This site is dedicated to the memory of Dr. Alan William Smolowe who gave birth to the creation of this database.
It is sometimes said that “all teachers care.” It is because they care that people go into teaching. However, this is not universally true; we all have known teachers who are cruel and uncaring, and these people should not be in teaching at all. But even for the majority who do “care” in the virtue sense—that is, they profess to care and work hard at their teaching—there are many who do not adopt the relational sense of caring. They “care” in the sense that they conscientiously pursue certain goals for their students, and they often work hard at coercing students to achieve those goals. These teachers must be credited with caring in the virtue sense of the word. However, these same teachers may be unable to establish relations of care and trust.
Care | Goals | Majority | People | Sense | Virtue | Virtue | Work |
Niccolò Machiavelli, formally Niccolò di Bernardo dei Machiavelli
So long as the great majority of men are not deprived of either property or honor, they are satisfied.
Ouida, pseudonym of Maria Louise Ramé, preferred to be called Marie Louise de la Ramée NULL
There are many moments in friendship, as in love, when silence is beyond words. The faults of our friend may be clear to us, but it is well to seem to shut our eyes to them. Friendship is usually treated by the majority of mankind as a tough and everlasting thing which will survive all manner of bad treatment. But this is an exceedingly great and foolish error; it may die in an hour of a single unwise word; its conditions of existence are that it should be dealt with delicately and tenderly, being as it is a sensitive plant and not a roadside thistle. We must not expect our friend to be above humanity.
Existence | Friend | Majority | Mankind | Silence | Will | Friendship |
Pat Buchanan, fully Patrick Joseph "Pat" Buchanan
Americans who seek stricter immigration control have been charged with many social sins: racism, xenophobia, nativism. Yet none has sought to expel any fellow American based on color or creed. We have only sought to preserve the country we grew up in. Do not people everywhere do that, without being reviled? What motivates people who insist that America’s doors be held open wide until the European majority has disappeared? What is their grudge against the old America that eats at their heart?
These timeless ways of being human are threatened by global forces that do not consider people’s deepest longings... For most people, to understand something new requires a cognitive antecedent... What we already know frames what we see, and what we see frames what we understand... ideas question and liberate, while ideologies justify and dictate. Ecologists and biologists know that systems achieve stability and health through diversity, not uniformity. Ideologues take the opposite view. Neoconservatives believe that ordinary citizens cannot be entrusted with the reins of power, that a small group of superior individuals should rule over the majority of inferiors, using religion and the perpetual threat of war to create a Potemkin village of populism.
Global | Health | Ideas | Justify | Majority | Question | Religion | Rule | War | Understand |
Everyone knows how to love, because we are all born with that gift. Some people have a natural talent for it but the majority of us have to re-learn, to remember how to love, and everyone, without exception, needs to burn on the bonfire of past emotions, to relieve certain joys and griefs, certain ups and downs, until they can see the connecting thread that exists behind each new encounter; because there is a connecting thread.
Peter F. Drucker, fully Peter Ferdinand Drucker
This society in which knowledge workers dominate is in danger of a new 'class conflict'; the conflict between the large minority of knowledge workers and the majority of people who will make their living through traditional ways, either by manual work, whether skilled or unskilled, or by services work, whether skilled or unskilled.
Danger | Knowledge | Majority | People | Society | Will | Society | Danger |
Peter F. Drucker, fully Peter Ferdinand Drucker
Throughout history, the great majority of people never had to ask the question, what should I contribute? They were told what to contribute, and their tasks were dictated either by the work itself by a master or a mistress. Knowledge workers have to learn to ask that question based on an understanding and melding of their strengths and passions. And the question must be revisited periodically: If I were not in this career today, would I have gotten into it? If not, what am I going to do about it?
