This site is dedicated to the memory of Dr. Alan William Smolowe who gave birth to the creation of this database.
John Kenneth Galbraith, aka "Ken"
In any great organization it is far, far safer to be wrong with the majority than to be right alone.
Majority | Organization | Right | Wrong |
John Rawls, fully John Bordley Rawls
The perspective of eternity is not a perspective from a certain place beyond the world, nor the point of view of a transcendent being; rather it is a certain form of thought and feeling that rational persons can adopt within the world. And having done so, they can, whatever their generation, bring together into one scheme all individual perspectives and arrive together at regulative principles that can be affirmed by everyone as he lives by them, each from his own standpoint. Purity of heart, if one could attain it, would be to see clearly and to act with grace and self-command from this point of view.
Eternity | Grace | Heart | Individual | Principles | Purity | Self | Thought | World | Thought |
In all the more advanced communities the great majority of things are worse done by the intervention of government than the individuals most interested in the matter would do them, or cause them to be done, if left to themselves.
Cause | Government | Majority | Government |
The macrocosm (order of the universe), microcosm (order of the individual), and mesocosm (order of the attuned society) are equivalent, the social ideas and moral principles by which the individual is constrained to his group are conceived to be, finally, of his own nature. And for the same reason, the visionary realizations of the yogi in solitude would be of the psychological sources out of which the mesocosmic order of his mythologically grounded cultural monad originated.
Ideas | Individual | Nature | Order | Principles | Reason | Society | Solitude | Universe |
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 |
Those of us who shout the loudest about Americanism in making character assassinations are all too frequently those who, by our own words and acts, ignore some of the basic principles of Americanism - The right to criticize. The right to hold unpopular beliefs. The right to protest. The right of independent thought. The exercise of these rights should not cost one single American citizen his reputation or his right to a livelihood nor should he be in danger of losing his reputation or livelihood merely because he happens to know someone who holds unpopular beliefs. Who of us does not? Otherwise none of us could call our souls our own. Otherwise thought control would have set in. The American people are sick and tired of being afraid to speak their minds lest they be politically smeared as Communists or Fascists by their opponents. Freedom of speech is not what is used to be in America. It has been so abused by some that it is not exercised by others. The American people are sick and tired of seeing innocent people smeared and guilty people whitewashed.
Character | Control | Cost | Danger | Freedom of speech | Freedom | People | Principles | Protest | Reputation | Right | Rights | Speech | Thought | Words | Danger | Afraid | Guilty | Thought |
Though the ethical challenges we face in the workplace may be different from those in our personal lives, the principles of ethical conduct that apply to those challenges do not change. There is no such thing as business ethics - there is only ethics.
Business | Change | Conduct | Ethics | Principles | Business |
Ethics is putting principles into action. Consistently between what we say we value and what our actions say we value is a matter of integrity.
Action | Ethics | Integrity | Principles | Value |
In my experience, very few politicians have solid principles that they are unwilling to sell out for the sake of winning elections. They are, most of them, "the hollow men, stuffed men" of whom T. S. Eliot wrote, and in Clinton we have perhaps as extreme an embodiment of this professional deformation as can be unearthed.
Experience | Extreme | Men | Principles | Winning |
The majority of men meet with failure because of their lack of persistence in creating new plans to take the place of those which fail.
Failure | Majority | Men | Persistence | Failure |
Noam Chomsky, fully Avram Noam Chomsky
We really don't know what the fundamental principles of moral judgment actually are, but we have very good reason to believe that they're there.
Good | Judgment | Principles | Reason |
To practice the basic principles of good health, visualize yourself as sound, healthy and filled with vitality and boundless life of your Creator. Look upon yourself as the unique individual that you are. Get in harmony with the creative, life-giving, health-maintaining forces of the universe. Affirm peace, wholeness, and good health - and they will be yours.
Giving | Good | Harmony | Health | Individual | Life | Life | Peace | Practice | Principles | Sound | Unique | Universe | Wholeness | Will |
To have doubted one's own first principles is the mark of a civilized man.
Man | Principles |
The effects of opposition are wonderful. There are men who rise refreshed on hearing of a threat; men to whom a crisis which intimidates and paralyzes the majority - demanding, not the faculties of prudence and thrift, but comprehension, immovableness, the readiness to sacrifice - comes graceful and beloved as a bride.
Bride | Majority | Men | Opposition | Prudence | Prudence | Sacrifice | Thrift | Crisis |
The seniority system keeps a handful of old men... in control of the Congress. These old men stand inplacably across the paths that could lead us toward a better future. But worse than they, I think, are the majority of members of both Houses who continue to submit to the senility system.