This site is dedicated to the memory of Dr. Alan William Smolowe who gave birth to the creation of this database.
I have no ambition to govern men. It is a painful and thankless office.
Most bad government has grown out of too much government.
Truth is great and will prevail if left to herself, that she is the proper and sufficient antagonist to error, and has nothing to fear from the conflict, unless by human interposition disarmed of her natural weapons, free argument and debate; errors ceasing to be dangerous when it is permitted freely to contradict them.
Blessings on the hand of women! Angels guard its strength and grace, in the palace, cottage, hovel, oh, no matter where the place.
Moral codes | Morality | Moral codes |
Wilkie Collins, fully William Wilkie Collins
The actions of human beings are not invariably governed by the laws of pure reason.
Walt Disney, fully Walter Elias "Walt" Disney
The way to get started is to quit talking and begin doing
Cynicism | Entertainment | Experience | Good | Happy | Little | Method | Morality | Satire | Story | Style | Virtue | Virtue | Wickedness |
They call you "Little Man", "Common Man"; they say a new era has begun, the "Era of the Common Man". It isn't you who says so, Little Man. It is they, the Vice Presidents of great nations, promoted labor leaders, repentant sons of bourgeois families, statesman and philosophers. They give you your future but don't ask about your past.
No man-made law ever, no matter whether derived from the past or projected onto a distant, unforeseeable future, can or should ever be empowered to claim that it is greater than the Natural Law from which it stems and to which it must inevitably return in the eternal rhythm of creation and decline of all things natural. This is valid, no matter whether we speak in terms such as “God,” “Natural Law,” “Cosmic Primordial Force,” “Ether” or “Cosmic Orgone Energy.”
Achievement | Culture | Instinct | Man | Morality | Time | Unity | Will | Work |
Under the rule of the free market ideology, we have gone through two decades of an energy crisis without an effective energy policy. Because of an easy and thoughtless reliance on imported oil, we have no adequate policy for the conservation of gasoline and other petroleum products. We have no adequate policy for the development or use of other, less harmful forms of energy. We have no adequate system of public transportation.
Discipline | Knowledge | Morality | Time |
Voltaire, pen name of François-Marie Arouet NULL
There's scarce a point whereon mankind agree - So well as in their boast of killing me; I boast of nothing, but when I've a mind - I think I can be even with mankind
Vine Deloria, fully Vine Victor Deloria, Jr.
When asked by an anthropologist what the Indians called America before the white men came, an Indian said simply "Ours.
Move ahead. Give proper Nourishment to the body. May your hands,legs and body not be destroyed by death.
Ursula Le Guin, fully Ursula Kroeber Le Guin
If you can see a thing whole, he said, it seems that it's always beautiful. Planets, lives. . . . But close up, a world's all dirt and rocks. And day to day, life's a hard job, you get tired, you loose the pattern. You need distance, interval. The way to see how beautiful earth is, is to see it from the moon. The way to see how beautiful life is, is from the vantage point of death. That's all right for Urras. Let it stay off there and be the moon-I don't want it! But I am not going to stand up on a gravestone and look down on life and say, 'O lovely!' I want to see it whole right in the middle of it, here, now. I don't give a hoot for eternity. It's nothing to do with eternity, said Shevek, grinning, a thin shaggy man of silver and shadow. All you have to do to see life as a whole is to see it as mortal. I'll die, you'll die; how could we love each other otherwise? The sun's going to burn out, what else keeps it shining? Ah! your talk, your damned philosophy! Talk? It's not talk. It's not reason. It's hand's touch. I touch the wholeness, I hold it. Which is moonlight, which is Takver? How shall I fear death? When I hold it, when I hold in my hands the light-Don't be propertarian, Takver muttered. Dear heart, don't cry. I'm not crying. You are. Those are your tears. I'm cold. The moonlight's cold. Lie down. A great shiver went through his body as she took him in her arms. I'm afraid, Takver, he whispered.
What I am about to say may sound provocative, but I feel more and more strongly that even these ideas are not enough, that we must go farther and deeper.
Authority | Morality | Order | Responsibility | Science | Understanding | Will |