This site is dedicated to the memory of Dr. Alan William Smolowe who gave birth to the creation of this database.
Virtue... in so far as it is based on internal freedom, contains a positive command for man, namely, that he should bring all his powers and inclinations under his rule (that of reason); and this is a positive precept of command over himself which is additional to the prohibition, namely, that he should not allow himself to be governed by his feelings and inclinations (the duty of apathy); since, unless reason takes the reins of government into its own hands, the feelings and inclinations play the master over the man.
Apathy | Duty | Feelings | Freedom | Government | Man | Play | Precept | Reason | Rule | Virtue | Virtue | Government |
The desire of a man for a woman is not directed at her because she is a human being, but because she is a woman. That she is a human being is of no concern to him.
What action would promote happiness of a rational being is completely insoluble, and consequently no imperative respect it is possible which should, in the strict sense, command to do what makes happy; because happiness is not an ideal of reason but of imagination, resting solely on empirical grounds, and it is vain to expect that these should define an action by which one could attain the totality of a series of consequences which is really endless.
Action | Consequences | Happy | Imagination | Reason | Respect | Sense | Respect | Happiness |
Public education is a great instrument of social change... Education is a social proceeds, perhaps the most important process in determining the future of our country; it should command a far larger portion of our national income than it does today.
What the world craves today is a more spiritual and less formal religion. To the man or woman facing death, great conflict, the big problems of human life, the forms of religion are of minor concern, while the spirit of religion is a desperately needed source of inspiration, comfort and strength.
Comfort | Death | Inspiration | Life | Life | Man | Problems | Religion | Spirit | Strength | Woman | World |
John Kenneth Galbraith, aka "Ken"
The culture of organization runs strongly to the shifting of problems to others – to an escape from personal mental effort and responsibility. This, in turns, becomes the larger public attitude. It is for others to do the worrying, take the action. In the world of the great organization, problems are not solved but passed on. And there is a further effect. The delegation process just cited adds ineluctably to the layers of command and to the prestige associated with command. That prestige is regularly measured by the number of individual subordinates.
Action | Culture | Effort | Individual | Organization | Problems | Public | Responsibility | World |
The true virtue of human beings is fitness to live together as equals; claiming nothing for themselves but what they as freely concede to everyone else; regarding command of any kind as an exceptional necessity, and in all cases a temporary one.
It would not be going too far to assert that… conflict confronts every woman who ventures upon a career of her own and hwo is… unwilling to pay for her daring with the renunciation of her femininity.
Lord Chesterfield, Philip Dormer Stanhope, 4th Earl of Chesterfield
An absolute command of your temper, so as not to be provoked to passion, upon any account; patience, to hear frivolous, impertinent, and unreasonable applications; with address enough to refuse, without offending, or, by your manner of granting, to double the obligation; dexterity enough to conceal a truth without telling a lie; sagacity enough to read other people’s countenances; and serenity enough not to let them discover anything by your; a seeming frankness with a real reserve. There are the rudiments of a politician.
Absolute | Enough | Frankness | Obligation | Passion | Patience | People | Reserve | Sagacity | Serenity | Temper | Truth |
The woman was made out of a rib out of the side of Adam; not of his feet to be trampled on by him, but out of his side to be equal with him, under his arms to be protected and, near his heart to be loved.
Paramahansa Yogananda, born Mukunda Lal Ghosh
Mankind must realize that the basic nature of the soul is spiritual. For man and woman to look upon each other only as a means to satisfy lust is to court the destruction of happiness. Slowly, bit by bit, peace of mind will go.
Lust | Man | Mankind | Means | Mind | Nature | Peace | Soul | Will | Woman |
Pythagoras, aka Pythagoras of Samos or Pythagoras the Samian NULL
No one is free who has not obtained the empire of himself. No man is free who cannot command himself.
Man |
Plutarch, named Lucius Mestrius Plutarchus after becoming Roman citizen NULL
Laughing at his own son, who got his mother, and by his mother's means his father also, to indulge him, he told him that he had the most power of any one in Greece: "For the Athenians command the rest of Greece, I command the Athenians, your mother commands me, and you command your mother."
A man has no more character than he can command in a time of crisis.
Robert Kennedy, fully Robert Francis "Bobby" Kennedy
Some believe there is nothing one man or one woman can do against the enormous array of the world's ills -- against misery, against ignorance, or injustice and violence. Yet many of the world's great movements, of thought and action, have flowed from the work of a single man. A young monk began the Protestant reformation, a young general extended an empire from Macedonia to the borders of the earth, and a young woman reclaimed the territory of France. It was a young Italian explorer who discovered the New World, and 32 year old Thomas Jefferson who proclaimed that all men are created equal. ‘Give me a place to stand,’ said Archimedes, ‘and I will move the world.’ These men moved the world, and so can we all.
Action | Earth | Ignorance | Injustice | Injustice | Man | Men | Nothing | Thought | Will | Woman | Work | World | Old | Thought |