This site is dedicated to the memory of Dr. Alan William Smolowe who gave birth to the creation of this database.
Mikhail Gorbachev, fully Mikhail Sergeyevich Gorbachev
I view the award of the Nobel Prize to me as an expression of understanding of my intentions, my aspirations, the objectives of the profound transformation we have begun in our country, and the ideas of new thinking. I see it as your acknowledgment of my commitment to peaceful means of implementing the objectives of perestroika.
Commitment | Ideas | Means | Objectives | Understanding |
Mitch Albom, fully Mitchell David "Mitch" Albom
The word commitment has lost its meaning. It’s the same with faith. If you don’t commit, you miss what’s on the other side… a happiness you can’t find alone.
Commitment | Happiness |
Mikhail Bakunin, fully Mikhail Alexandrovich Bakunin
We are firmly convinced that the most imperfect republic is a thousand times better than the most enlightened monarchy. In a republic, there are at least brief periods when the people, while continually exploited, is not oppressed; in the monarchies, oppression is constant. The democratic regime also lifts the masses up gradually to participation in public life--something the monarchy never does. Nevertheless, while we prefer the republic, we must recognise and proclaim that whatever the form of government may be, so long as human society continues to be divided into different classes as a result of the hereditary inequality of occupations, of wealth, of education, and of rights, there will always be a class-restricted government and the inevitable exploitation of the majorities by the minorities. The State is nothing but this domination and this exploitation, well regulated and systematised.
Better | Government | Inequality | Inevitable | Nothing | Oppression | Public | Society | Will | Society | Government |
Napoleon Bonaparte, Napoleon I
Among those who dislike oppression are many who like to oppress.
The ideal of romantic love stands in opposition to much of our history, as we shall see. First of all, it is individualistic. It rejects the view of human beings as interchangeable units, and it attaches the highest importance to individual differences as well as to individual choice. Romantic love is egoistic, in the philosophical, not in the petty, sense. Egoism as a philosophical doctrine holds that self-realization and personal happiness are the moral goals of life, and romantic love is motivated by the desire for personal happiness. Romantic love is secular. In its union of physical with spiritual pleasure in sex and love, as well as in its union of romance and daily life, romantic love is a passionate commitment to this earth and to the exalted happiness that life on earth can offer.
Commitment | Desire | Doctrine | Earth | Goals | Individual | Life | Life | Love | Opposition | Pleasure | Romance | Self-realization | Happiness |
How do we keep our inner fire alive? Two things, at minimum, are needed: an ability to appreciate the positives in our life – and a commitment to action. Every day, it's important to ask and answer these questions: ‘What's good in my life?’ and ‘What needs to be done?
Faith is the commitment of one's consciousness to beliefs for which one has no sensory evidence or rational proof. When man rejects reason as his standard of judgement, only one alternative standard remains to him: his feelings. A mystic is a man who treats his feelings as tools of cognition. Faith is the equation of feelings with knowledge.
Commitment | Consciousness | Evidence | Faith | Feelings | Man | Reason |
Nelson Mandela, fully Nelson Rolihlahla Mandela
Never, never and never again shall it be that this beautiful land will again experience the oppression of one by another.
Experience | Land | Oppression | Will |
Nelson Mandela, fully Nelson Rolihlahla Mandela
I must deal immediately and at some length with the question of violence. Some of the things so far told to the Court are true and some are untrue. I do not, however, deny that I planned sabotage. I did not plan it in a spirit of recklessness, nor because I have any love of violence. I planned it as a result of a calm and sober assessment of the political situation that had arisen after many years of tyranny, exploitation, and oppression of my people by the Whites.
An unauthentic word, one which is unable to transform reality, results when dichotomy is imposed upon its constitutive elements. When a word is deprived of its dimension of action, reflection automatically suffers as well; and the word is changed into idle chatter, into verbalism, into an alienated and alienating blah. It becomes an empty word, one which cannot denounce the world, for denunciation is impossible without a commitment to transform, and there is no transformation without action.
Commitment | Reflection |
One of the gravest obstacles to the achievement of liberation is that oppressive reality absorbs those within it and thereby acts to submerge human beings’ consiousness. Functionally, oppression is domesticating. To no longer be prey to its force, one must emerge from it and turn upon it. This can be done only by means of the praxis(practice): reflection and action upon the world in order to transform it.
