This site is dedicated to the memory of Dr. Alan William Smolowe who gave birth to the creation of this database.
The first step is to take weapons off the streets and to put more police on them. The Brady Bill, which my husband signed into law in 1995, imposes a 5-day waiting period for gun purchases; time enough for authorities to check out a buyer's record and for the buyer to cool down about any conflict he might have intended the gun to resolve. Since it was enacted, more than 40,000 people with criminal records have been prevented from buying guns. The 1994 Violent Crime Control and Law Enforcement Act banned 19 types of military-style assault weapons whose only purpose is to kill people… As part of a zero tolerance policy for weapons, drugs, and other threats to the safety of teachers and students, the President signed an executive order decreeing that any student who comes to school with a gun will be expelled and punished as a condition of federal aid.
Control | Crime | Enough | Husband | Kill | Law | Order | People | Policy | Purpose | Purpose | Time | Waiting | Weapons | Will |
Barbara Ehrenreich, born Barbara Alexander
Sexual ecstasy usually arises among dyads, or groups of two, but the ritual ecstasy of primitives emerged within groups generally composed of thirty or more participants. Thanks to psychology and the psychological concerns of Western culture generally, we have a rich language for describing the emotions drawing one person to another--from the most fleeting sexual attraction, to ego-dissolving love, all the way to the destructive force of obsession. What we lack is any way of describing and understanding the love that may exist among dozens of people at a time; and it is this kind of love that is expressed in ecstatic ritual.
Culture | Ecstasy | Emotions | Force | Language | Love | People | Psychology | Understanding |
Deborah Tannen, fully Deborah Frances Tannen
The seeds of the Argument Culture can be found our classrooms, where a teacher will introduce an article or an idea... up debates where people learn not to listen to each other because they're so busy trying to win the debate.
Barbara Ehrenreich, born Barbara Alexander
No culture on earth outside of mid-century suburban America has ever deployed one woman per child without simultaneously assigning her such major productive activities as weaving, farming, gathering, temple maintenance, and tent-building. The reason is that full-time, one-on-one child-raising is not good for women or children.
Barbara Ehrenreich, born Barbara Alexander
There seems to be a vicious cycle at work here, making ours not just an economy but a culture of extreme inequality. Corporate decision makers, and even some two-bit entrepreneurs like my boss at The Maids, occupy an economic position miles above that of the underpaid people whose labor they depend on. For reasons that have more to do with class — and often racial — prejudice than with actual experience, they tend to fear and distrust the category of people from which they recruit their workers. Hence the perceived need for repressive management and intrusive measures like drug and personality testing. But these things cost money — $20,000 or more a year for a manager, $100 a pop for a drug test, and so on — and the high cost of repression results in ever more pressure to hold wages down. The larger society seems to be caught up in a similar cycle: cutting public services for the poor, which are sometimes referred to collectively as the 'social wage,' while investing ever more heavily in prisons and cops. And in the larger society, too, the cost of repression becomes another factor weighing against the expansion or restoration of needed services. It is a tragic cycle, condemning us to ever deeper inequality, and in the long run, almost no one benefits but the agents of repression themselves.
Cost | Culture | Decision | Distrust | Extreme | Fear | Labor | Money | Need | People | Personality | Position | Prejudice | Public | Society | Work | Society |
R. W. Sellars, fully Roy Wood Sellars
Religious humanists regard the universe as self-existing and not created... believes that man is a part of nature and that he has emerged as the result of a continuous process... recognizes that man’s religious culture and civilization, as clearly depicted by anthropology and history, are the product of a gradual development due to his interaction with his natural environment and with his social heritage.
A basic drive had appeared among Western nations, set free by their machines. From this moment onwards, the underlying preconditions of our civilization and culture no longer reigned supreme, because although the events themselves have past, the phenomenon as such remains.
Civilization | Culture | Events |
Raymond Aron, fully Raymond-Claude-Ferdinand Aron
The man who no longer expects miraculous changes either from a revolution or from an economic plan is not obliged to resign himself to the unjustifiable. It is because he likes individual human beings, participates in communities, and respects the truth, that he refuses to surrender his soul to an abstract ideal of humanity, a tyrannical party, and an absurd scholasticism. . . If tolerance is born of doubt, let us teach everyone to doubt all the models and utopias, to challenge all the prophets of redemption and the heralds of catastrophe. If they can abolish fanaticism, let us pray for the advent of the skeptics.
