This site is dedicated to the memory of Dr. Alan William Smolowe who gave birth to the creation of this database.
It is easier to know men in general, than men in particular.
In the adversity of our best friends we often find something which does not displease us.
There is no mockery like the mockery of that spirit which looks around in the world and believes that all is emptiness.
Egon Friedell, born Egon Friedmann
The highest, the only reality, is ever at hand, but for the most part invisible. Genius makes it visible... All knowing that goes beyond the immediate experience of the moment is a matter of faith.
Our worth is determined by the good deeds we do, rather than by the fine emotions we feel.
We all know of course that we cannot abolish all the evils in this world by statute or by the enforcement of statutes, nor can we prevent the inexorable law of nature which decrees that suffering shall follow vice, and all the evil passions and folly of mankind. Law cannot give to depravity the rewards of virtue, to indolence the rewards of industry, to indifference the rewards of ambition, or to ignorance the rewards of learning. The utmost that government can do is measurably to protect men, not against the wrong they do themselves but against wrong done by others and to promote the long, slow process of educating mind and character to a better knowledge and nobler standards of life and conduct. We know all this, but when we see how much misery there is in the world and instinctively cry out against it, and when we see some things that government may do to mitigate it, we are apt to forget how little after all it is possible for any government to do, and to hold the particular government of the time and place to a standard of responsibility which no government can possibly meet.
Mankind |
If you ask for the purpose or goal of society as a whole or of an individual taken as a whole the question loses its meaning. This is, of course, even more so if you ask the purpose or meaning of nature in general. For in those cases it seems quite arbitrary if not unreasonable to assume somebody whose desires are connected with the happenings.
Action | Consequences | Desire | Earnestness | Fulfillment | Individual | Life | Life | Mankind | Opinion | Purpose | Purpose | Question | Struggle |
Should the poor be flattered? No; let the candied tongue lick absurd pomp, and crook the pregnant hinges of the knee where thrift may follow fawning.
To make laws that man cannot, and will not obey, serves to bring all law into contempt.
Emily Brontë, fully Emily Jane Brontë, aka pseudonym Ellis Bell
For that mist may break when the sun is high and this soul forget its sorrow and the rose ray of the closing day may promise a brighter ‘morrow.
Corruption | Enough | Experience | Grief | Hope | Mankind | Mind | Mortal | Trust | Truth | Youth | Youth | Think |
The sense of justice and equality, the love of liberty and of human brotherhood — these fundamentals of the real regeneration of society — the Communist State suppressed to the point of extermination. Man's instinctive sense of equity was branded as weak sentimentality; human dignity and liberty became a bourgeois superstition; the sanctity of life, which is the very essence of social reconstruction, was condemned as unrevolutionary, almost counter-revolutionary. This fearful perversion of fundamental values bore within itself the seed of destruction.
Fear | Heaven | Humanity | Man | Mankind | Reward | Spirit | Truth | Will |
The import is not the kind of work woman does, but rather the quality of the work she furnishes. She can give suffrage or the ballot no new quality, nor can she receive anything from it that will enhance her own quality. Her development, her freedom, her independence, must come from and through herself. First, by asserting herself as a personality, and not as a sex commodity. Second, by refusing the right to anyone over her body; by refusing to bear children, unless she wants them; by refusing to be a servant to God, the State, society, the husband, the family, etc., by making her life simpler, but deeper and richer. That is, by trying to learn the meaning and substance of life in all its complexities, by freeing herself from the fear of public opinion and public condemnation. Only that, and not the ballot, will set woman free, will maker her a force hitherto unknown in the world, a force for real love, for peace, for harmony; a force of divine fire, of life-giving; a creator of free men and women.
E. F. Schumacher, fully Ernst Friedrich "Fritz" Schumacher
Before we can talk about giving aid, we must have something to give. We do not have thousands of poverty-stricken villages in our country; so what do we know about effective methods of self-help in such circumstances?
Che Guevara, fully Ernesto “Che” Guevara
The revolution is made through human beings, but individuals must forge their revolutionary spirit day by day.
Consequences | Mankind | Problems |
Ernst Haeckel, full name Ernst Heinrich Phillip August Haeckel
At the same time, it has to recognize in the shades of difference in form the degree of blood-relationship, and make an effort to construct the ancestral tree of the animal world. In this way, comparative anatomy enters into the closest relations with comparative embryology on the one hand, and with the science of classification on the other.