This site is dedicated to the memory of Dr. Alan William Smolowe who gave birth to the creation of this database.
Our job is not to have faith. We have faith already, whether we want it or not. It comes in our blood from our ancestors who gave their lives for it. Our job is to transport that higher vision that gave them their faith down into our minds, into our personalities, into our words, into our actions in daily life. To make it part of our selves and our world.
At proper time, appropriate work must be done.
Wilhelm von Humboldt, fully Friedrich Wilhelm Christian Karl Ferdinand von Humboldt
The best and noblest parts of man depend precious little on culture, education, and whatever else it is called. One can never have enough respect for true humanity as it is visible in the persons of the totally uneducated classes, and never enough humility if one sometimes believes one is superior to them.
We must live in groups; other people are like nutrients for us, and are absolutely essential for our survival.
Behavior | Conduct | Culture | Emotions | Order | Persuasion | Power | Preference | Think |
To be fossilized is to be stagnant, unprogressive, dead, frozen into a solid. It is only liquid currents of thought that move men and the world.
An alliance is like a chain. It is not made stronger by adding weak links to it. A great power like the United States gains no advantage and it loses prestige by offering, indeed peddling, its alliances to all and sundry. An alliance should be hard diplomatic currency, valuable and hard to get, and not inflationary paper from the mimeograph machine in the State Department.
One might say that a nation is politically stable when nothing of radical consequence is determined by its elections.
He only has known the full joy of living who somewhere and at some time has struck a decisive blow for the freedom of the human spirit.
In government offices which are sensitive to the vehemence and passion of mass sentiment public men have no sure tenure. They are in effect perpetual office seekers, always on trial for their political lives, always required to court their restless constituents. They are deprived of their independence. Democratic politicians rarely feel they can afford the luxury of telling the whole truth to the people. And since not telling it, though prudent, is uncomfortable, they find it easier if they themselves do not have to hear too often too much of the sour truth. The men under them who report and collect the news come to realize in their turn that it is safer to be wrong before it has become fashionable to be right.
The disesteem into which moralists have fallen is due at bottom to their failure to see that in an age like this one the function of the moralist is not to exhort men to be good but to elucidate what the good is. The problem of sanctions is secondary.
Belief | Conduct | Doubt | Good | Law | Man | Power | Rebellion | Rights |
A man who has humility will have acquired in the last reaches of his beliefs the saving doubt of his own certainty.
Yet this corporate being, though so insubstantial to our senses, binds, in Burkes words, a man to his country with ties which though light as air, are as strong as links of iron. That is why young men die in battle for their country’s sake and why old men plant trees they will never sit under.
Conduct | Order | Public | Sense | Propaganda |
Warren Buffett, fully Warren Edward Buffett, aka Oracle of Omaha
As a group, lemmings have a rotten image, but no individual lemming has ever received bad press.
Warren Buffett, fully Warren Edward Buffett, aka Oracle of Omaha
The line separating investment and speculation, which is never bright and clear, becomes blurred still further when most market participants have recently enjoyed triumphs. Nothing sedates rationality like large doses of effortless money. After a heady experience of that kind, normally sensible people drift into behavior akin to that of Cinderella at the ball. They know that overstaying the festivities — that is, continuing to speculate in companies that have gigantic valuations relative to the cash they are likely to generate in the future — will eventually bring on pumpkins and mice. But they nevertheless hate to miss a single minute of what is one helluva party. Therefore, the giddy participants all plan to leave just seconds before midnight. There’s a problem, though: They are dancing in a room in which the clocks have no hands.
When the Gauls laid waste Rome, they found the senators clothed in their robes, and seated in stern tranquility in their curule chairs; in this manner they suffered death without resistance or supplication. Such conduct was in them applauded as noble and magnanimous; in the hapless Indians it was reviled as both obstinate and sullen. How truly are we the dupes of show and circumstances! How different is virtue, clothed in purple and enthroned in state, from virtue, naked and destitute, and perishing obscurely in a wilderness.
Conduct | God | Hope | Mission | Paradise | Resignation | Unity | Will | God | Child |
Whenever a man's friends begin to compliment him about looking young, he may be sure that they think he is growing old.