This site is dedicated to the memory of Dr. Alan William Smolowe who gave birth to the creation of this database.
William Cohen, fully William Sebastian Cohen
If, as it appears, it was an act of terrorists, then we will do everything in our power to track them down and hold them accountable.
Controversy | Destroy | Enemy | Exploit | Society | Weapons | Will | Society |
Power will intoxicate the best hearts, as wine the strongest heads. No man is wise enough, nor good enough to be trusted with unlimited power.
Wernher von Braun, fully Wernher Magnus Maximilian, Freiherr von Braun
It [space travel] will free man from his remaining chains, the chains of gravity which still tie him to this planet. It will open to him the gates of heaven.
Age | Bible | Destroy | Enough | God | Good | History | Knowledge | Law | Moral law | Nature | Power | Question | Revelation | Science | Space | God | Bible | Learn |
The market economy must find its place in a higher order of things which is not ruled by supply and demand, free prices, and competition. It must be firmly contained within an all-embracing order of society in which the imperfections and harshness of economic freedom are corrected by law and in which man is not denied conditions of life appropriate to his nature.
Freedom | Law | Life | Life | Man | Order | Society | Society |
Today we are aware of the high price that had to be paid for it [material progress] and that we will continue to have to pay, and we are by no means still certain that the price is not too high. We distrust the optimistic assertion that technology and the machine are completely innocent of all this and that the blame rests squarely on man alone who is using them in the wrong way and will just have to learn the right one...The problem of the machine - which happens to be something else than just a highly developed tool - is not merely one of its use, but also one of the machine itself, which, following its own laws and imposing them on man, extracts its tribute from him.
Only too often do we thoughtlessly follow a fashion which favors mass produced commodities, and only slowly do we come to realize that these also have great disadvantages.
Character | Competition | Harmony | Important | Order | Principles | Society | Society |
There is no denying it: the collectivist state is rooted in the masses (to which professors can belong as well as workers) and it can only exist under conditions which, sociologically speaking, we term spiritual collectivization, that is, conditions of society for which precisely the extreme democratic development is an excellent preparation but which is the direct opposite of the liberal as well as the conservative-aristocratic ideal.
Freedom | Law | Life | Life | Man | Order | Society | Society |
Walter Anderson, fully Walter Truett Anderson
Our lives improve only when we take chances -- and the first and most difficult risk we can take is to be honest with ourselves.
We need to ask not whether it is realistic or practical or viable but whether it is imaginable. We need to ask if our consciousness and imagination have been so assaulted and co-opted by the royal consciousness that we have been robbed of the courage or power to think an alternative thought.
It is better to catch the idol-maker than to smash each idol.
No serious historian of politics would imagine that he had accounted for the protective tariff of the system of bounties or subsidies, for the monetary and banking laws, for the state of law in regard to corporate privileges and immunities, for the actual status of property rights, for agricultural or for labor policies, until he had gone behind the general claims and the abstract justifications and had identified the specifically interested groups which promoted the specific law.
Walter Gropius, fully Walter Adolph Georg Gropius
Let us therefore create a new guild of craftsmen without the class-distinctions that raise an arrogant barrier between craftsmen and artists! Let us desire, conceive, and create the new building of the future together. It will combine architecture, sculpture, and painting in a single form, and will one day rise towards the heavens from the hands of a million workers as the crystalline symbol of a new and coming faith.
Education | Effort | Experience | Important | Integration | Knowledge | Method | Right | Sense | Will |
That, however, does not render the poetry as a failure or as an irrelevance. It only affirms that alternatives to the lethal reductionism of empire require imagination and courage and staying power. In that ancient world, it was required that old Jerusalem be relinquished and new Jerusalem be undertaken. It is no less required now that there be relinquishing and undertaking. Those who act in this way will do so at the behest of the poets who may eventually be seen as Spirit led.
The new history begins as history always begins, in a word spoken. "Now Yahweh said to Abram." How else could history begin? That is the way with individual histories when persons are addressed and called into being, into a new consciousness. Such a word spoken gives identity and personhood, and we could not have invented it. It is the voice of the prophet-or the poet if you wish-who calls a name, bestows a vision, summons a pilgrimage. This is not the detached prattle of a computer; not the empty language of a quota or a formula or a rule; but it is a word spoken that lets one not be the same...
Walter J. Ong, fully Walter Jackson Ong
Alphabet letterpress printing, in which each letter was cast on a separate piece of metal, or type, marked a psychological breakthrough of the first order. It embedded the word itself deeply in the manufacturing process and made it into a kind of commodity. The first assembly lie, a technique of manufacture which in a series of set steps produces identical complex objects made up of replaceable parts, was not one which produced stoves or shoes or weaponry but one which produced the printed book. In the late 1700s, the industrial revolution applied to other manufacturing the replaceable-part techniques which printers had worked with for three hundred years. Despite the assumptions of many semiotic structuralists, it was print, not writing, that effectively reified the word, and, with it, noetic activity.
Abstract | Knowledge | Organization | Thinking |
Walter J. Ong, fully Walter Jackson Ong
Oratory has deep agonistic roots. The development of the vast rhetorical tradition was distinctive of the west and was related, whether as cause or effect or both, to the tendency among the Greeks and their cultural epigoni to maximize oppositions, in the mental as in the extramental world: this by contrast with Indians and Chinese, who programmatically minimized them.
Deeds | Experience | Memory | Nature | Deeds |