This site is dedicated to the memory of Dr. Alan William Smolowe who gave birth to the creation of this database.
While the government is studying and funding and organizing its ‘Big Thought’, nothing is being done. But the citizen who is willing to ‘Think Little’, and, accepting the discipline of that, to go ahead on his own, is already solving the problem. A man who is trying to live as a neighbor to his neighbors will have a lively and practical understanding of the work of peace and brotherhood, and let there be no mistake about it - he is doing that work... A man who is willing to undertake the discipline and the difficulty of mending his own ways is worth more to the conservation movement than a hundred who are insisting merely that the government and the industries mend their ways.
The United States has 250 Billion tons of recoverable coal reserves - enough to last 100 years even at double the current rate of consumption.' We humans have inhabited the earth for many thousands of years, and now we can look forward to surviving for another hundred by doubling our consumption of coal? This is national security? The world-ending fire of industrial fundamentalism may already be burning in our furnaces and engines, but if it will burn for a hundred more years, that will be fine. Surely it would be better to intend straightforwardly to contain the fire and eventually put it out! But once greed has been made an honorable motive, then you have an economy without limits. It has no place for temperance or thrift or the ecological law of return. It will do anything. It is monstrous by definition.
Why should conservationists have a positive interest in... farming? There are lots of reasons, but the plainest is: Conservationists eat.
We had entered an era of limitlessness, or the illusion thereof, and this in itself is a sort of wonder. My grandfather lived a life of limits, both suffered and strictly observed, in a world of limits. I learned much of that world from him and others, and then I changed; I entered the world of labor-saving machines and of limitless cheap fossil fuel. It would take me years of reading, thought, and experience to learn again that in this world limits are not only inescapable but indispensable.
Care | Culture | Future | Good | Justice | Need | Plan | Teach | Will | World |
W. D. Ross, fully Sir William David Ross
There is probably no act, for instance, which does good to anyone without doing harm to someone else, and vice versa.
Consideration | Duty | Gratitude | Justice | Need | People | Promise | Recompense | Self-improvement |
Vladimir Lenin, fully Vladimir Ilyich Lenin
Tsar Nicholas the Bloody, who has dispersed the First and Second Dumas, who has drowned Russia in blood, enslaved Poland and Finland, and is in alliance with out — and-out reactionaries conducting a policy of stifling the Jews and all “aliens”, the tsar whose loyal friends shot down the workers on the Lena and ruined the peasants to the point of starvation all over Russia — that tsar pretends to be the champion of Slav independence and freedom!"
Change | Justice | Need | People | Struggle | System | Will | Crisis |
We must have religion for religion's sake, morality for morality's sake, as with art for art's sake…the beautiful cannot be the way to what is useful, or to what is good, or to what is holy; it leads only to itself.
King of the peak and glacier, King of the cold, white scalps, He lifts his head at that close tread, The eagle of the Alps.
Justice | Lord | Revolution | World |
Ursula Le Guin, fully Ursula Kroeber Le Guin
And though I came to forget or regret all I have ever done, yet would I remember that once I saw the dragons aloft on the wind at sunset above the western isles; and I would be content.
Justice |
Vauvenargues, Luc de Clapiers, Marquis de Vauvenargues NULL
There are those who are so scrupulously afraid of doing wrong that they seldom venture to do anything.
Heart | Justice | Self-interest |
Vauvenargues, Luc de Clapiers, Marquis de Vauvenargues NULL
Women and young people develop their separate estimates of their tastes.
Appearance | Blame | Justice | Law | Order | Rights | Rule | Universe |