This site is dedicated to the memory of Dr. Alan William Smolowe who gave birth to the creation of this database.
If the meaning of life is not a mystery, if leading meaningful lives is within the power of all of us, then we do not need to ask the question `What’s it all about?’ in despair. We can look around us and see the many ways in which life can be meaningful. We can see the value of happiness while accepting that it is not everything, which will make it easier for us at those times when it eludes us. We can learn to appreciate the pleasure of life without becoming slaves to appetites which can never be satisfied. We can see the value of success, while not interpreting that too narrowly, so that we can appreciate the project of striving to become what we want to be as well as the more visible, public signs of success. We can see the value of seizing the day, without leading us into a desperate scramble to grasp the ungraspable moment. We can appreciate the value in helping others lead meaningful lives, too, without thinking that altruism demands everything we have. And finally, we can recognize the value of love, as perhaps the most powerful motivator to do anything at all.
Altruism | Day | Despair | Life | Life | Love | Meaning | Mystery | Need | Pleasure | Power | Public | Question | Success | Thinking | Will | Happiness | Learn | Value |
Johann Georg Ritter von Zimmermann
All our distinctions are accidental; beauty and deformity, though personal qualities, are neither entitled to praise nor censure; yet it is so happens that they color our opinion of those qualities to which mankind have attached responsibility.
Beauty | Censure | Mankind | Opinion | Praise | Qualities | Responsibility | Wisdom | Beauty |
Our American system of government by lobbyist guarantees us a form of taxation with representation that the founding father did not foresee: special interests get the representation while the broad public gets the taxation.
Father | Government | Public | System | Government |
The most effective way to influence opinion is by the selection and arrangement of the appropriate facts.
Perfection of means and confusion of goals seem – in my opinion – to characterize our age.
Age | Goals | Means | Opinion | Perfection |
The arts of power and its minions are the same in all countries and in all ages. It marks its victim; denounces [him]; and excites the public odium and the public hatred, to conceal its own abuses and encroachments.
We narratively represent our selves in part in order to answer certain questions of identity. It is useful to distinguish two different aims of self-representation that in the end are deeply intertwined. First, there is self-representation for the sake of self-understanding. This is the story we tell ourselves to understand ourselves for who we are. The ideal here is convergence between self-representation and an acceptable version of the story of our actual identity. Second, there is self-representation for public dissemination, whose aim is underwriting successful social interaction.
Aims | Distinguish | Order | Public | Self | Story | Understanding | Understand |
Erich Fromm, fully Erich Seligmann Fromm
In our effort to escape from aloneness and powerlessness, we are ready to get rid of our individual self either by submission to new forms of authority or by a compulsive conforming to accepted patterns.
Authority | Effort | Individual | Self | Submission |
Erich Fromm, fully Erich Seligmann Fromm
Words can become idols, and machines can become idols; leaders, the state, power, and political groups may also serve. Science and the opinion of one’s neighbors can become idols, and God has become an idol for many.
We are at ease with a moral judgment made against someone’s private sin - lust or greed. We are much less comfortable judging someone’s public ethic - those decisions that can lead to such outcomes as aggression, the abuse of the environment, the neglect of the needy.
Abuse | Aggression | Greed | Judgment | Lust | Neglect | Public | Sin |
In visions of wisdom, in devotion to the good, in submission to beauty, and when overwhelmed by the holy, we awake to behold existence in this relationship. In reverence, suffering, and humility we discover our existence and find the bridge that leads from existence to God. And this is religion.
Beauty | Devotion | Existence | God | Good | Humility | Relationship | Religion | Reverence | Submission | Suffering | Wisdom |
How a report is framed, which facts it contains and emphasizes and which it ignores, and in what context, are as important to sharing opinion as the bare facts themselves.
B. H. Liddell Hart, fully Captain B. H. Liddell
Be very careful never to show your own bias to anyone who is giving you information, or passing it on to you. Once he sees that you have a particular inclination he will instinctively tend to tell you what he thinks will suit you, and enhance your opinion of him.
Giving | Inclination | Opinion | Will |
Nothing makes the multitude angrier than when someone forces them to change their opinion of him.
Error of opinion may be tolerated where reason is left free to combat it.
Samuel Johnson, aka Doctor Johnson
The greatest part of mankind have no other reason for their opinion than that they are in fashion.