This site is dedicated to the memory of Dr. Alan William Smolowe who gave birth to the creation of this database.
Peter Geach, fully Peter Thomas Geach
In modern ethical treatises we find hardly any mention of God; and the idea that if there really is a God, his commandments might be morally relevant is wont to be dismissed by a short and simple argument that is generally regarded as irrefutable. 'If what God commands is not right, then the fact of his commanding it is no moral reason for obedience, though it may in that case be dangerous to disobey. And if what God commands is right, even so it is not God's commanding it that makes it right; on the contrary, God as a moral being would command only what was right apart from his commanding it. So God has no essential place in the foundations of morals.
Philip Dormer Stanhope, 4th Earl of Chesterfield
A man is fit for neither business nor pleasure, who either cannot, or does not, command and direct his attention to the present object, and, in some degree, banish for that time all other objects from his thoughts.
Phyllis Diller, born Phyllis Ada Driver
I'm the only woman who can walk in Central Park at night - and reduce the crime rate.
Philoxenus of Mabbug, aka Aksnāyā NULL
When you have extended your hands and taken the body, bow, and put your hands before your face, and worship the living Body whom you hold. Then speak with him in a low voice, and with your gaze resting upon him say to him: When we gather, we are privileged to carry You, the Living GOD, Who is incarnate in the bread, and we embrace You in our palms, LORD of the worlds whom no world has contained. You have circumscribed Yourself in a fiery coal within our fleshly palms–You LORD, Who with Your palm measured out the dust of the earth. You are holy, GOD incarnate in my hands in a fiery coal which is a body. See, we hold You, although there is nothing that contains You; our bodily hands embrace You, LORD of natures whom a fleshly womb embraced. Within a womb You became a circumscribed body, and now within each hand, You appear to us as a small morsel. You alone have made us worthy to approach You and receive You. You enable our hands to embrace You confidently–You make us worthy, LORD, to eat You in a holy manner and to taste the food of Your body as a taste of your life. Instead of the stomach, the body’s member, may the womb of our intellect and the hand of our mind receive You. May You be conceived in us as You were in the womb of the Virgin. There You appeared as an infant, and Your hidden self was revealed to the world as corporeal fruit; may You also appear in each of us here and be revealed by us in fruits that are spiritual works and just labors pleasing to Your will. And by your food may our desires be killed; and by the drinking of Your cup may our passions be quenched. And instead of just feeding the members of our human body, may our thoughts receive strength from the nourishment of Your Body. Like the manifest members of our body, may our hidden thoughts be engaged in exercise and in running and in works according to Your living commands and Your spiritual laws. From the food of Your Body and the drinking of Your Blood may we grow in integrity and unity and wax strong inwardly, and excel outwardly, and run diligently, and attain to the full stature of an interior human being, individually and corporately. May we each and in our global and local covenant communities, become more like The Perfect Man, mature in intelligence, residing in all our spiritual members, our head being crowned with the crown of Thy perfection, obedient to the Word and Command of Your Father in all of our behavior. May we, Your Church, become a royal diadem in Your hands, as You promised us, O hidden GOD whose manifestness we embrace in the perfection of Your Body.
Body | Father | Global | God | Integrity | Lord | Mind | Nothing | Perfection | Receive | Self | Strength | Taste | Unity | World | Worship | God | Intellect |
Phyllis Schlafly, fully Phyllis McAlpin Stewart Schlafly
What I am defending is the real rights of women. A woman should have the right to be in the home as a wife and mother… When will American men learn how to stand up to the nagging by the intolerant, uncivil feminists whose sport is to humiliate men?
Pope John Paul II, born Karol Józef Wojtyła, aka Saint John Paul the Great NULL
Original sin is not only the violation of a positive command … but … attempts … to abolish fatherhood, destroying its rays which permeate the created world, placing in doubt the truth about God who is Love and leaving man with only a sense of the master-slave relationship.
Pope John Paul II, born Karol Józef Wojtyła, aka Saint John Paul the Great NULL
We are asked to love and honor the life of every man and woman and to work with perseverance We are facing an enormous and dramatic clash between good and evil, death and life, the culture. We must emphasize and give prominence to the primacy of human beings in the production process, the primary of human beings over things.
Death | Good | Honor | Life | Life | Love | Man | Woman | Work |
A woman is so made that she cannot give the tender passionate devotion of her whole nature save to the great conquering soul, stronger in its powers, though not in its aspirations, than her own, that can lead her forever & forever up and on. It is for her soul exactly as it is for her body. The strong divine soul of the man embracing hers with passionate love—so alone the precious germs within her soul can be quickened into life. And the time will come when man will understand that a woman’s soul is as dear and needful to his and as different from his as her body to his body. That was what happened to me when I had read for a few days, nay, hours, in your books. It was the divine soul embracing mine. I never before dreamed what love meant: not what life meant. Never was alive before—no words but those of “new birth” can hint the meaning of what then happened to me.
