This site is dedicated to the memory of Dr. Alan William Smolowe who gave birth to the creation of this database.
Richard Wright, fully Richard Nathaniel Wright
Negroes, as they enter our culture, are going to inherit the problems we have, but with a difference. They are outsiders and they are going to know that they have these problems. They are going to be self-conscious; they are going to be gifted with a double vision, for, being Negroes, they are going to be both inside and outside of our culture at the same time. Every emotional and cultural convulsion that ever shook the heart and soul of Western man will shake them. Negroes will develop unique and specially defined psychological types. They will become psychological men, like the Jews . . . They will not only be Americans or Negroes; they will be centers of knowing, so to speak . . . The political, social, and psychological consequences of this will be enormous.
Consequences | Culture | Heart | Man | Problems | Soul | Unique | Will |
If people need a book to tell them that in marriage kindness and forbearance are necessary, and that the sexual act is happier when it is undertaken to give pleasure as well as to receive it, these books are what they want. Possibly people so lacking in understanding of themselves and others do not mind being addressed in the coarse, grainy prose of the marriage counselor.
Books | Forbearance | Kindness | Marriage | Mind | Need | People | Pleasure | Receive | Understanding |
We are living at an important and fruitful moment now, for it is clear to men that the images of adult manhood given by the popular culture are worn out; a man can no longer depend on them. By the time a man is thirty-five he knows that the images of the right man, the tough man, the true man which he received in high school do not work in life.
During the fifties, for example, the American character appeared with some consistency that became a model of manhood adopted by many men: the Fifties male. He got to work early, labored responsibly, supported his wife and children and admired discipline. Reagan is a sort of mummified version of this dogged type. This sort of man didn't see women's souls well, but he appreciated their bodies; and his view of culture and America's part in it was boyish and optimistic. Many of his qualities were strong and positive, but underneath the charm and bluff there was, and there remains, much isolation, deprivation, and passivity. Unless he has an enemy, he isn't sure that he is alive. The Fifties man was supposed to like football, be aggressive, stick up for the United States, never cry, and always provide.... During the sixties, another sort of man appeared. The waste and violence of the Vietnam war made men question whether they knew what an adult male really was. If manhood meant Vietnam, did they want any part of it? Meanwhile, the feminist movement encouraged men to actually look at women, forcing them to become conscious of concerns and sufferings that the Fifties male labored to avoid.
Character | Children | Consistency | Culture | Man | Men | Model | Qualities | Question | War | Waste | Wife | Work |
Robert Bellah, fully Robert Neelly Bellah
I don't want to imply that it's uniquely American that people growing up have to come to terms with their independence and their separation to some extent from parents and from teachers. That's normal in any culture. It's that our culture pushes, emphasizes, and intensifies it beyond, I think, virtually any culture I know about.
Margaret Fuller, fully Sara Margaret Fuller, Marchese Ossoli
Mercury has cast aside The signs of intellectual pride, Freely offers thee the soul: Art thou noble to receive? Canst thou give or take the whole, Nobly promise and believe? Then thou wholly human art, A spotless, radiant, ruby heart, And the golden chain of love Has bound thee to the realm above. Guard thee from the power of evil; Who cannot trust, vows to the devil.
Beauty | Culture | Friend | Life | Life | Light | Prison | Simplicity | Spirit | Wealth | Beauty |
Ronald Reagan, fully Ronald Wilson Reagan
Our government needs the church, because only those humble enough to admit they're sinners can bring democracy the tolerance it requires to survive
Action | Failure | Forbearance | Will | Failure |
Ronald Reagan, fully Ronald Wilson Reagan
Our natural, unalienable rights are now considered to be a dispensation of government, and freedom has never been so fragile, so close to slipping from our grasp as it is at this moment.... You and I have a rendezvous with destiny. We will preserve for out children this, the last best hope of man on earth, or we'll sentence them to take the last step into a thousand years of darkness.
Democracy | Enough | Government | Government |
Rudolf Steiner, fully Rudolf Joseph Lorenz Steiner
Love extends beyond the bounds of family to all human beings and is changed into vivifying, creative, transmuting power.
Rufus Jones, fully Rufus Matthew Jones
The reason why we can hope to find God is that He is here, engaged all the time in finding us. Every pulse of love is a tendril that draws us in His direction. Every verification of truth links the finite mind up into a Foundational Mind that undergirds us. Every deed of good will points toward a consummate Goodness which fulfills all our tiny adventures in faith. We can find Him because in Him we live and move and have our being.
Age | Business | Culture | Eternal | Harmony | Life | Life | Power | Thought | Business | Thought | Truths |
Rupert Sheldrake, fully Alfred Rupert Sheldrake
Because a truly skeptical position would be a very uncertain one.
Culture |
Ruth Benedict, born Ruth Fulton
The adequate study of culture, our own and those on the opposite side of the globe, can press on to fulfillment only as we learn today from the humanities as well as from the scientists.
Civilization | Culture | Individual | Sense |
Salman Rushdie, fully Sir Ahmed Salman Rushdie
I think it's a stupid way to read a book... to say that because something happens to one person the author is trying to suggest that all people are like this. The novel is the art of the particular. And I'm talking about a particular person whose development from innocence to guilt, if you like, is his own particular narrative arc. The point is to make that coherent - not to read the book as some kind of simple allegory, but to read it as a story about a person.
I can understand that the man you told me about has offended you, and I am very annoyed that he forgot himself like that. However, you must not consider what he did as coming from him but rather as a trial which God wishes to make of your patience. This virtue will be even more a virtue in you who are more sensitive by nature and have given less cause for the offense that you have received.
Forbearance | Grace | Kindness | Little | Reconciliation |
Anyone who emerges in the midst of mankind as a herald who knows how to employ the gift of poetry to inspire the human mind with enthusiasm for all that is pure and true and godly, anyone who knows how to make man proud to be human and to enable him to recognize his God in every breath of his existence, anyone who can snatch man from the dust to have him stand upright in all his dignity and nobility, is, in the view of Judaism, a messenger of God on earth.
Culture | Danger | Education | Joy | Knowledge | Pleasure | Usefulness | Will | Danger |
The prophet of the new message came into their midst with the cry of "religion allied to progress"; he filled the blank, pacified their conscience and wiped out their shame. With this magic word he turned irreligion into Godliness, apostasy into priesthood, sin into merit, frivolity into virtue, weakness into strength, thoughtlessness into profundity.
Art | Culture | Justice | Man | Peace | Truth | Will | Art |
In a way, human beings have never been part of the natural order; we're not biological in the normal sense. Normal biological animals stop eating when they're not hungry and stop breeding when there is no sense in breeding. By contrast, human beings are what I think of as "biomythic" animals: we're controlled largely by the stories we tell. When we get the story wrong, we get out of harmony with the rest of the natural order. For a long time, our unnatural beahvior didn't threaten the natural world, but now it does.
Culture | Individual |
The more the Jew is a Jew, the more universalist will his views and aspirations be, the less aloof will he be from anything that is noble and good, true and upright, in art or science, in culture or education; the more joyfully will he applaud whenever he sees truth and justice and peace and the ennoblement of man prevail and become dominant in human society.
Civilization | Culture | Progress | Will | Circumstance |