This site is dedicated to the memory of Dr. Alan William Smolowe who gave birth to the creation of this database.
Good teachers don't approach a child of this age with overzealousness or with destructive conscientiousness. They're not drill-masters in the military or floor managers in a production system. They are specialists in opening small packages. They give the string a tug but do it carefully. They don't yet know what's in the box. They don't know if it's breakable.
I must study politics and war, that my sons may have liberty to study mathematics and philosophy, geography, natural history and naval architecture, navigation, commerce, and agriculture, in order to give their children a right to study painting, poetry, music, architecture, statuary, tapestry, and porcelain.
Children | History | Liberty | Mathematics | Order | Politics | Right | Study |
Education is not just learning dates and events from history but learning to apply the lessons of lives well lived and lives poorly lived -- and how to tell the difference.
A study of the history of opinion is a necessary preliminary to the emancipation of the mind.
Ernest Renan, aka Joseph Ernest Renan
No theologian could ever be a historian. History is essentially disinterested. The historian has only one concern: art and truth, which are inseparable... whereas the theologian has something else at stake - his dogma.
The real history of consciousness starts with one's first lie.
Consciousness | History |
Innovation is the outstanding fact in the economic history of capitalist society or in what is purely economic in that history, and also it is largely responsible for most of what we would at first sight attribute to other factors.
All cultures … have grown out of myths. They are founded on myths. What these myths have given has been inspiration for aspiration. The economic interpretation of history is for the birds. Economics is itself a function of aspiration. It’s what people aspire to that creates the field in which economics works.
Economics | History | Inspiration | People |
Great conquerors, we read, have been both animated, and also, in a great measure, formed by reading the exploits of former conquerors. Why may not the same effect be expected from the history of philosophy to philosophers? May not even more be expected in this case? The wars of many of those conquerors, who received this advantage from history, had no proper connection with former wars: they were only analogous to them. Whereas the whole business of philosophy, diversified as it is, is but one; it being one and the same great scheme, that all philosophers, of all ages and nations, have been conducting, from the beginning of the world; so that the work being the same, the. labours of one are not only analogous to those of of another, but in an immediate manner subservient to them; and one philosopher succeeds another in the same field; as one Roman proconsul succeeded another in carrying on the same war, and pursuing the same conquests, in the same country. In this case, an intimate knowledge of what has been done before us cannot but greatly facilitate our future progress, if it be not absolutely necessary to it.
Beginning | Business | Future | History | Knowledge | Philosophy | Reading | Work | Business |
Death is not regarded as a natural affair by primitive man. Death is believed to be due to the intervention of some malevolent or at least not well disposed power. Normally it should not take place. So we have all through history crude explanations of death, as e.g., the influence of the serpent, the devil, sin.
Joseph Goebbels, fully Paul Joseph Goebbels
If you tell a lie big enough and keep repeating it, people will eventually come to believe it. The lie can be maintained only for such time as the State can shield the people from the political, economic and/or military consequences of the lie. It thus becomes vitally important for the State to use all of its powers to repress dissent, for the truth is the mortal enemy of the lie, and thus by extension, the truth is the greatest enemy of the State.
Consequences | Enemy | Enough | Important | Mortal | People | Time | Truth | Will |
Carl von Clausewitz, fully Carl Philipp Gottfried von Clausewitz, also Karl von Clausewitz
Never forget that no military leader has ever become great without audacity.
Leader |
Men make their own history but not in circumstances of their own choosing.
Circumstances | History |
Karl Popper, fully Sir Karl Raimund Popper
Before we as individuals are even conscious of our existence we have been profoundly influenced for a considerable time (since before birth) by our relationship to other individuals who have complicated histories, and are members of a society which has an infinitely more complicated and longer history than they do (and are members of it at a particular time and place in that history); and by the time we are able to make conscious choices we are already making use of categories in a language which has reached a particular degree of development through the lives of countless generations of human beings before us
Existence | History | Language | Relationship | Society | Time | Society |
Henri Poincaré, fully Jules Henri Poincaré
The task of the educator is to make the child's spirit pass again where its forefathers have gone, moving rapidly through certain stages but suppressing none of them. In this regard, the history of science must be our guide.
Karl Popper, fully Sir Karl Raimund Popper
There is no history of mankind, there are only many histories of all kinds of aspects of human life. And one of these is the history of political power. This is elevated into the history of the world. But… the history of power politics is nothing but the history of international crime and mass murder… This history is taught in schools, and some of the greatest criminals are extolled as its heroes.
"What is the meaning of life?" This question has no answer except in the history of how it came to be asked. There is no answer because words have meaning, not life or persons or the universe itself. Our search for certainty rests in our attempts at understanding the history of all individual selves and all civilizations. Beyond that, there is only awe.
History | Individual | Life | Life | Meaning | Question | Search | Understanding | Universe | Words |