This site is dedicated to the memory of Dr. Alan William Smolowe who gave birth to the creation of this database.
Why did you betray your own heart Cathy? I have not one word of comfort. You deserve this. You have killed yourself. ... You loved me - then what right had you to leave me? Because ... nothing God or satan could inflict would have parted us, you, of you own will, did it. I have not broken your heart - you have broken it; and in breaking it, you have broken mine. So much the worse for me that I am strong. Do I want to live? What kind of living will it be when you - oh God! would you like to live with your soul in the grave? [...] I forgive what you have done to me. I love my murderer - but yours! How can I?
Doubt | Looks | Reputation | Shame |
Two words would comprehend my future -- death and hell: existence, after losing her, would be hell.
Ends |
Jews are the intensive form of any nationality whose language and customs they adopt.
Reason is alone. And in this sense knowledge never encounters anything truly other in the world. This is the profound truth of idealism. It betokens a radical difference between spatial exteriority and the exteriority of instants in relation to one another.
One gloomy day in 2009, the young Belarusian activist Pavel Lyashkovich learned the dangers of excessive social networking the hard way. A freshman at a public university in Minsk, he was unexpectedly called to the dean’s office, where he was met by two suspicious-looking men who told him they worked for the KGB, one public organization that the Belarusian authorities decided not to rename even after the fall of communism (they’re a brand-conscious bunch). The KGB officers asked Pavel all sorts of detailed questions about his trips to Poland and Ukraine as well as his membership in various antigovernment movements. Their extensive knowledge of the internal affairs of the Belarusian opposition – and particularly of Pavel’s own involvement in them, something he didn’t believe to be common knowledge – greatly surprised him. But then it all became clear, when the KGB duo loaded his page on vkontakte.ru, a popular Russian social networking site, pointing out that he was listed as a “friend” by a number of well-known oppositional activists. Shortly thereafter, the visitors offered Lyashkovich to sign an informal “cooperation agreement” with their organization. He declined – which may eventually cost him dearly, as many students sympathetic to the opposition and unwilling to cooperate with authorities have been expelled from universities in the past. We will never know how many other new suspects the KGB added to its list by browsing Lyashkovich’s profile.
Art | Friend | Government | Industry | Need | Revolution | Search | Unique | Government | Art |
Every year, something in you dies when the leaves fall from the trees, and the bare branches of the defenseless, swaying in the wind in the cold winter sunshine. But you know that spring will come, just as you are sure that the frozen river again freed from the ice. But when the cold rain poured incessantly and killed the spring, it seems as if for nothing ruined young lives... At that time I already knew that when something ends in life, whether good or bad, there is a void. But the void left after bad, fills itself. Void after something good can be filled, only to find something better.
I have watched them all day and they are the same men that we are. I believe that I could walk up to the mill and knock on the door and I would be welcome except that they have orders to challenge all travelers and ask to see their papers. It is only orders that come between us. Those men are not fascists. I call them so, but they are not. They are poor men as we are. They should never be fighting against us and I do not like to think of the killing.
The tragedy of life that Searles is referring to is the one we have been discussing: man's finitude, his dread of death and of the overÂwhelmingness of life. The schizophrenic feels these more than anyÂone else because he has not been able to build the confident defenses that a person normally uses to deny them. The schizoÂphrenic's misfortune is that he has been burdened with extra anxieties, extra guilt, extra helplessness, an even more unpredictable and unsupportive environment. He is not surely seated in his body, has no secure base from which to negotiate a defiance of and a denial of the real nature of the world. The parents have made him massively inept as an organism. He has to contrive extra-ingenious and extra-desperate ways of living in the world that will keep him from being torn apart by experience, since he is already almost apart. We see again confirmed the point of view that a person's character is a defense against despair, an attempt to avoid insanity because of the real nature of the world. Searles looks at schizoÂphrenia precisely as the result of the inability to shut out terror, as a desperate style of living with terror. Frankly I don't know anyÂthing more cogent that needs to be said about this syndrome: it is a failure in humanization, which means a failure to confidently deny man's real situation on this planet. Schizophrenia is the limiting test case for the theory of character and reality that we have been exÂpounding here: the failure to build dependable character defenses allows the true nature of reality to appear to man. It is scientifically apodictic. The creativity of people on the schizophrenic end of the human continuum is a creativity that springs from the inability to accept the standardized cultural denials of the real nature of exÂperience. And the price of this kind of almost "extra human" creaÂtivity is to live on the brink of madness, as men have long known. The schizophrenic is supremely creative in an almost extra-human sense because he is furthest from the animal: he lacks the secure instinctive programming of lower organisms; and he lacks the secure cultural programming of average men. No wonder he appears to average men as "crazy": he is not in anything's world.
Creativity | Ends |
No one is really working for peace unless he is working primarily for the restoration of wisdom.
Excellent! This is real life, full of antinomies and bigger than logic. Without order, planning, predictability, central control, accountancy, instructions to the underlings, obedience, discipline—without these, nothing fruitful can happen, because everything disintegrates. And yet—without the magnanimity of disorder, the happy abandon, the entrepreneurship venturing into the unknown and incalculable, without the risk and the gamble, the creative imagination rushing in where bureaucratic angels fear to tread—without this, life is a mockery and a disgrace.
Ends | Guidance | Need | People | Science | Wisdom | Work | Guidance | Value |
There exists a modern trend towards total quantification at the expense of the appreciation of qualitative differences; for private enterprise is not concerned with what it produces but only with what it gains from production.
Argument | Distinguish | Ends | Important | Society | Society |
How happy I am to go to the front at last. To do my bit. To prove with my life what I think I feel.
No man can, at one and the same time, both philosophize and indulge in such ways of life as are incompatible with philosophical thinking.
Ends | Philosophy |