This site is dedicated to the memory of Dr. Alan William Smolowe who gave birth to the creation of this database.
We may remember what the Romans... thought a cultivated person ought to be: one who knows how to choose his company among men, among things, among thoughts, in the present as well as in the past.
Everything rhythmically organic is true. Everything, which results from the proper feeling for rhythmically organized spiritual units, is true and alive ? alive within itself. When we lose the sense for such true beauty we lose our natural sense for the rich flavor of life, which is the basis for all inspirational work.
Man |
Today we ought to add to these terms the latest and perhaps most formidable form of such dominion, bureaucracy or the rule by an intricate system of bureau in which no men, neither one nor the best, neither the few nor the many can be held responsible and which could be properly called the rule by Nobody.
The totalitarian attempt at global conquest and total domination has been the destructive way out of all impasses. Its victory may coincide with the destruction of humanity; wherever it has ruled, it has begun to destroy the essence of man. Yet to turn our backs on the destructive forces of the century is of little avail. The trouble is that our period has so strangely intertwined the good with the bad that without the imperialists' "expansion for expansion's sake," the world might never have become one; without the bourgeoisie's political device of "power for power's sake," the extent of human strength might never have been discovered; without the fictitious world of totalitarian movements, in which with unparalleled clarity the essential uncertainties of our time have been spelled out, we might have been driven to our doom without ever becoming aware of what has been happening. And if it is true that in the final stages of totalitarianism an absolute evil appears (absolute because it can no longer be deduced from humanly comprehensible motives), it is also true that without it we might never have known the truly radical nature of Evil.
Day |
Carnap calls such concepts as point, straight line, etc., which are given by implicit definitions, improper concepts. Their peculiarity rests on the fact that they do not characterize a thing by its properties, but by its relation to other things. Consider for example the concept of the last car of a train. Whether or not a particular car falls under this description does not depend on its properties but on its position relative to other cars. We could therefore speak of relative concepts, but would have to extend the meaning of this term to apply not only to relations but also to the elements of the relations.
The trouble with Eichmann was precisely that so many were like him, and that the many were neither perverted nor sadistic, that they were, and still are, terribly and terrifyingly normal. From the viewpoint of our legal institutions and of our moral standards of judgment, this normality was much more terrifying than all the atrocities put together.
Day |
Clocks are inherently four-dimensional instruments, since the endpoints of their unit distances are events. Measuring rods, on the other hand, are three-dimensional measuring instruments; their end points are space points and they can be changed into four-dimensional measuring instruments only if events are produced at their end points according to a special rule.
Absolute time would exist in a causal structure for which the concept indeterminate as to time order lends to a unique simultaneity, i.e., for which there is no finite interval of time between the departure and return of a first-signal...
Common to the two geometries is only the general property of one-to-one correspondence, and the rule that this correspondence determines straight lines as shortest lines as well as their relations of intersection.
Somewhat influenced by Aristotelian physics, he [Augustine] holds that the end of all movement is rest, and now he understands the emotions - the motions of the soul - in analogy to the movements of the physical world. For ?nothing else do bodies desire by their weight than what souls desire by their love.? Hence, in the Confessions: ?My weight is my love; by it I am borne whithersoever I am born.? The soul?s gravity, the essence of who somebody is, and which as such is inscrutable to human eyes, becomes manifest in this love.
Day |
Nothing improves the taste of pasta more than a good appetite.