Abstract | Absurd | Challenge | Doubt | Individual | Man | Plan | Redemption | Revolution | Soul | Surrender | Teach |
Listening is the oldest and perhaps the most powerful tool of healing. It is often through the quality of our listening and not the wisdom of our words that we are able to effect the most profound changes in the people around us. When we listen, we offer with our attention an opportunity for wholeness. Our listening creates sanctuary for the homeless parts within the other person. That which has been denied, unloved, devalued by themselves and others. That which is hidden. In this culture the soul and the heart too often go homeless. Listening creates a holy silence. When you listen generously to people, they can hear the truth in themselves, often for the first time. And in the silence of listening, you can know yourself in everyone. Eventually you may be able to hear, in everyone and beyond everyone, the unseen singing softly to itself and to you.
Attention | Culture | Heart | Listening | Opportunity | People | Silence | Soul | Truth | Wisdom | Words |
So, what is the task of the medical system? Our modern view of disease is that disease is centered in the body. The older view of disease is that it is soul loss, a loss of connection, of meaning, of purpose, of essence. If this is so, the real task of the medical system is to heal soul loss, to aid in the retrieval of the soul. The entire culture is ill with soul loss. What is needed is not to bring spirit into our work, to develop more of a spiritual practice or to go to church more. Our task is to recognize that we are always on sacred ground, that there is no split between the sacred and secular. That the living god is dancing on our back. That there is no task that is not sacred in nature and no relationship that is not sacred in nature. Life is a spiritual practice. Health care, which serves life, is a spiritual practice. Disease is a spiritual path, too. Much illness is caused by the loss of the soul. Many, many people live lives that are empty. This emptiness is caused, in some part, by living without meaning, or with meaning that is much too small, too trivial, or too material for the needs of a human being.
Aid | Church | Culture | Disease | God | Health | Life | Life | Meaning | Nature | People | Practice | Relationship | Sacred | Soul | Spirit | System | Loss | God |
The willingness to consider possibility requires a tolerance of uncertainty.
The climate of our culture is changing. Under these new rains, new suns, small things grow great, and what was great grows small; whole species disappear and are replaced.
Culture |
I think that one possible definition of our modern culture is that it is one in which nine-tenths of our intellectuals can't read any poetry.
Ravi Shankar, born Robindro Shaunkor Chowdhury, aka Pandit
In our culture we have such respect for musical instruments, they are like part of God.
I became a little alarmed at the number of my readers who took the meme more positively as a theory of human culture in its own right -- either to criticize it (unfairly, given my original modest intention) or to carry it far beyond the limits of what I then thought justified. This was why I may have seemed to backtrack.
I doubt that religion can survive deep understanding. The shallows are its natural habitat. Cranks and fundamentalists are too often victimized as scapegoats for religion in general. It is only quite recently that Christianity reinvented itself in non-fundamentalist guise, and Islam has yet to do so (see Ibn Warraq's excellent book, Why I am not a Muslim). Moonies and scientologists get a bad press, but they just haven't been around as long as the accepted religions. Theology is a respectable discipline when it studies such subjects as moral philosophy, the psychology of religious belief and, above all, biblical history and literature. Like Bertie Wooster, my knowledge of the Bible is above average. I seem to know Ecclesiastes and the Song of Solomon almost by heart. I think that the Bible as literature should be a compulsory part of the national curriculum - you can't understand English literature and culture without it. But insofar as theology studies the nature of the divine, it will earn the right to be taken seriously when it provides the slightest, smallest smidgen of a reason for believing in the existence of the divine. Meanwhile, we should devote as much time to studying serious theology as we devote to studying serious fairies and serious unicorns.
Belief | Bible | Culture | Discipline | Doubt | Existence | History | Knowledge | Literature | Nature | Psychology | Reason | Religion | Right | Theology | Time | Will | Bible | Think | Understand |
Richard Feynman, fully Richard Phillips Feynman
Religion is a culture of faith; science is a culture of doubt.
Insensibility, in return for acts of seeming, even of real, unkindness, is not required of us. But, whilst we feel for such acts, let our feelings be tempered with forbearance and kindness. Let not the sense of our own sufferings render us peevish and morose. Let not our sense of neglect on the part of others induce us to judge of them with harshness and severity. Let us be indulgent and compassionate towards them. Let us seek for apologies for their conduct. Let us be forward in endeavoring to excuse them. And if, in the end, we must condemn them, let us look for the cause of their delinquency, less in a defect of kind intention than in the weakness and errors of human nature. He who knoweth of what we are made, and hath learned, by what he himself suffered, the weakness and frailty of our nature, hath thus taught us to make compassionate allowances for our brethren, in consideration of its manifold infirmities.
Cause | Consideration | Feelings | Forbearance | Intention | Neglect | Sense | Weakness |