Achievement | Action | Means | Oppression | Order | Reality | Reflection | World |
Even revolution, which transforms a concrete situation of oppression by establishing the process of liberation, must confront this phenomenon. Many of the oppressed who directly or indirectly participate in revolution intend - conditioned by the myths of the old order - to make it their private revolution. The shadow of their former oppressor is still cast over them.
Oppression | Order | Revolution | Old |
While both humanization and dehumanization are real alternatives [today], only the first is man’s vocation. This vocation is constantly negated, yet it is affirmed by that very negation. It is thwarted by injustice, exploitation, oppression and the violence of the oppressors; it is affirmed by the yearning of the oppressed for freedom and justice, and by their struggle to recover their lost humanity... This, then, is the great humanistic and historical task of the oppressed: to liberate themselves and their oppressors as well. The oppressors, who oppress, exploit, and rape by virtue of their power, cannot find in this power the strength to liberate either the oppressed or themselves. Only power that springs from the weakness of the oppressed will be sufficiently strong to free both. Any attempt to “soften” the power of the oppressor in deference to the weakness of the oppressed almost always manifests itself in the form of false generosity; indeed, the attempt never goes beyond this. In order to have the continued opportunity to express their “generosity,” the oppressors must perpetuate injustice as well. An unjust social order is the permanent fount of this “generosity,” which is nourished by death, despair, and poverty. This is why the dispensers of false generosity become desperate at the slightest threat to its source.
Deference | Dehumanization | Freedom | Generosity | Injustice | Injustice | Opportunity | Oppression | Order | Power | Strength | Struggle | Virtue | Virtue | Weakness | Will |
Peter Kropotkin, fully Prince Pyotr Alexeyevich Kropotkin
America is just the country that shows how all the written guarantees in the world for freedom are no protection against tyranny and oppression of the worst kind. There the politician has come to be looked upon as the very scum of society. The peoples of the world are becoming profoundly dissatisfied and are not appeased by the promise of the social-democrats to patch up the State into a new engine of oppression.
Freedom | Oppression | Promise | Tyranny | World |
Peter Senge, fully Peter Michael Senge
People often want a formula, a technique, something tangible they can apply to solve the problem of structural conflict. Commitment to the truth always seems to people to be an inadequate strategy. But, in fact, being committed to the truth is far more important than any technique.
Commitment | Important | People | Truth |
Peter Kropotkin, fully Prince Pyotr Alexeyevich Kropotkin
America is just the country that shows how all the written guarantees in the world for freedom are no protection against tyranny and oppression of the worst kind. There the politician has come to be looked upon as the very scum of society.
Freedom | Oppression | Tyranny | World |
Communism is oppression and slavery. Man is very willing to obey the law of duty, serve his country, and oblige his friends; but he wishes to labor when he pleases, where he pleases, and as much as he pleases. He wishes to dispose of his own time, to be governed only by necessity, to choose his friendships, his recreation, and his discipline; to act from judgment, not by command; to sacrifice himself through selfishness, not through servile obligation. Communism is essentially opposed to the free exercise of our faculties, to our noblest desires, to our deepest feelings. Any plan which could be devised for reconciling it with the demands of the individual reason and will would end only in changing the thing while preserving the name. Now, if we are honest truth-seekers, we shall avoid disputes about words.
Individual | Labor | Law | Man | Oppression | Plan | Reason | Sacrifice | Will | Wishes |
Pope Pius X, aka Saint Pope Pius X and Pope of the Eucharist, born Giuseppe Melchiorre Sarto NULL
A great movement of apostasy being organized in every country for the establishment of a One-World Church which shall have neither dogmas, nor hierarchy, nor discipline for the mind, nor curb for the passions, and which, under the pretext of freedom and human dignity, would bring back to the world the reign of legalized cunning and force, the oppression of the weak, and of those who toil and suffer.
Apostasy | Church | Cunning | Discipline | Freedom | Oppression | World |
Pope John Paul II, born Karol Józef Wojtyła, aka Saint John Paul the Great NULL
Friendship, as has been said, consists in a full commitment of the will to another person with a view to that person's good.
Commitment | Will |
Pope John Paul II, born Karol Józef Wojtyła, aka Saint John Paul the Great NULL
Love consists of a commitment which limits one's freedom - it is a giving of the self, and to give oneself means just that: to limit one's freedom on behalf of another.
Commitment | Freedom | Giving | Means |