This site is dedicated to the memory of Dr. Alan William Smolowe who gave birth to the creation of this database.
John Dalberg-Acton, Lord Acton, fully John Emerich Edward Dalberg-Acton, 1st Baron Acton
The danger is not that a particular class is unfit to govern. Every class is unfit to govern.
Waldo Beach, fully William Waldo Beach
It is not just negative inertia and caution which lie behind racial discrimination, but the positive counterfaiths which produce them. The “conflicting valuations” turn out to be a warfare of the gods in the soul of man. Ultimately the racial problem is not one of hypocrisy but idolatry.
The things in our civilization we most prize are not of ourselves. They exist by grace of the doings and sufferings of the continuous human community in which we are a link. Ours is the responsibility of conserving, transmitting, rectifying and expanding the heritage of values we have received, that those who come after us may receive it more solid and secure, more widely accessible and more generously shared that we have received it. Here are all the elements for a religious faith that shall not be confined to sect, class or race. Such a faith has always been implicitly the common faith of mankind.
Civilization | Faith | Grace | Mankind | Race | Receive | Responsibility |
At the bottom, people tend to believe that class is defined by the amount of money you have. In the middle, people grant that money has something to do with it, but think education and the kind of work you do almost equally important. Nearer the top, people perceive that taste, values, ideas, style, and behavior are indispensable criteria of class, regardless of money or occupation or education.
Behavior | Education | Ideas | Important | Indispensable | Money | Occupation | People | Style | Taste | Work | Think |
That amid our highest civilization men faint and die with want is not due to the niggardliness of nature, but to the injustice of man.
An act of injustice is condemned, not because the law is broken, but because a person has been hurt.
It is cheap and easy to decry the injustice of others, but desperately costly to confront our own.
Not the extremists but the great, white midstream America - i.e. Christian America - produces and preserves the racial chasm in American society.
Society |
No man has a moral right to use his property, a creature of God, against the children of God. Racial discrimination even in the use of purely private property, is immoral at least as transgressing the supreme law of charity.
Deprivation of the right of association with his fellow-men is the basic and fundamental reason for the immorality of racial segregation.
Association | Men | Reason | Right | Association |
The inseparable twin of racial injustice is economic injustice.
Jayaprakash Narayan, known as JP Narayan, Jayaprakash or Loknayak
A violent revolution has always brought forth a dictatorship of some kind or another… After revolution, a new privileged class of rulers and exploiters grows up in the course of time to which the people at large is once again subject.
People | Revolution | Time |
To indoctrinate the child with the prevailing world-view of the society and class in which he has been born, to enforce conformity in later life by the thunders of the priest and by the sword of the magistrate has been “the wisdom of our ancestor” at every stage in their progress from savagery to civilization.
Civilization | Conformity | Life | Life | Progress | Society | Wisdom | World | Society | Child |
Social change rarely comes through the efforts of the disenfranchised. The middle class creates social revolutions.
Change |