Knowledge | Majority | People | Question | Understanding | Work | Learn |
Peter F. Drucker, fully Peter Ferdinand Drucker
This society in which knowledge workers dominate is in danger of a new "class conflict" between the large minority of knowledge workers and the majority of workers who will make their livings through traditional ways, either by manual work...or by service work. The productivity of knowledge work--still abysmally low--will predictably become the economic challenge of the knowledge society. On it will depend the ability of the knowledge society to give decent incomes, and with them dignity and status, to non knowledge people.
Ability | Challenge | Danger | Dignity | Knowledge | Majority | Service | Society | Will | Society | Danger |
Simply put, philosophical counselling consists of a trained philosopher helping an individual deal with a problem or an issue that is of concern to that individual. Philosophical counselors know that the majority of people are quite capable of resolving most of their problems on a day-to-day basis either by themselves or with the help of significant others. It is when problems become too complex -- as, for example, when values seem to conflict, when facts appear contradictory, when reasoning about a problem becomes trapped within a circle, or when life seems unexpectedly meaningless -- that a trained philosopher can be of greater help than the average friend or family member.
Family | Friend | Individual | Life | Life | Majority | People | Problems |
Peter Kropotkin, fully Prince Pyotr Alexeyevich Kropotkin
In the animal world we have seen that the vast majority of species live in societies, and that they find in association the best arms for the struggle for life: understood, of course, in its wide Darwinian sense — not as a struggle for the sheer means of existence, but as a struggle against all natural conditions unfavorable to the species. The animal species, in which individual struggle has been reduced to its narrowest limits, and the practice of mutual aid has attained the greatest development, are invariably the most numerous, the most prosperous, and the most open to further progress. The mutual protection which is obtained in this case, the possibility of attaining old age and of accumulating experience, the higher intellectual development, and the further growth of sociable habits, secure the maintenance of the species, its extension, and its further progressive evolution. The unsociable species, on the contrary, are doomed to decay.
Age | Aid | Association | Growth | Individual | Majority | Means | Old age | Practice | Sense | Struggle | World | Association | Old |
Pierre-Simon Laplace, Compte de Laplace, Marquis de Laplace
The present state of the system of nature is evidently a consequence of what it was in the preceding moment, and if we conceive of an intelligence that at a given instant comprehends all the relations of the entities of this universe, it could state the respective position, motions, and general effects of all these entities at any time in the past or future. Physical astronomy, the branch of knowledge that does the greatest honor to the human mind, gives us an idea, albeit imperfect, of what such an intelligence would be. The simplicity of the law by which the celestial bodies move, and the relations of their masses and distances, permit analysis to follow their motions up to a certain point; and in order to determine the state of the system of these great bodies in past or future centuries, it suffices for the mathematician that their position and their velocity be given by observation for any moment in time. Man owes that advantage to the power of the instrument he employs, and to the small number of relations that it embraces in its calculations. But ignorance of the different causes involved in the production of events, as well as their complexity, taken together with the imperfection of analysis, prevents our reaching the same certainty about the vast majority of phenomena. Thus there are things that are uncertain for us, things more or less probable, and we seek to compensate for the impossibility of knowing them by determining their different degrees of likelihood. So it was that we owe to the weakness of the human mind one of the most delicate and ingenious of mathematical theories, the science of chance or probability.
Chance | Future | Honor | Ignorance | Imperfection | Impossibility | Intelligence | Knowing | Knowledge | Law | Majority | Man | Mind | Nature | Observation | Order | Past | Position | Power | Present | Science | Simplicity | System | Time | Weakness |
Pitirim A. Sorokin, fully Pitirim Alexandrovich (Alexander) Sorokin
Millions of singular sociocultural phenomena that make the superorganic world of reality appear to us in the form of the integrated systems and unintegrated congeries. If two or more singular superorganic phenomena are related to one another only by chance (by mere spatial or time adjacency) they are congeries having no real unity and interdependence between them. If two or more singular sociocultural facts are tied together meaningfully and causally in such a way that they articulate consistently the same set of meanings (values, norms) and empirically-in their vehicles and human members-show tangible (causal) interdependence of its important parts, such combination of any number of singular sociocultural phenomena makes an integrated cultural system or organized social system (Ganzbuten). Though overlooked by the majority of sociologists, the distinction between the systems and congeries is basic and important in many respects and especially for the purposes of adequate study of the sociocultural phenomena.
