This site is dedicated to the memory of Dr. Alan William Smolowe who gave birth to the creation of this database.
The writer in western civilization has become not a voice of his tribe, but of his individuality. This is a very narrow-minded situation.
This sharpening of skills is the real value of competition. Many have lost sight of the purpose of healthy competition, which helps us to draw forth inner strength and encourages us to transcend our ideas of personal limitation. The real competition, however, is within the person, and not between people... In essence, competition is cooperation.
Competition | Cooperation | Ideas | People | Purpose | Purpose | Strength | Value |
Our civilization… is not devaluing its awareness of the unknowable; nor is it deifying it. It is the first civilization that has severed it from religion and superstition in order to question it.
Awareness | Civilization | Order | Question | Religion | Superstition | Awareness |
A race preserves its vigor so long as it harbors a real contrast between what has been and what may be, and so long as it nerved by the vigor to adventure beyond the safeties of the past. Without adventure, civilization is in full decay.
Adventure | Civilization | Contrast | Past | Race |
Patience does not mean indifference. We may work and trust and wait, but we ought not to be idle or careless while waiting.
Indifference | Patience | Trust | Waiting | Work |
The major advances in civilization are processes that all but wreck the societies in which they occur. . . . Civilization advances by extending the number of important operations which we can perform without thinking about them.
Civilization | Important | Thinking |
A race preserves its vigor so long as it harbors a real contrast between what has been and what may be, and so long as it is nerved by the vigor to adventure beyond the safeties of the past. Without adventure, civilization is in full decay.
Adventure | Civilization | Contrast | Past | Race |
In man, the things which are not measurable are more important than those which are measurable. The existence of thought is as fundamental as for instance, the physiochemical equilibria of blood serum. The sepration of eh qualitative from the quantitative grew still wider when Descartes created the dualism of the body and soul. Then, the manifestations of the mind became inexplicable. The material was definitely isolated from the spiritual. Organic structures and physiological mechanisms assumed a far greater reality than thought, pleasure, sorrow and beauty. This error switched civilization to the road which led science to triumph and man to degradation.
Beauty | Body | Civilization | Error | Existence | Important | Man | Mind | Organic | Pleasure | Reality | Science | Sorrow | Soul | Thought | Thought |
We believe that the most basic of all changes in human social organization have been the result of three processes. Starting 8,000 to 10,000 years ago, agriculture was invented in the Middle East – probably by a woman. That’s the First Wave. Roughly 250 years ago, the Industrial Revolution triggered a Second Wave of change. Brute-force technologies amplified human and animal muscle power and gave rise to an urban, factory-centered way of life. Sometime after World War II, a gigantic Third Wave began transforming the planet, based on tools that amplify mind rather than muscle. The Third Wave is bigger, deeper and faster than the other two. This is the civilization of the computer, the satellite and Internet.
Change | Civilization | Computer | Force | Internet | Life | Life | Mind | Organization | Power | Revolution | War | Woman | World |
In its broadest sense, art is civilization. For civilization is nothing other than the unremitting aim at the major perfection’s of harmony.
Art | Civilization | Harmony | Nothing | Perfection | Sense | Art |
Anne Morrow Lindbergh, born Anne Spencer Morrow
Life is a gift, given in trust – like a child.
Happiness itself is sufficient excuse. Beautiful things are right and true; so beautiful actions are those pleasing to the gods. Wise people have an inward sense of what is beautiful, and the highest wisdom is to trust this intuition and be guided by it. The answer to the last appeal of what is right lies within a person's own breast. Trust thyself.
Intuition | People | Right | Sense | Trust | Wisdom | Wise |
Man is at bottom a wild and terrible animal. We know him only as what we call civilization has tamed and trained him; hence we are alarmed by the occasional breaking out of his true nature. But whenever the locks and chains of law and order are cast off, and anarchy comes in, he shows himself for what he really is.
Arnold J. Toynbee, fully Arnold Joseph Toynbee
Western Civilization stands not for technology, but the sacredness of the individual human personality.
Civilization | Individual | Personality | Technology |
I’m convinced that time has no existence in the mind at all. We partition time out of necessity, so that if I say I will be somewhere at 1 o’clock, we agree on what 1 o’clock is. Civilization couldn’t function otherwise. But our minds are a swirling mass of images and recollections that are connected, and it’s the connections that count.
Arnold J. Toynbee, fully Arnold Joseph Toynbee
The history of almost every civilization furnishes examples of geographical expansion coinciding with deterioration in quality.
Civilization | History |
Arnold J. Toynbee, fully Arnold Joseph Toynbee
We are in the first age since the dawn of civilization in which people have dared to think it practicable to make the benefits of civilization available to the whole human race.
Age | Civilization | Dawn | Human race | People | Race | Think |