This site is dedicated to the memory of Dr. Alan William Smolowe who gave birth to the creation of this database.
Auguste Comte, formally Isidore Auguste Marie François Xavier Comte
The happiness of every man depends on the harmony between the development of his various faculties and the entire system of circumstances which govern his life.
Circumstances | Harmony | Life | Life | Man | System | Wisdom | Govern | Happiness |
The dead carry our thoughts to another and a nobler existence. They teach us, and especially buy all the strange and seemingly untoward circumstances of their departure from this life, that they and we shall live in a future state forever.
Circumstances | Existence | Future | Life | Life | Teach | Wisdom |
Many adults draw childlike drawings and many children give up drawing at age nine or ten. These children grow up to become the adults who say they never could draw and can't even draw a straight line. The same adults, however, if questioned, often say that they would have liked to learn to draw well, just for their own satisfaction at solving the drawing problems that plagued them as children. But they felt that they had to stop drawing because they couldn't learn how to draw.
With the seizing of the means of production by society, production of commodities is done away with, and, simultaneously, the mastery of the product over the producer. Anarchy in social production is replaced by plan-conforming, conscious organization. The struggle for individual existence disappears... Only from that time will man himself, with full consciousness, make his own history - only from that time will the social causes set in movement by him have, in the main and in a constantly growing measure, the results intended by him. It is the ascent of man from the kingdom of necessity to the kingdom of freedom.
Anarchy | Consciousness | Existence | Freedom | History | Individual | Man | Means | Necessity | Organization | Plan | Society | Struggle | Time | Will | Wisdom |
It is one of the ironic and yet pathetic aspects of our competitive life that with each step up the ladder of success, the regimentation of the individual and his family becomes more intense and coercive. The goal of competitive striving is to be allowed to submit to these extractions and find fulfillment only in doing as faithfully as possible what others in one's competitive class are doing
Family | Fulfillment | Individual | Life | Life | Success | Wisdom |
E. M. Forster, fully Edward Morgan Forster
It is pleasant to be transferred from an office where one is afraid of a sergeant-major into an office where one can intimidate generals, and perhaps this is why History is so attractive to the more timid among us. We can recover self-confidence by snubbing the dead.
Confidence | History | Office | Self | Self-confidence | Wisdom | Afraid |
One intellectual excitement has, however, been denied me. Men wiser and more learned than I have discerned in history a plot, a rhythm, a predetermined pattern. These harmonies are concealed from me. I can see only one emergency following another as wave follows upon wave, only one great fact with respect to which, since it is unique, there can be no generalizations, only one safe rule for the historian: that he should recognize in the development of human destinies the play of the contingent and the unforeseen.
Excitement | History | Men | Play | Respect | Rule | Safe | Unique | Wisdom | Following | Respect |
We are living the events which for centuries to come will be minutely studied by scholars who will undoubtedly describe these days as probably the most exciting and creative in the history of mankind. But preoccupied with our daily chores, our worries and personal hopes and ambitions, few of us are actually living in the present.
All children talk with integrity up to about the age of five, when they fall victim to the influences of the adult world and mass entertainment. It is then that they begin, all unconsciously, to become plausible actors. The product of this process is known as maturity, or you and me.
Age | Children | Entertainment | Integrity | Wisdom | World | Victim |
There are two fools in this world. One is the millionaire who thinks that by hoarding money he can somehow accumulate real power, and the other is the penniless reformer who thinks that if only he can take the money from one class and give it to another, all the world's ills will be cured.
Nothing in history has turned out to be more impermanent than military victory.
Truth isn’t outside power, or lacking in power: contrary to a myth whose history and functions would repay further study, truth isn’t the reward of free spirits, the child of protracted solitude, nor the privilege of those who have succeeded in liberating themselves. Truth is a thing of this world: it is produced only by virtue of multiple forms of constraint. And it induces regular effects of power. Each society has its regime of truth, its ‘general politics’ of truth: that is, the types of discourse which it accepts and makes function as true; the mechanisms and instances which enable one to distinguish true and false statements, the means by which each is sanctions; the techniques and procedures accorded value in the acquisition of truth; the status of those who are charged with saying what counts as true.
Constraint | Distinguish | History | Means | Myth | Politics | Power | Reward | Society | Solitude | Study | Truth | Virtue | Virtue | Wisdom | World | Society | Child | Privilege | Value |
The great trouble with the skepticism of the age is, that it is not thorough enough. It questions everything but its own foundations.
Age | Enough | Skepticism | Wisdom | Trouble |
Those who are versed in the history of their country, in the history of the human race, must know that rigorous state prosecutions have always preceded the era of convulsion; and this era, I fear, will be accelerated by the folly and madness of our rulers. If the people are discontented, the proper mode of quieting their discontent is, not by instituting rigorous and sanguinary prosecutions, but by redressing their wrongs and conciliating their affections. Courts of justice, indeed, may be called in to the aid of ministerial vengeance; but if once the purity of their proceedings is suspected, they will cease to be objects of reverence to the nation; they will degenerate into empty and expensive pageantry, and become the partial instruments of vexatious oppression. Whatever may become of me, my principles will last forever. Individuals may perish; but truth is eternal. The rude blasts of tyranny may blow from every quarter; but freedom is that hardy plant which will survive the tempest and strike an everlasting root into the most unfavorable soil.
Aid | Discontent | Era | Eternal | Folly | Freedom | History | Madness | People | Principles | Purity | Reverence | Truth | Tyranny | Will | Wisdom |
Sigmund Freud, born Sigismund Schlomo Freud
This age of childhood, in which the sense of shame is unknown, seems a paradise when we look back upon it alter, and paradise itself is nothing but the mass-phantasy of the childhood of the individual. This is why in paradise men are naked and unashamed, until the moment arrives when shame and fear awaken; expulsion follows, and sexual life and cultural development begin.
Age | Childhood | Fear | Individual | Life | Life | Men | Nothing | Paradise | Sense | Shame | Wisdom |