This site is dedicated to the memory of Dr. Alan William Smolowe who gave birth to the creation of this database.
Thomas Mann, fully Paul Thomas Mann
The friend of humanity cannot recognize a distinction between what is political and what is not. There is nothing that is not political.
Distinction | Friend | Humanity | Nothing | Wisdom |
Karl Marx (1818-1883) German Philosopher, Socialist and Friedrich Engels
The bourgeoisie has played a most revolutionary role in history... It has resolved personal worth into exchange value, and in place of the numberless indefeasible chartered freedoms has set up that single, unconscionable freedom - Free Trade. In one word, for exploitation, veiled by religious and political illusions, it has substituted naked, shameless, direct, brutal exploitation.
Bourgeoisie | Freedom | History | Wisdom | Worth |
The institutions of a country depend in great measure on the nature of its soil and situation. Many of the wants of man are awakened or supplied by these circumstances. To these wants, manners, laws, and religion must shape and accommodate themselves. The division of land, and the rights attached to it, alter with the soil; the laws relating to its produce, with its fertility. The manners of its inhabitants are in various ways modified by its position. The religion of a miner is not the same as the faith of a shepherd, nor is the character of the ploughman so war-like as that of the hunter. The observant legislator follows the direction of all these various circumstances. the knowledge of the natural advantages or defects of a country thus form an essential part of political science and history.
Character | Circumstances | Defects | Faith | History | Knowledge | Land | Man | Manners | Nature | Position | Religion | Rights | Science | Wants | War | Wisdom |
Daniel Patrick Moynihan, aka "Pat"
Liberty and Equality are the twin ideals of American democracy. But they are not the same thing... Many person who would gladly die for liberty are appalled by equality. Many who are devoted to equality are puzzled and even troubled by liberty. Much of the political history of the American nation can be seen as a competition between these two ideals.
Competition | Democracy | Equality | History | Ideals | Liberty | Wisdom |
Michel de Montaigne, fully Lord Michel Eyquem de Montaigne
It takes a lot of self-love and presumption to have such esteem for one’s own opinions that to establish them one must overthrow the public peace and introduce so many inevitable evils, and such a horrible corruption of morals, as civil wars and political changes bring with them in a matter of such weight - and introduce them into one’s own country.
Corruption | Esteem | Inevitable | Love | Peace | Presumption | Public | Self | Self-love | Wisdom |
Equality is one of the most consummate scoundrels that ever crept from the brain of a political juggler - a fellow who thrusts his hand into the pocket of honest industry or enterprising talent, and squanders their hard-earned profits on profligate idleness or indolent stupidity.
Privacy is absolutely essential to maintaining a free society. The idea that is at the foundation of the notion of privacy is that the citizen is not the tool or the instrument of government - but the reverse... If you have no privacy, it will tend to follow that you have no political freedom, no religious freedom, no freedom of families to make their own decisions [regarding having children]. All these freedoms tend to reinforce on another.
Children | Freedom | Government | Society | Will | Wisdom | Government |
Every political society is composed of other smaller societies of different kinds, each of which has its interests and its rules of conduct: but those societies which everybody perceives, because they have an external and authorized form, are not the only ones that actually exist in the State... Unhappily personal interest is always found in inverse ratio to duty, and increases in proportion as the association grows narrower, and the engagement less sacred; which irrefragably proves that the most general will always the most just also, and that the voice of the people is in fact the voice of God.
Association | Conduct | Duty | God | People | Sacred | Society | Will | Wisdom | Association | Society | Engagement |
Lydia Sigourney, fully Lydia Huntley Sigourney, née Lydia Howard Huntley
One of the principal ingredients in the happiness of childhood is freedom from suspicion - why may it not be combined with a more extensive intercourse with mankind? A disposition to dwell on the bright side of character is like gold to its possessor; but to imagine more evil than meets the eye, betrays affinity for it.
Character | Childhood | Evil | Freedom | Gold | Mankind | Suspicion | Wisdom | Happiness |
Authority is properly the servant of justice, and political powers are arbitrary and illegitimate if not based upon qualification for that service. This is the doctrine of the ethical derivation of authority or public power, as opposed to that of an unconditioned and inherent sovereignty.
Authority | Doctrine | Justice | Power | Public | Service | Wisdom |
Alexis de Tocqueville, fully Alexis-Charles-Henri Clérel de Tocqueville
There is no country in the world in which everything can be provided for by the laws, or in which political institutions can prove a substitute for common sense and public morality.
Real goodness does not attach itself merely to this life - it points to another world. Political or professional reputation cannot last forever, but a conscience void of offense before God and man is an inheritance for eternity.
Conscience | Eternity | God | Inheritance | Life | Life | Man | Offense | Reputation | Wisdom | World | God |
E. B. White, fully Elwyn Brooks White
I have yet to see a piece of writing, political or non-political, that doesn’t have a slant. All writing slants the way a writer leans, and no man is born upright. The beauty of the American free press is that the slants and the twists and the distortions come from so many directions, and the special interests are so numerous, the reader must sift and sort and check and countercheck in order to find out what the score is.
Beauty | Free press | Man | Order | Wisdom | Writing | Beauty |
The punditocracy is a tiny group of highly visible political pontificators who make their living offering “inside political opinions and forecasts” in the elite national media. And it is their debate, rather than any semblance of a democratic one, that determines the parameters of political discourse in the nation today.
Nikolai Berdyaev, fully Nikolai Alexandrovich Berdyaev, also spelled Nichlas Berdiaev
The political organization of the state rests both on force and on faith.
Faith | Force | Organization |
Men and women are biological facts. Ladies and gentleman - citizens - are social artifacts, works of political art. They carry the culture that is sustained by wise laws, and traditions of civility. A the end of the day we are right to judge a society by the character of the people it produces. That is why statecraft is, inevitably, soulcraft.
Art | Character | Civility | Culture | Day | Men | People | Right | Society | Wisdom | Wise | Society |
Subhas Chandra Bose, aka Netaji
The secret of political bargaining is to look more strong than what you really are.