This site is dedicated to the memory of Dr. Alan William Smolowe who gave birth to the creation of this database.
You may break a mosque, you may break a temple, you may break any holy place, but you must not break the human heart, because there the Lord Himself dwells.
The uprooting of human beings from the land, the concentration in cities, the breakdown of the authority of family, of tradition, and of moral conventions, the complexity and the novelty of modern life, and finally the economic insecurity of our industrial system have called into being the modern social worker. They perform a function in modern society which is not a luxury but an absolute necessity.
Absolute | Authority | Family | Insecurity | Land | Life | Life | Luxury | Necessity | Novelty | Society | System | Tradition | Wisdom | Society | Novelty |
Samuel David Luzzatto, aka by acronym of SHaDaL or SHeDaL
Judaism looks upon all human beings as children of one Father; thinks of them as all created in the image of God, and insists that a man be judged not by his religion, but his action.
Action | Children | Father | God | Looks | Man | Religion | Wisdom |
And in the end, through the long ages of our quest for light, it will be found that truth is still mightier than the sword. For out of the welter of human carnage and human sorrow and human weal the indestructible thing that will always live is a sound idea.
The quality of civilization depends on a balance of body, mind and spirit in its people, measured on a scale less human than divine... To survive, we must keep this balance. To progress, we must improve it. Science is upsetting it with an overemphasis of mind and a neglect of spirit and body.
Balance | Body | Civilization | Mind | Neglect | People | Progress | Science | Spirit | Wisdom |
War is no more inevitable than the plague is inevitable. War is no more a part of human nature than the burning of witches is a human act.
Human nature | Inevitable | Nature | War | Wisdom |
Aspirations after the holy, the only aspiration in which the human soul can be assured that it will never meet with disappointment.
Aspiration | Soul | Will | Wisdom | Aspiration |
Barry Lopez, fully Barry Holstun Lopez
The land is like poetry: it is inexplicably coherent, it is transcendent in its meaning, and it has the power to elevate a consideration of human life.
Consideration | Land | Life | Life | Meaning | Poetry | Power | Wisdom |
Japanese poetry has as its subject the human heart. It may seem to be of no practical use and just as well left uncomposed, but when one knows poetry well, one understands also without explanation the reasons governing order and disorder in the world.
The fundamental rights, like the right to existence and life; the right to personal freedom or to conduct one’s own life as master of oneself and of one’s acts, responsible for them before God and the law of the community; the right to the pursuit of the perfection of moral and rational human life; the right to keep one’s body whole; the right to private ownership of material goods, which is a safeguard of the liberties of the individual; the right to marry according to one’s choice and to raise a family which will be assured of the liberties due it; the right of association, the respect for human dignity in each individual, whether or not he represents an economic value for society - all these rights are rooted in the vocation of the person (a spiritual and free agent) to the order of absolute values and to a destiny superior to time.
Absolute | Association | Body | Choice | Conduct | Destiny | Dignity | Existence | Family | Freedom | God | Individual | Law | Life | Life | Order | Perfection | Personal freedom | Respect | Right | Rights | Society | Time | Will | Wisdom | Society | Respect | God | Value |
The opposition is indispensable. A good statesman, like any other sensible human being, always learns more from his opponents than from his fervent supporters. For his supporters will push him to disaster unless his opponents show him where the dangers are. So if he is wise he will often pray to be delivered from his friends, because they will ruin him. But though it hurts, he ought also to pray never to be left without opponents; for they keep him on the path of reason and good sense.
Good | Indispensable | Opposition | Reason | Will | Wisdom | Wise |
Neil MacCormick, Sir Donald Neil MacCormick
When we say that law ‘embodies’ values we are talking metaphorically. What does it mean? Values are only ‘embodied’ in law in the sense that and to the extent that human beings approve of the laws they have because of the state of affairs they are supposed to secure, being states of affairs which are on some ground deemed just or otherwise good. This need not be articulated at all.
Now what we have, but what we use, not what we see, but what we choose, these are the things that mar or bless the sum of human happiness.
Wisdom |
Kate Millet, Katherine Murray Millett
The worst part about prostitution is that you’re obliged not to sell sex only, but your humanity. That’s the worst part of it: that what you’re selling is your human dignity. Not really so much in bed, but in accepting the agreement - in becoming a bought person.