This site is dedicated to the memory of Dr. Alan William Smolowe who gave birth to the creation of this database.
The system of equality...must result from, rather than precede, the moral improvement of humankind.
Equality | Improvement | System |
A function of free speech under our system of government is to invite dispute. It may indeed best serve its high purpose when it indices a condition of unrest, creates dissatisfaction with things as they are, or even stirs people to anger. Speech is often provocative and challenging. It may strike at prejudices and preconceptions and have profound unsettling effects as it presses for understanding.
Confidence | Free speech | Government | People | Purpose | Purpose | Society | Speech | System | Government |
The peril of every fine faculty is the delight of playing with it for pride. Talent is commonly developed at the expense of character, and the greater it grows, the more is the mischief. Talent is mistaken for genius, a dogma or system for truth, ambition for greatest, ingenuity for poetry, sensuality for art.
Ambition | Art | Character | Dogma | Genius | Ingenuity | Peril | Poetry | Pride | Sensuality | System | Truth | Talent | Ambition | Ingenuity |
For the Universe has three children, born at one time, which reappear under different names in every system of thought, whether they are called cause, operation and effect; or more poetically, Jove, Pluto, Neptune; or theologically, the Father, the Spirit and the Son; but we will call the Knower, the Doer and the Sayer. These stand respectively for the love of truth, for the love of good, and the love of beauty. These three are equal. The poets are thus liberating gods. They are free and they make free.
Beauty | Cause | Children | Father | Good | Love | Spirit | System | Thought | Time | Truth | Universe | Will |
Socialism is that contemplated system of industrial society which proposes the abolition of private property in the great material instruments of production, and the substitution therefore of collective property; and advocates the collective management of production, together with the distribution of social income by society, and private property in the larger proportion of this social income.
The seniority system keeps a handful of old men... in control of the Congress. These old men stand inplacably across the paths that could lead us toward a better future. But worse than they, I think, are the majority of members of both Houses who continue to submit to the senility system.
The soul is more interested in particulars than in generalities. That is true of personal identity as well. Identifying with a group or a syndrome or a diagnosis is giving in to an abstraction. Soul provides a strong sense of individuality - personal destiny, special influences and background, and unique stories. In the face of overwhelming need for both emergency and chronic care, the mental health system labels people schizophrenics, alcoholics, and survivors so that it can bring some order to the chaos of life at home and on the street, but each person has a special story to tell, no matter how many common themes it contains.
Care | Destiny | Giving | Health | Individuality | Life | Life | Need | Order | People | Sense | Soul | Story | System | Unique |
An intellectual… [is] a person who has learned to establish relationships between the different elements of his sum of knowledge, one who possesses a coherent system of relationships into which he can fit all such new items of information as he may pick up in the course of his life.
C. Wright Mills, fully Charles Wright Mills
Prestige involves at least two persons: one to claim it and another to honor the claim… In the status system of a society these claims are organized as rules and expectations which regulate who successfully claims prestige, from whom, in what ways, and on what basis. The level of self-esteem enjoyed by given individuals is more or less set by this status system.
Esteem | Honor | Self | Self-esteem | Society | System | Society |
Doris Lessing, fully Doris May Lessing, born Doris May Tayler
Ideally, what should be said to every child, repeatedly, throughout his or her school life is something like this: "You are in the process of being indoctrinated. We have not yet evolved a system of education that is not a system of indoctrination. We are sorry, but it is the best we can do."
Akon says to Elizabeth: “The cradle of mankind, Venus, remained shrouded and bereft of life after the Pleistocene cycle of solar expansion, her fruitful aeons of fertility at an end, her vast warm seas that nurtured our beginning, dried out and barren. But her glory still remains as a reality in the electric mirage, perfected by her progeny, who were compelled to move from her protective surface, out into the far reaches of space to propagate their species on the surface of an alien planet called Earth, where we adapted to a different time-speed on a younger planet. Laying claim to Earth as a host to life, we continued to perfect our spaceships in rediness for the time when we would have to leave this solar system prior to another wave of mass extinctions from the star of this system.”
Earth | Glory | Life | Life | Reality | Space | System | Time |
Akon says to Elizabeth: “The Moon is alien to this system and came with Jupiter and its retinue of planets. Jupiter is a forming star, a star condensing, and thereby, retaining a high velocity of rotation, a large mass and low density and the usual heat in the core retained by the star. A solar system within a solar system. Seven of Jupiter’s planets have retained atmospheres and life as we know it.”