Devotion | Life | Life | Love | Man | Meaning | Nature | Soul | Time | Will | Woman | Words | Understand |
Pope John Paul II, born Karol Józef Wojtyła, aka Saint John Paul the Great NULL
Love between man and woman cannot be built without sacrifices and self-denial.
Recollection, Repetition, and Working Through. Take, for example, the feeling of being abandoned-not that the adult, who feels lonely and therefore takes tablets or drugs, goes to the movies, visits friends, or telephones unnecessarily, in order to bridge the gap somehow. No, I mean the original feeling in the small infant, who had none of these chances of distraction and whose communication, verbal or proverbial, did not reach the mother. This was not the case because his mother was bad, but because she herself was narcissistically deprived, dependent on a specific echo from the child that was so essential to her, or she herself was a child in search of an object that could be available to her. However paradoxical this may seem, a child is at the mother's disposal A child cannot run away from her as her own mother once did. A child can be so brought up that it becomes what she want it to be. A child can be made to show respect, she can impose her own feelings on him, see herself mirrored in his love and admiration, and feel strong in his presence, but when he becomes too much she can abandon that child to a stranger. The mother can feel herself the center of attention, for her child's eyes follow her everywhere. When a woman had to suppress and repress all these needs in relation to her own mother, they rise from the depth of her unconscious and seek gratification through her own child, however well-educated and well-intentioned she may be, and however much she is aware of what a child needs. The child feels this clearly and very soon forgoes the expression of his own distress. Later, when there feeling of being deserted begin to emerge in analysis of the adult, they are accompanied by such intensity of pain and despair that it is quite clear that these people could not have survived so much pain. That would only have been possible in an empathic, attentive environment, and this they lacked. The same holds true for emotions connected with the Oedipal drama and the entire drive development of the child. All this had to be warded off. But to say that it was absent would be a denial of the empirical evidence we have gained in analysis.
Despair | Emotions | Evidence | Feelings | Love | Mother | Object | Order | Pain | People | Search | Woman | Child |
Barbara Ehrenreich, born Barbara Alexander
Upscale young men seem to go for the kind of woman who plays with a full deck of credit cards, who won't cry when she's knocked to the ground while trying to board the six o clock Eastern shuttle, and whose schedule doesn't allow for a sexual encounter lasting more than twelve minutes.
This decision, which is one of the most fundamental, difficult, and soul-searching decisions a woman and a family can make, is also one in which the government should have no role. I believe we can all recognize that abortion in many ways represents a sad, even tragic choice to many women. Often, it's a failure of our system of education, and preventive services. It's often a result of family dynamics. This decision is a profound and complicated one; a difficult one, often the most difficult that a woman will ever make. The fact is that the best way to reduce the number of abortions is to reduce the number of unwanted pregnancies in the first place.
Choice | Decision | Failure | Family | Government | System | Will | Woman | Government | Failure |
Sanctions deriving from it could take the form of parents being obligated to internalize information on the consequences of corporal punishment, in much the same way as drivers of motor vehicles are required by state law to be familiar with the highway code. In the case of our children, the point at issue is not only the welfare of individual families-- the vital interests of society as a whole are at stake. Physical cruelty and emotional humiliation not only leave their marks on children, they also inflict a disastrous imprint of the future of our society. Information on the effects of the well-meant smack should therefore be part and parcel of courses for expectant mothers and of counseling for parents. Hitler, Stalin, Mao and other dictators were exposed to severe physical mistreatment in childhood and refused to face up to the fact later. Instead of seeing and feeling what had happened to them, they avenged themselves vicariously by killing millions of people. And millions of others helped them to do so. If the legislation we are advocating had existed the time, those millions would simply have refused to perpetrate acts of cruelty at the command of crazed political leaders.
Childhood | Consequences | Cruelty | Future | Individual | Law | Parents | Society | Cruelty | Society |
Barbara Ehrenreich, born Barbara Alexander
No culture on earth outside of mid-century suburban America has ever deployed one woman per child without simultaneously assigning her such major productive activities as weaving, farming, gathering, temple maintenance, and tent-building. The reason is that full-time, one-on-one child-raising is not good for women or children.
It all goes back, of course, to Adam and Eve - a story which shows among other things, that if you make a woman out of a man, you are bound to get into trouble.
We need to understand that there is no formula for how women should lead their lives. That is why we must respect the choices that each woman makes for herself and her family. Every woman deserves the chance to realize her God-given potential.
Rabbi Akiva, fully Rebbe Akiva ben Yosef NULL
Which is the more beautiful—God’s work or man’s?" "Undoubtedly man's work is the better," was Akiva's reply; "for while nature at God's command supplies us only with the raw material, human skill enables us to elaborate the same according to the requirements of art and good taste."