This site is dedicated to the memory of Dr. Alan William Smolowe who gave birth to the creation of this database.
Viktor Frankl, fully Viktor Emil Frankl
Sigmund Freud once asserted, “Let one attempt to expose a number of the most diverse people uniformly to hunger. With the increase of the imperative urge of hunger all individual differences will blur, and in their stead will appear the uniform expression of the one unstilled urge.” Thank heaven, Sigmund Freud was spared knowing the concentration camps from the inside. His subjects lay on a couch designed in the plush style of Victorian culture, not in the filth of Auschwitz. There, the individual differences did not blur but, on the contrary, people became more different; people unmasked themselves, both the swine and the saints.
Behavior | Decision | Dignity | Freedom | Life | Life | Man | Martyrs | Mind | Suffering | Witness | Words |
Viktor Frankl, fully Viktor Emil Frankl
This emphasis on responsibleness is reflected in the categorical imperative of logotherapy, which is: Live as if you were living already for the second time and as if you had acted the first time as wrongly as you are about to act now!
Behavior | Freedom | Martyrs | Mind | Suffering | Witness | Words |
Viktor Frankl, fully Viktor Emil Frankl
To discover that there was any semblance of art in a concentration camp must be a surprise enough for an outsider, but he may be even more astonished to hear that one could find a sense of humor there as well; of course, only the faint trace of one, and then only for a few seconds or minutes. Humor was another of the soul's weapons in the fight for self-preservation. It is well known that humor, more than anything else in the human make-up, can afford an aloofness and an ability to rise above any situation, even if only for a few seconds. I practically trained a friend of mine who worked next to me on the building site to develop a sense of humor. I suggested to him that we would promise each other to invent at least one amusing story daily, about some incident that could happen one day after our liberation. He was a surgeon and had once been an assistant on the staff of a large hospital. So I once tried to get him to smile by describing to him how he would be unable to lose the habits of camp life when he returned to his former work. On the building site (especially when the supervisor made his tour of inspection) the foreman encouraged us to work faster by shouting: 'Action! Action!' I told my friend, 'One day you will be back in the operating room, performing a big abdominal operation. Suddenly an orderly will rush in announcing the arrival of the senior surgeon by shouting, Action! Action!'
Indispensable | Knowledge | Meaning | Nothing | Search | Wisdom | Words |
Viktor Frankl, fully Viktor Emil Frankl
No man and no destiny can be compared with any other man or any other destiny. No situation repeats itself, and each situation calls for a different response.
Accomplishment | Challenge | Chance | Circumstances | Failure | Greatness | Life | Life | Majority | Men | Opportunity | People | Words | Failure | Think |
The balanced persons will be active because it is their duty. They will not be agitated by anything - failure or success. The Godly will take up activity as a means of worshipping God; and they leave the result to God. They know that they are but instruments in the hands of God.
Upton Sinclair, fully Upton Beall Sinclair, Jr.
At last Paul went on. I know how it is, son. You won't do it, you haven't the nerve for it-you're soft. He waited, while those cruel words sank in. Yes, that's the word, soft. You've always had everything you wanted- you've had it handed to you on a silver tray, and it's made you a weakling. You have a good heart, you know what's right, but you couldn't bear to act, you'd be too afraid of hurting somebody.
Words |
Ursula Le Guin, fully Ursula Kroeber Le Guin
The important thing is not the finding, it is the seeking, it is the devotion with which one spins the wheel of prayer and scripture, discovering the truth little by little. If this machine gave you the truth immediately, you would not recognize it.
Upton Sinclair, fully Upton Beall Sinclair, Jr.
There’s no excuse for poverty in a state as rich as California. We can produce so much food that we have to dump it into our bay.
Distinguish | Dreams | Men | Music | Poetry | Sacred | Words | Friends |
Ursula Le Guin, fully Ursula Kroeber Le Guin
From that time forth he believed that the wise man is one who never sets himself apart from other living things, whether they have speech or not, and in later years he strove long to learn what can be learned, in silence, from the eyes of animals, the flight of birds, the great slow gestures of trees.
Ursula Le Guin, fully Ursula Kroeber Le Guin
No, I don't mean love, when I say patriotism. I mean fear. The fear of the other. And its expressions are political, not poetical: hate, rivalry, aggression.
Ursula Le Guin, fully Ursula Kroeber Le Guin
If at moments the facts seem to alter with an altered voice, why then you can choose the fact you like best; yet none of them are false, and it is all one story.
Upton Sinclair, fully Upton Beall Sinclair, Jr.
Chophouse. It was his descriptions of meat, though, that most concerned Americans. Even President Theodore Roosevelt seemed to be more shocked by the details of how cattle and hogs were being sliced into beef and pork--and by how much condemned meat was ending up on American dinner tables--than by the workers' plight. Within a matter of months, Sinclair's book became an international bestseller and sparked legislation regulating the meat industry for the first time. I aimed for the public's heart ... and by accident I hit it in the stomach.
Upton Sinclair, fully Upton Beall Sinclair, Jr.
Man is an evasive beast, given to cultivating strange notions about himself. He is humiliated by his simian ancestry, and tries to deny his animal nature, to persuade himself that he is not limited by its weaknesses nor concerned in its fate. And this impulse may be harmless, when it is genuine. But what are we to say when we see the formulas of heroic self-deception made use of by unheroic self-indulgence? What are we to say when we see asceticism preached to the poor by fat and comfortable retainers of the rich? What are we to say when we see idealism become hypocrisy, and the moral and spiritual heritage of mankind twisted to the knavish purposes of class-cruelty and greed? What I say is — Bootstrap-lifting!
Words |
Ursula Le Guin, fully Ursula Kroeber Le Guin
The book itself is a curious artifact, not showy in its technology but complex and extremely efficient: a really neat little device, compact, often very pleasant to look at and handle, that can last decades, even centuries. It doesn't have to be plugged in, activated, or performed by a machine; all it needs is light, a human eye, and a human mind. It is not one of a kind, and it is not ephemeral. It lasts. It is reliable. If a book told you something when you were fifteen, it will tell it to you again when you're fifty, though you may understand it so differently that it seems you're reading a whole new book.
Words |
There is only one art, whose sole criterion is the power, the authenticity, the revelatory insight, the courage and suggestiveness with which it seeks its truth. Thus, from the standpoint of the work and its worth it is irrelevant to which political ideas the artist as a citizen claims allegiance, which ideas he would like to serve with his work or whether he holds any such ideas at all.