This site is dedicated to the memory of Dr. Alan William Smolowe who gave birth to the creation of this database.
One of the difficulties with our busy modern culture is that we don’t take time to listen to our hearts. Our immediate problems, our plans and thoughts, fill our minds and, lost in thinking, we lose our connection to our hearts and our true nature.
I will... venture to assume that as the human race is continually advancing in civilization and culture as its natural purpose, so it is continually making progress for the better in relation to the moral end of its existence, and that this progress although it maybe sometimes interrupted, will never be entirely broken off or stopped.
Better | Civilization | Culture | Existence | Human race | Progress | Purpose | Purpose | Race | Will |
Jean Baptiste Lacordaire, fully Jean Baptiste Henri Lacordaire
To the mother alone it has been given, that her soul during the nine months should touch the soul of the child, and impose upon it predispositions to truth, gentleness, goodness, the culture of which precious germs she should complete in the light of day, after having sown them in the mysterious mysteries of her maternity.
Culture | Day | Gentleness | Light | Mother | Soul | Truth |
John Kenneth Galbraith, aka "Ken"
The culture of organization runs strongly to the shifting of problems to others – to an escape from personal mental effort and responsibility. This, in turns, becomes the larger public attitude. It is for others to do the worrying, take the action. In the world of the great organization, problems are not solved but passed on. And there is a further effect. The delegation process just cited adds ineluctably to the layers of command and to the prestige associated with command. That prestige is regularly measured by the number of individual subordinates.
Action | Culture | Effort | Individual | Organization | Problems | Public | Responsibility | World |
Being morally good, for the majority of Americans, means following the norms and values of their society or culture - whether this be their peer culture, their church, their country, or a combination of these. The theory that morality is relative to societal norms is known in moral philosophy as cultural relativism. Many others claim that morality is relative to the individual and is different for every person depending on what they feel. This theory is known in philosophy as ethical subjectivism.
Church | Culture | Good | Individual | Majority | Means | Morality | Philosophy | Society | Society | Following |
Compassion leaves an indelible blueprint of the recognition that life so sorely needs between one individual and another; one nation and another; one culture and another. It is also valid for the road which our spirit should be building now for crossing the historical abyss that still separates us from a truly contemporary vision of life, and the increase of life and meaning that awaits us in the future.
Compassion | Culture | Future | Individual | Life | Life | Meaning | Spirit | Vision |
Anti-Semitism in any form is a barbaric insult to our culture and our civilization, which have been moulded by Christianity, and as a breakdown of Christian values, which have become confused and lacking in humanity.
Anti-semitism | Civilization | Culture | Humanity | Insult | Insult |
Joseph Chilton Pearce, aka Joe
Our children’s growth: joyful learning or cultural conditioning? A child’s socialization, which can be characterized as learning in its most complete form, encouraging reflective thought, is instinctual and arises spontaneously on its own. Culture is something quite the opposite: an intellectual, arbitrary conditioning and enhancement of automatic reflexes that must be both induced and enforced.
The capacity for friendship usually goes with highly developed civilizations. The ability to cultivate people differs by culture and class; but on the whole, educated people have more ways to make friends.
Ability | Capacity | Culture | People | Friendship |
We do not make use of our freedom. We have given away the fundamental freedom to visualize and shape our world. We allow actors, advertisers and politicians to dream for us. And a culture that does not dream is not free.
Max Lerner, fully Maxwell "Max" Alan Lerner, aka Mikhail Lerner
In our culture we make heroes of the men who sit on top of a heap of money, and we pay attention not only to what they say in their field of competence, but to their wisdom on every other question in the world.
Attention | Competence | Culture | Men | Money | Question | Wisdom | World |
Max Lerner, fully Maxwell "Max" Alan Lerner, aka Mikhail Lerner
We cannot live by power, and a culture that seeks to live by it becomes brutal and sterile. But we can die without it.
Michael Harrington, fully Edward Michael "Mike" Harrington
There are tens of millions of Americans who are beyond the welfare state. Taken as a whole there is a culture of poverty... bad health, poor housing, low levels of aspiration and high levels of mental distress. Twenty per cent of a nation, some 32,000,000.
Aspiration | Culture | Distress | Health | Poverty | Aspiration |
Noam Chomsky, fully Avram Noam Chomsky
Every aspect of the culture implicitly involves an expression of what a "proper" life and a "proper" set of values are, and that's all indoctrination.