This site is dedicated to the memory of Dr. Alan William Smolowe who gave birth to the creation of this database.
Religion may also be developed as a philosophical system built on axioms. In our time rationalism is used in an absurdly narrow sense …. Rationalism involves not only logical concepts. Churches deviated from religion which had been founded by rational men. The rational principle behind the world is higher then people.
Like any organic entity, a system of consciousness manifests itself through the orderly, differentiated development of a certain unifying reality.
Consciousness | Organic | System |
Kurt Hahn, fully Kurt Martin "the rod" Hahn
I am referring to the published statistics on the rise of juvenile crime. For one age group the crime rate has in one year risen by 56 percent. For this state of affairs people blame the lack of parental control and leniency of the Law—the established educational system of the country is hardly ever held responsible. But some of us educators feel that we ought to say, nostra culpa, nostra maxima culpa, ours is the guilt, ours the greatest guilt.
Age | Blame | Control | Crime | Leniency | People | Statistics | System |
Vladimir Lenin, fully Vladimir Ilyich Lenin
The best way to destroy the capitalist system is to debauch the currency.
This is the element that distinguishes applied science from basic. Surprise is what makes the difference. When you are organized to apply knowledge, set up targets, produce a usable product, you require a high degree of certainty from the outset. All the facts on which you base protocols must be reasonably hard facts with unambiguous meaning. The challenge is to plan the work and organize the workers so that it will come out precisely as predicted. For this, you need centralized authority, elaborately detailed time schedules, and some sort of reward system based on speed and perfection. But most of all you need the intelligible basic facts to begin with, and these must come from basic research. There is no other source. In basic research, everything is just the opposite. What you need at the outset is a high degree of uncertainty; otherwise it isn't likely to be an important problem. You start with an incomplete roster of facts, characterized by their ambiguity; often the problem consists of discovering the connections between unrelated pieces of information. You must plan experiments on the basis of probability, even bare possibility, rather than certainty.
Challenge | Important | Need | Plan | Reward | Science | System | Time | Will | Work |
Josiah Stamp, Josiah Charles Stamp, 1st Baron Stamp, Lord Stamp
The modern banking system manufactures money out of nothing.
Ludwig von Mises, fully Ludwig Heinrich Edler von Mises
A man who chooses between drinking a glass of milk and a glass of a solution of potassium cyanide does not choose between two beverages; he chooses between life and death. A society that chooses between capitalism and socialism does not choose between two social systems; it chooses between social cooperation and the disintegration of society. Socialism is not an alternative to capitalism; it is an alternative to any system under which men can live as human beings.
Capitalism | Cooperation | Life | Life | Man | Men | Society | System | Society |
Ludwig von Mises, fully Ludwig Heinrich Edler von Mises
A society that chooses between capitalism and socialism does not choose between two social systems; it chooses between social cooperation and the disintegration of society. Socialism is not an alternative to capitalism; it is an alternative to any system under which men can live as human beings.
Capitalism | Cooperation | Men | Society | System | Society |
Ludwig von Mises, fully Ludwig Heinrich Edler von Mises
There is no means of avoiding the final collapse of a boom brought about by credit expansion. The alternative is only whether the crisis should come sooner as the result of voluntary abandonment of further credit expansion, or later as a final and total catastrophe of the currency system involved.
The idea that we are “stewards of the earth” is another symptom of human arrogance. Imagine yourself with the task of overseeing your body’s physical processes. Do you understand the way it works well enough to keep all its systems in operation? Can you make your kidneys function? . . . Are you conscious of the blood flow through your arteries? . . . We are unconscious of most of our body’s processes, thank goodness, because we’d screw it up if we weren’t. The human body is so complex, with so many parts... The idea that we are consciously caretaking such a large and mysterious system is ludicrous.
Body | Enough | System | Understand |
Ludwig von Mises, fully Ludwig Heinrich Edler von Mises
Capitalism and socialism are two distinct patterns of social organization. Private control of the means of production and public control are contradictory notions and not merely contrary notions. There is no such thing as a mixed economy, a system that would stand midway between capitalism and socialism.
Capitalism | Control | Means | Public | System |
Ludwig Wittgenstein, fully Ludwig Josef Johann Wittgenstein
The child learns to believe a host of things. I.e. it learns to act according to these beliefs. Bit by bit there forms a system of what is believed, and in that system some things stand unshakeably fast and some are more or less liable to shift. What stands fast does so, not because it is intrinsically obvious or convincing; it is rather held fast by what lies around it.
A country that displays an almost ruthless commitment to efficiency and performance in every aspect of its economy, a country that switched to Japanese cars the moment they were more reliable, and to Chinese T-shirts the moment they were five cents cheaper, has loyally stuck with a health-care system that leaves its citizenry pulling out their teeth with pliers.
Commitment | Efficiency | System |
Malcolm X, born Malcolm Little, Muslim name El-Hajj Malik El-Shabazz
A segregated school system produces children who when they graduate, graduate with crippled minds.
Mao Tse-tung, alternatively Zedong, Ze dong, aka Chairman Mao
The socialist system will eventually replace the capitalist system; this is an objective law independent of man's will. However much the reactionaries try to hold back the wheel of history, eventually revolution will take place and will inevitably triumph.
Law | Revolution | System | Will |
Mao Tse-tung, alternatively Zedong, Ze dong, aka Chairman Mao
In China, although in the main socialist transformation has been completed with respect to the system of ownership, and although the large-scale and turbulent class struggles of the masses characteristic of the previous revolutionary periods have in the main come to an end, there are still remnants of the overthrown landlord and comprador classes, there is still a bourgeoisie, and the remolding of the petty bourgeoisie has only just started. The class struggle is by no means over. The class struggle between the proletariat and the bourgeoisie, the class struggle between the different political forces, and the class struggle in the ideological held between the proletariat and the bourgeoisie will continue to be long and tortuous and at times will even become very acute. The proletariat seeks to transform the world according to its own world outlook, and so does the bourgeoisie. In this respect, the question of which will win out, socialism or capitalism, is still not really settled.
Bourgeoisie | Means | Proletariat | Question | Respect | Struggle | System | Will | World | Respect |
Mark Twain, pen name of Samuel Langhorne Clemens
The jury system puts a ban upon intelligence and honesty and a premium upon ignorance, stupidity and perjury.
Honesty | Intelligence | Stupidity | System |
Martin Seligman, Martin E. P. "Marty" Seligman
Herein lies the likely reason for feelings. Just as negative feelings are a "here-be-dragons" sensory system that alarms you, telling you unmistakably that you are in a win-lose encounter, the feeling part of positive emotion is also sensory. Positive feeling is a neon "here-be-growth" marquee that tells you that a potential win-win encounter is at hand.
The system is not working. That is how a paradigm shift begins: the established way of seeing the world no longer functions.
To care for the quarrels of the past, to identify oneself passionately with a cause that became, politically speaking, a losing cause with the birth of the modern world, is to experience a kind of straining against reality, a rebellious nonconformity that, again, is rare in America, where children are instructed in the virtues of the system they live under, as though history had achieved a happy ending in American civics.
Birth | Care | Cause | Children | Experience | Happy | History | System |