This site is dedicated to the memory of Dr. Alan William Smolowe who gave birth to the creation of this database.
Ludwig von Mises, fully Ludwig Heinrich Edler von Mises
If the small minority of enlightened citizens who are able to conceive sound principles of political management do not succeed in winning the support of their fellow citizens and converting them to the endorsement of policies that bring and preserve prosperity, the cause of mankind and civilization is hopeless. There is no other means to safeguard a propitious development of human affairs than to make the masses of inferior people adopt the ideas of the elite. This has to be achieved by convincing them. It cannot be accomplished by a despotic regime that instead of enlightening the masses beats them into submission. In the long run the ideas of the majority, however detrimental they may be, will carry on. The future of mankind depends on the ability of the elite to influence public opinion in the right direction.
Ability | Cause | Civilization | Future | Ideas | Influence | Mankind | Means | Opinion | People | Principles | Public | Right | Sound | Will | Winning |
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 |
Men and women approaching retirement age should be recycled for public service work, and their companies should foot the bill. We can no longer afford to scrap-pile people.
Age | Public | Retirement | Service |
Margaret Thatcher, fully Margaret Hilda Thatcher, Baroness Thatcher, née Roberts
I should therefore prefer to restrict my guidelines to the following: Don't believe that military interventions, no matter how morally justified, can succeed without clear military goals. Don't fall into the trap of imagining that the West can remake societies. Don't take public opinion for granted -- but don't either underrate the degree to which good people will endure sacrifices for a worthwhile cause. Don't allow tyrants and aggressors to get away with it. And when you fight -- fight to win.
Mao Tse-tung, alternatively Zedong, Ze dong, aka Chairman Mao
The only way to settle questions of an ideological nature or controversial issues among the people is by the democratic method, the method of discussion, of criticism, of persuasion and education, and not by the method of coercion or repression. To be able to carry on their production and studies effectively and to arrange their lives properly, the people want their government and those in charge of production and of cultural and educational organizations to issue appropriate orders of an obligatory nature. It is common sense that the maintenance of public order would be impossible without such administrative regulations. Administrative orders and the method of persuasion and education complement each other in resolving contradictions among the people. Even administrative regulations for the maintenance of public order must be accompanied by persuasion and education, for in many cases regulations alone will not work.
Coercion | Common Sense | Education | Government | Method | Nature | Order | People | Persuasion | Public | Sense | Will | Government |
Marcus Aurelius, Marcus Aurelius Antoninus Augustus
A man should always have these two rules in readiness. First, to do only what the reason of your ruling and legislating faculties suggest for the service of man. Second, to change your opinion whenever anyone at hand sets you right and unsettles you in an opinion, but this change of opinion should come only because you are persuaded that something is just or to the public advantage, not because it appears pleasant or increases your reputation.
Change | Man | Opinion | Public | Reason | Right | Service |
The old notion that children are the private property of parents dies very slowly. In reality, no parent raises a child alone. How many of us nice middle-class folk could make it without our mortgage reduction? That's a government subsidy of families, yet we resent putting money directly into public housing. We take our deduction for dependent care yet resent putting money directly into child care. Common sense and necessity are beginning to erode old notions of the private invasion of family life, because so many families are in trouble.
Beginning | Care | Children | Common Sense | Family | Government | Money | Necessity | Parents | Property | Public | Sense | Government | Child | Old | Parent |
The categorical imperative holds up a “universal natural law,” the law of human society, as a standard of comparison to this [bourgeois] natural law of individuals. This would be meaningless if particular interests and the needs of the general public intersected not just haphazardly but of necessity. That this does not occur, however, is the inadequacy of the bourgeois economic form: there exists no rational connection between the free competition of individuals as what mediates and the existence of the entire society as what is mediated...This irrationality expresses itself in the suffering of the majority of human beings...This problem, which only society itself could rationally solve through the systematic incorporation of each member into a consciously directed labor process, manifests itself in the bourgeois epoch as a conflict in the inner life of its subjects.
Competition | Existence | Labor | Law | Life | Life | Majority | Public | Society | Suffering | Society |
Max Weber, formally Maximilian Carl Emil Weber
The fate of our times is characterized by rationalization and intellectualization and, above all, by the ''disenchantment of the world.'' Precisely the ultimate and most sublime values have retreated from public life either into the transcendental realm of mystic life or into the brotherliness of direct and personal human relations. It is not accidental that our greatest art is intimate and not monumental.