Chance | Distinction | Important | Majority | Phenomena | Reality | Study | System | Time | Unity | World |
Pope John Paul II, born Karol Józef Wojtyła, aka Saint John Paul the Great NULL
The truth is not always the same as the majority decision.
Barbara Ehrenreich, born Barbara Alexander
We (the left) have to be used to being a minority – a small minority- for some time to come. The odd thing is that the right even when it is in power, likes to think of itself as an embattled minority against this elite that somehow runs everything. Whereas the left, even when it has no power at all, likes to imagine it somehow represents the majority of people. These are mirror -image delusions. It is important to stick to principles, even when some of them may be unpopular now for one reason or another. For example, there has been a tendency for some progressives to look at the power of the right, and say, ‘Well, all we can focus on is economic justice issues, because other things, whether they are abortion rights or drug law reform, will be less popular and more divisive.’ And I think that is wrong approach. There are certain core things we stand for, and these include both economic justice and civil liberties, which you can’t back away from.
Focus | Important | Justice | Law | Majority | Power | Reason | Right | Rights | Time | Will | Wrong | Think |
A little reflection soon shows how inconceivable it is really to love others (not merely to need them), if one cannot love oneself as one really is. And how could a person do that if, from the very beginning, he has had no chance to experience his true feelings and to learn to know himself? For the majority of sensitive people, the true self remains deeply and thoroughly hidden. But how can you love something you do not know, something that has never been loved? So it is that many a gifted person lives without any notion of his or her true self. Such people are enamored of an idealized, conforming, false self. They will shun their hidden and lost true self, unless depression makes them aware of its loss or psychosis confronts them harshly with that true self, whom they now have to face and to whom they are delivered up, helplessly, as to a threatening stranger. In the following pages I am trying to come closer to the origins of this loss of the self. While doing so, I shall not use the term narcissism. However, in my clinical descriptions, I shall speak occasionally of a healthy narcissism and depict the ideal case of a person who is genuinely alive, with free access to the true self and his authentic feelings. I shall contrast this with narcissistic disorders, with the true self's solitary confinement within the prison of the false self. This I see less as an illness than as tragedy, and it is my aim in this book to break away from judgmental, isolating, and therefore discriminating terminology.
Chance | Contrast | Depression | Experience | Feelings | Little | Love | Majority | Need | People | Prison | Reflection | Self | Will | Following | Loss | Learn |
Buckminster Fuller, fully Richard Buckminster "Bucky" Fuller
The effective decisions can only be made by the independently thinking and adequately informed human individuals and their telepathically intercommunicated wisdom--the wisdom of the majority of all such human individuals--qualifying for continuance in Universe as local cosmic problem-solvers--in love with the truth and in individually spontaneous self-commitment to absolute faith in the wisdom, integrity, and love of God, who seems to wish Earthian humans to survive.
Absolute | Faith | Love | Majority | Thinking | Truth | Universe | Wisdom |
Buckminster Fuller, fully Richard Buckminster "Bucky" Fuller
When I was born, humanity was 95 per cent illiterate. Since I've been born, the population has doubled and that total population is now 65 per cent literate. That's a gain of 130-fold of the literacy. When humanity is primarily illiterate, it needs leaders to understand and get the information and deal with it. When we are at the point where the majority of humans them-selves are literate, able to get the information, we're in an entirely new relationship to Universe. We are at the point where the integrity of the individual counts and not what the political leadership or the religious leadership says to do.
Humanity | Individual | Integrity | Majority | Relationship | Leadership | Understand |