we can then make social choices. To refrain from making social choices is to say that beyond the issue of free speech we have no substantive values which we will express in action. If we do not discriminate in the actions we support or oppose, we cannot rectify the terrible injustices of the present world.
Action | Free speech | Giving | Present | Speech | Will | World |
John W. Gardner, fully John William Gardner
[Leaders] can express the values that hold the society together. Most important, they can conceive and articulate goals that lift people out of their petty preoccupations, carry them above the conflicts that tear a society apart, and unite them in the pursuit of objectives worthy of their best efforts.
Goals | Important | Objectives | People | Society | Society |
John W. Gardner, fully John William Gardner
Our problem is not to find better values but to be faithful to those we profess.
Better |
Being morally good, for the majority of Americans, means following the norms and values of their society or culture - whether this be their peer culture, their church, their country, or a combination of these. The theory that morality is relative to societal norms is known in moral philosophy as cultural relativism. Many others claim that morality is relative to the individual and is different for every person depending on what they feel. This theory is known in philosophy as ethical subjectivism.
Church | Culture | Good | Individual | Majority | Means | Morality | Philosophy | Society | Society | Following |
Each person is a temporary focus of forces, vitalities, and values that carry back into an immemorial past that reach ford into an unthinkable future.
Faith in the creative process, in the dynamics of emergence, in the values and purposes that transcend past achievements and past forms, is the precondition of all further growth.
The most generous dreams of the past have not become immediate practical necessities: a word-wide cooperation of people, a more just distribution of al the goods of life; the use of knowledge and energy or the service of life, and the use of life itself for the extension of the human spirit to provinces where human values and purposes could not heretofore penetrate. If we awaken in time to overcome the automatisms and irrational compulsions that are now pushing nations toward destruction, we shall create a universal community.
Cooperation | Dreams | Energy | Knowledge | Life | Life | Nations | Past | People | Service | Spirit | Time |
Maltbie Babcock, fully Maltbie Davenport Babcock
Opportunities do not come with their values stamped upon them. Every one must be challenged. A day dawns, quite like other days; in it a single hour comes, quite like other hours; but in that day and in that hour the chance of a lifetime faces us. To face every opportunity of life thoughtfully and ask its meaning bravely and earnestly, is the only way to meet the supreme opportunities when they come, whether open-faced or disguised.
We do not have a money problem in America. We have a values and priorities problem.
Money |