May Sarton, pen name of Eleanore Marie Sarton
The poet must be free to love or hate as the spirit moves him, free to change, free to be a chameleon, free to be an enfant terrible. He must above all never worry about his effect on other people. Power requires that one do just that all the time. Power requires that the inner person never be unmasked. No, we poets have to go naked. And since this is so, it is better that we stay private people; a naked public person would be rather ridiculous, what?
Publication of the "Humanist Manifesto" will, in my opinion, serve no sufficient purpose. I cannot believe with you that it will clarify the public mind, or do constructive work for the cause. A set of fifteen principles, detached from the living experience which precipitated them and lacking the life and warmth of the interests they represent, can do little to inform the mind and nothing to stir the heart. Humanism—if I understand the philosophy of it—cannot be "sold" to people. If the "Manifesto" were a rallying cry issuing with glowing conviction from a group on the march together, or if it gave promise of gripping men and women of humanistic leanings, drawing them into closer, more understanding and more active unity, it would be a desirable signal. Unfortunately, I see no such service in it. And experience has taught me to beware of deceiving myself into thinking something has really been done when all that has been done is that something has been said. It would be easier for me to write, "Sure, go ahead, put me down." If I take the harder course and do not sign the document which I know will carry the names of men I greatly admire and respect, it is because of a deep conviction that the "Manifesto" will prove to be an ineffectual gesture, and a tactical error.
Experience | Life | Life | Little | Men | Mind | Nothing | Philosophy | Promise | Public | Service | Thinking | Understanding | Will | Work | Understand |
Menachem Mendel Schneerson, known as the Lubavitcher Rebbe
In order to truly influence a fellow, we must devote ourselves to him or her without regard to whether s/he will be influenced or not. He is a fellow human being who needs your help. So help him. If she lacks something material, help her. If she is spiritually lost, help her. Many see the point of influencing a fellow Jew to do a good deed, a mitzvah -- to put on tefillin, to perform a single act of charity, to avoid a moral transgression -- if this leads to a greater involvement, and ultimately, a complete transformation. But when confronted with a "lost case" they feel it's a waste of time. Why bother? Why bother? Because you care about him, not only about what he ought to be, what he will be, or what you see in him. He lacks something now, and you are privileged to be of assistance. If you care for him because you expect to influence him, then chances are he won't respond. But if you care for him whether he responds or not, then he will respond.[adapted from Public Speech]
Care | Good | Influence | Order | Public | Regard | Waste | Will |
If one looks into the genealogies of many 'old families,' one discovers episodes of slave trafficking, bootlegging, gun running, opium trading, falsified land claims, violent acquisition of water and mineral rights, the extermination of indigenous peoples, sales of shoddy and unsafe goods, public funds used for private speculations, crooked deals in government bonds and vouchers, and payoffs for political favors. One finds fortunes built on slave labor, indentured labor, prison labor, immigrant labor, female labor, child labor, and scab labor -- backed by the lethal force of gun thugs and militia. 'Old money' is often little more than dirty money laundered by several generations of possession.
Dirty | Force | Government | Labor | Land | Little | Looks | Money | Prison | Public | Government | Child |
The conservative goal has been the "Third Worldization" of the United States: an increasingly underemployed, lower-wage work-force; a small but growing moneyed class that pays almost no taxes; the privatization or elimination of human services; the elimination of public education for low-income people; the easing of restrictions against child labor; the exporting of industries and jobs to low-wage, free-trade countries; the breaking of labor unions; and the elimination of occupational safety and environmental controls and regulations.
Instead of a bottom-line based on money and power, we need a new bottom-line that defines productivity and creativity as where corporations, governments, schools, public institutions, and social practices are judged as efficient, rational and productive not only to the extent they maximize money and power, but to the extent they maximize love and caring, ethical and ecological sensitivity, and our capacities to respond with awe and wonder at the grandeur of creation.
Far from being reluctantly propelled into hostilities by popular war fever, leaders incite that fever in order to gather support for their war policies. Thereby do they attempt to distract the public from pressing domestic matters, serve the overseas interests of U.S. investors, justify gargantuan military budgets, and present themselves as great leaders.