This site is dedicated to the memory of Dr. Alan William Smolowe who gave birth to the creation of this database.
Mitch Albom, fully Mitchell David "Mitch" Albom
Well, for one thing, the culture we have does not make people feel good about themselves. We're teaching the wrong things. And you have to be strong enough to say if the culture doesn't work, don't buy it. Create your own. Most people can't do it.
Mitch Albom, fully Mitchell David "Mitch" Albom
Morrie believed in the inherent good of people. But he also saw what they could become. People are only mean when they’re threatened, and that’s what our culture does. When you get threatened, you start looking out for only yourself.
Mikhail Gorbachev, fully Mikhail Sergeyevich Gorbachev
For a new type of progress throughout the world to become a reality, everyone must change. Tolerance is the alpha and omega of a new world order.
There are, no doubt, a few who manage to acquire a high degree of modern culture and even to achieve distinction in some branches of modern knowledge without finding themselves intellectually at variance with Orthodoxy. They belong to those who see no need for welding tradition and experience into a unitary organised mental background. They willingly subscribe to the medieval principle that Torah and philosophy have nothing to do with each other, because it saves them a great deal of mental bother. But such is only a small eddy in the main current of Jewish life.
Culture | Distinction | Experience | Knowledge | Need | Nothing | Philosophy | Tradition | Torah |
Morrie Schwartz, fully Morris "Morrie" S. Schwartz
The culture doesn't encourage you to think about such things until you're about to die. We're so wrapped up with egostical things, career, family, having enough money, meeting the mortgage, getting a new car, fixing the radiator when it breaks. We're involved in trillions of little acts just to keep going . So we don't get into the habit of standing back and looking at our lives and saying, Is this all? Is this all I want? Is something missing?
Mohamed Iqbal or Sir Muhammad Iqbal, aka Allama Iqbal
I advise you to guard against atheism and materialism. The biggest blunder made by Europe was the separation of Church and State. This deprived their culture of moral soul and diverted it to the atheistic materialism.
Mother Teresa, born Agnes Gonxha Bojaxhiu NULL
Sacrifice, surrender, and suffering are not popular topics nowadays. Our culture makes us believe that we can have it all, that we should demand our rights, that with the right technology all pain and problems can be overcome. This is not my attitude toward sacrifice. I know that it is impossible to relieve the world's suffering unless God's people are willing to surrender to God, to make sacrifices, and to suffer along with the poor.
Culture | Pain | People | Problems | Right | Suffering | Surrender | Technology |
Mahatma Gandhi, fully Mohandas Karamchand Gandhi, aka Bapu
No culture can live, if it attempts to be exclusive.
Culture |
What we had to do to find the world was to enter our own world fully, first. We had to enter through the tragedy of our own particular place. If the Nobel awards have a special meaning, it is that they carry this concept further. In their global eclecticism they recognize that no single society, no country or continent can presume to create a truly human culture for the world. To be among laureates, past and present, is at least to belong to some sort of one world.
In the beginning was the Word. The Word was with God, signified God's Word, the word that was Creation. But over the centuries of human culture the word has taken on other meanings, secular as well as religious. To have the word has come to be synonymous with ultimate authority, with prestige, with awesome, sometimes dangerous persuation, to have Prime Time, a TV talk show, to have the gift of the gab as well as that of speaking in tongues. The word flies through space, it is bounced from satellites, now nearer than it has ever been to the heaven from which it was believed to have come.
Nāgārjuna, fully Acharya Nāgārjuna NULL
Just as the grammarian makes one study grammar, A Buddha teaches according to the tolerance of his students; Some he urges to refrain from sins, others to do good, some to rely on dualism, other on non-dualism; and to some he teaches the profound, the terrifying, the practice of enlightenment, whose essence is emptiness that is compassion.
But it is much later in the game now, and ignorance of the score is inexcusable. To be unaware that a technology comes equipped with a program for social change, to maintain that technology is neutral, to make the assumption that technology is always a friend to culture is, at this late hour, stupidity plain and simple.
Culture | Friend | Ignorance | Stupidity | Technology |
We do not measure a culture by its output of undisguised trivialities but by what it claims as significant.
Culture |
The term "mensch" literally means a "person" or "man," but it represents a moral ideal for all people, men and women alike. . . . It means being sensitive to other people's needs and seeking out ways to help them. It is acquired by living close to family and extending one's sense of obligation beyond the family to the broader community. In the Jewish culture of Eastern Europe where the term arose, to call someone a mensch was the highest compliment that could be given.
Parents embraced “Sesame Street” for several reasons, among them that it assuaged their guilt over the fact that they could not or would not restrict their children’s access to television. “Sesame Street” appeared to justify allowing a four- or five-year-old to sit transfixed in front of a television screen for unnatural periods of time. Parents were eager to hope that television could teach their children something other than which breakfast cereal has the most crackle. At the same time, “Sesame Street” relieved them of the responsibility of teaching their pre-school children how to read—no small matter in a culture where children are apt to be considered a nuisance.... We now know that “Sesame Street” encourages children to love school only if school is like “Sesame Street.” Which is to say, we now know that “Sesame Street” undermines what the traditional idea of schooling represents.
Children | Culture | Guilt | Hope | Justify | Love | Parents | Responsibility | Teach | Television |
We must keep in mind the story of the statistician who drowned while trying to wade across a river with an average depth of four feet. That is to say, in a culture that reveres statistics, we can never be sure what sort of nonsense will lodge in people's heads.
Today, we must look to the city of Las Vegas, Nevada as a metaphor of our national character and aspiration, its symbol a thirty-foot high cardboard picture of a slot machine and a chorus girl. For Las Vegas is a city entirely devoted to the idea of entertainment, and as such proclaims the spirit of a culture in which all public discourse increasingly takes the form of entertainment. Our politics, our religion, news, athletics, education and commerce have been transformed into congenial adjuncts of show business, largely without protest or even much popular notice.
Character | Commerce | Culture | Education | Protest | Public | Spirit | Commerce |
Oswald Spengler, fully Oswald Manuel Arnold Gottfried Spengler
A culture is born when a great soul awakens, stands out of the mental state of perpetual childhood primary human form of the formless end, limit output and decay of the infinite and duration. It grows on the ground of a landscape exactly definable, which it remains bound as a plant. A culture dies when the soul has made the entire amount of its ability, in the form of peoples, languages, religious doctrines, arts, sciences, and thus it returns to the primary psychic state.