This site is dedicated to the memory of Dr. Alan William Smolowe who gave birth to the creation of this database.
The political function of the crisis-man [e.g., Napoleon, Mussolini, Hitler]… is to suspend the democratic constitution, replacing it with dictatorship in the interests of the ruling class.
Man |
E. L. Doctorow, fully Edgar Lawrence Doctorow
Religion is a private matter. Religious thought, to have any kind of integrity at all, must be the most private, tremblingly sacred kind of awareness we have. When religious terminology is bandied about, it loses its religious character and becomes entirely political and coercive.
Awareness | Character | Integrity | Religion | Sacred | Thought | Awareness |
Transcend political correctness and strive for human righteousness.
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.
Edward S. Herman and Noam Chomsky
The “societal purpose” of the media is to inculcate and defend the economic, social, and political agenda of privileged groups that dominate the domestic society and the state. The media serve this purpose in many ways: through selection of topics, distribution of concerns, framing of issues, filtering of information, emphasis and tone, and by keeping debate within the bounds of acceptable premises.
The power of bureaucracy is mainly passive, not active. IT consists in the capacity to withhold needed services rather than in the capacity to oppose political superiors directly.
Doris Kearns Goodwin, born Doris Helen Kearns
One of the most underestimated of all political resources is personal attention.
Politics is not about objective reality, but virtual reality. What happens in the political world is divorced from the real world. It exists for only the fleeting historical moment, in a magical movie of sorts, a never-ending and infinitely revisable docudrama. Strangely, the faithful understand that the movie is not true – yet also maintain that it is the only truth that really matters.
Politics | Reality | Truth | World | Understand |
Nonviolence is the answer to the crucial political and moral questions of our time; the need for mankind to overcome oppression and violence without resorting to oppression and violence. Mankind must evolve for all human conflict a method which rejects revenge, aggression, and retaliation. The foundation of such a method is love.
Aggression | Love | Mankind | Method | Need | Oppression | Retaliation | Revenge | Time |
Carl Jung, fully Carl Gustav Jung
It is in the nature of political bodies always to see the evil in the opposite group, just as the individual has an ineradicable tendency to get rid of everything he does not know and does not want to know about himself by foisting it off on somebody else… Nothing has a more diverse and alienating effect upon society than this moral complacency and lack of responsibility, and nothing promotes understanding and rapprochement more than the mutual withdrawal of projections.
Complacency | Evil | Individual | Nature | Nothing | Responsibility | Society | Understanding | Society |
Edward Luttwak, fully Edward Nicolae Luttwak
In frontless war where there are no clear lines on the map to show victory and defeat, the only true measure of progress must be political and nonquantifiable: the impact on the enemy’s will to continue the fight.
The mistake the world is making with the simple peoples is to try and hurry them into political concepts they don’t understand and aren’t prepared to cope with. I know. I am a peasant myself.
Hurry | Mistake | World | Understand |
Whitney J. Oates, fully Whitney Jennings Oates
The secular world, particularly in political forms, is finding that it cannot maintain its supremacy without some religious sanction, and consequently is busy manufacturing spurious religious faiths to bolster its own inadequacies.
World |