This site is dedicated to the memory of Dr. Alan William Smolowe who gave birth to the creation of this database.
Whenever a system of communication evolves, there is always the danger that some will exploit the system for their own ends. Brought up as we have been on the 'good of the species' view of evolution, we naturally think first of liars and deceivers as belonging to different species: predators, prey, parasites, and so on. However, we must expect lies and deceit, and selfish exploitation of communication to arise whenever the interests of the genes of different individuals diverge. This will include individuals of the same species. As we shall see, we must even expect that children will deceive their parents, that husbands will cheat on wives, and that brother will lie to brother.
Children | Danger | Exploit | System | Will | Danger | Think |
R. H. Tawney, fully Richard Henry Tawney
The exploitation of the weak by the powerful, organized for the purposes of economic gain, buttressed by imposing systems of law, and screened by decorous draperies of virtuous sentiment and resounding rhetoric, has been a permanent feature in the life of most communities that the world has yet seen.
Robert Aitken, fully Robert Baker Aitken
Chance and destiny are not adequate concepts for explaining karma. It's really a dance, isn't it!--a dance of sisters and brothers who come together by mysterious likeness and attraction. Their dances in turn come together with all the dances across the world. For some this can be joyless, even the dance of exploitation and murder, but for the Bodhisattva it is the great cotillion of intimacy.
Destiny |
The corner-stone of national defense is justice in fundamental relations of life -- economic justice.
Samuel Johnson, aka Doctor Johnson
Being in a ship is being in a jail, with the chance of being drowned.
Inequality | Inferiority | Man | Men | Modesty |
And, in this case, science could learn an important lesson from the literati — who love contingency for the same basic reason that scientists tend to regard the theme with suspicion. Because, in contingency lies the power of each person, to make a difference in an unconstrained world bristling with possibilities, and nudgeable by the smallest of unpredictable inputs into markedly different channels spelling either vast improvement or potential disaster.
Absurd | Defense | Disagreement | Excellence | Failure | Mediocrity | Model | Reality | Society | Struggle | Teach | Thought | Understanding | Excellence | Society | Failure | Think | Thought |
A man with a half-volition goes backwards and forwards, and makes no way on the smoothest road; a man with a whole volition advances on the roughest, and will reach his purpose, if there be even a little wisdom in it.
Inequality | Man |
Any society that would give up a little liberty to gain a little security will deserve neither and lose both.
Inequality | Means | Property |
Do not depend on the hope of results. When you are doing the sort of work you have taken on, you may have to face the fact that your work will be apparently worthless and even achieve no worth at all, if not perhaps, results opposite to what you expect. As you get used to this idea, you will start more and more to concentrate not on the results, but on the value, the rightness, the truth of the work itself.
Avarice | God | Man | Materialism | Mediocrity | Selfishness | God |
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 |
William Bolitho, pen name for Charles William Ryall
We will never have Fascism in England; no Englishman will dress up, not even for a revolution.
Life | Life | Mediocrity | Talent |
Will Durant, fully William James "Will" Durant
Does history support a belief in God? If by God we mean not the creative vitality of nature but a supreme being intelligent and benevolent, the answer must be a reluctant negative
Inequality | Men | Possessions | Power |
Will Durant, fully William James "Will" Durant
Every form of government tends to perish by excess of its basic principles.
Ability | Desire | Inequality | Man |
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
Deeply typographic folk forget to think of words as primarily oral, as events, and hence as necessarily powered: for them, words are rather to be assimilated to things, "out there". Such "things" are not actions, but are in a radical sense dead.