This site is dedicated to the memory of Dr. Alan William Smolowe who gave birth to the creation of this database.
This new world hath been the asylum for the persecuted lovers of civil and religious liberty from every part of Europe. Hither have they fled, not from the tender embraces of the mother, but from the cruelty of the monster; and it is so far true of England, that the same tyranny which drove the first emigrants from home, pursues their descendants still.
Rights |
Will Rogers, fully William Penn Adair "Will" Rogers
We would never understand why Mexico wasn’t crazy about us. We have always had their goodwill, oil, coffee and minerals at heart.
Civilization | Rights | Will |
Great political questions stir the deepest nature of one half the nation, but they pass far above and over the heads of the other half.
Walt Whitman, fully Walter "Walt" Whitman
And over all the sky—the sky! Far, far out of reach, studded, breaking out, the eternal stars.
Rights |
Walt Whitman, fully Walter "Walt" Whitman
Of the terrible doubt of appearances, of the uncertainty after all, that we may-be deluded, that may-be reliance and hope are but speculations after all, that may-be identity beyond the grave is a beautiful fable only. May-be the things I perceive, the animals, plants, men, hills, shining and flowing waters, the skies of day and night, colors, densities, forms, may-be these are (as doubtless they are) only apparitions, and the real something has yet to be known.
Giving | Indispensable | Rights |
Walt Whitman, fully Walter "Walt" Whitman
Thought of obedience, faith, adhesiveness; as I stand aloof and look there is to me something profoundly affecting in large masses of men following the lead of those who do not believe in men.
Giving | Indispensable | Rights |
The capacity to act upon the hidden realities of a situation is spite of appearances is the essence of statesmanship. It consists in giving the people not what they want but what they will learn to want. It requires due courage which is possible only in a mind that is detached from the agitations of the moment. It requires the insight which comes only from an objective and discerning knowledge of the facts, and a high and imperturbable disinterestedness.
Change | Government | Man | Nature | People | Rights | Government |
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 |
Unless our ideas are questioned, they become part of the furniture of eternity.
Democracy | Principles | Rights | Suicide | Will |
Walter J. Ong, fully Walter Jackson Ong
Print culture gave birth to the romantic notions of "originality" and "creativity", which set apart an individual work from other works even more, seeing its origins and meaning as independent of outside influence, at least ideally. When in the past few decades doctrines of intertextuality arose to counteract the isolationist aesthetics of a romantic print culture, they came as a kind of shock.
Culture | Plagiarism | Resentment | Rights | Sense |
Wei Wu Wei, pen name for Terence James Stannus Gray
This may account for the extraordinary popularity of such works as the Tao Te Ching, and in a lesser degree for that of the Diamond and Heart Sutras and Padma Sambhava's Knowing the Mind. For despite the accretion of superfluous verbiage in which the essential doctrine of some of the latter has become embedded, their direct pointing at the truth, instead of explaining it, goes straight to the heart of the matter and allows the mind itself to develop its own vision. An elaborately developed thesis must always defeat its own end where this subject matter is concerned, for only indication could produce this understanding, which requires an intuitional faculty, and it could never be acquired wholesale from without.
Defeat | Dependence | Doctrine | Heart | Knowing | Knowledge | Language | Literature | Means | Method | Mind | People | Popularity | Time | Understanding |
We want to be masters of our own destiny. We need no gods or emperors. We do not believe in the existence of any savior. We want to be masters of the world and not instruments used by autocrats to carry out their wild ambitions. We want a modern lifestyle and democracy for the people. Freedom and happiness are our sole objectives in accomplishing modernization.
Rights |
Can we actually suppose that we are wasting, polluting, and making ugly this beautiful land for the sake of patriotism and the love of God? Perhaps some of us would like to think so, but in fact this destruction is taking place because we have allowed ourselves to believe, and to live, a mated pair of economic lies: that nothing has a value that is not assigned to it by the market; and that the economic life of our communities can safely be handed over to the great corporations.
Control | Dependence | Economics | Era | Failure | Freedom | Need | Nothing | People | Politics | Rationality | Society | System | Will | World | Worry | Society | Failure |
No wonder so many sermons are devoted exclusively to spiritual subjects. If one is living by the tithes of history's most destructive economy, then the disembodiment of the soul becomes the chief of worldly conveniences.
Abstract | Art | Dependence | Earth | Family | Giving | Good | Guilt | Individual | Little | Means | Nature | Need | Present | Thought | Usefulness | Work | Art | Guilty | Thought |