This site is dedicated to the memory of Dr. Alan William Smolowe who gave birth to the creation of this database.
The language of the heart which comes from the heart and goes to the heart - is always simple, graceful, and full of power, but no art of rhetoric can teach it. It is at once the easiest and most difficult language, difficult, since it needs a heart to speak it; easy, because its periods though rounded and full of harmony, are still unstudied.
Art | Harmony | Heart | Language | Power | Rhetoric | Teach | Wisdom | Art |
C. Wright Mills, fully Charles Wright Mills
As a social and as a personal force, religion has become a dependent variable. It does not originate; it reacts. It does not denounce; it adapts. It does not set forth new models of conduct and sensibility; it imitates. Its rhetoric is without deep appeal; the worship it organizes is without piety. It has become less a revitalization of the spirit in permanent tension with the world than a respectable distraction from the sourness of life.
Conduct | Force | Life | Life | Piety | Religion | Rhetoric | Sensibility | Spirit | Wisdom | World | Worship |
Where love, trust, mutual aid, equality, and empathy are not linked, the boot, whip, warring, modern inquisitors, and their epigones will supply a rhetoric that accepts humanity's fate as tragic while doing everything to perpetuate that tragedy.
Aid | Empathy | Equality | Fate | Humanity | Love | Rhetoric | Tragedy | Trust | Will | Fate |
Milton Friedman, fully John Milton Friedman
The ICC [Interstate Commerce Commission] illustrates what might be called the natural history of government intervention. A real or fancied evil leads to demands to do something about it. A political coalition forms consisting of sincere, high-minded reformers and equally sincere interested parties. The incompatible objectives of the members of the coalition (e.g., low prices to consumers and high prices to producers) are glossed over by fine rhetoric about “the public interest,” “fair competition,” and the like. The coalition succeeds in getting Congress (or a state legislature) to pass a law. The preamble to the law pays lip service to the rhetoric and the body of the law grants power to government officials to “do something.” The high-minded reformers experience a glow of triumph and turn their attention to new causes. The interested parties go to work to make sure that the power is used for their benefit. They generally succeed. Success breeds its problems, which are met by broadening the scope of intervention. Bureaucracy takes its toll so that even the initial special interests no longer benefit. In the end the effects are precisely the opposite of the objectives of the reformers and generally do not even achieve the objectives of the special interests. Yet the activity is so firmly established and so many vested interests are connected with it that repeal of the initial legislation is nearly inconceivable. Instead, new government legislation is called for to cope with the problems produced by the earlier legislation and a new cycle begins.
Attention | Body | Commerce | Evil | Experience | Government | History | Law | Objectives | Power | Problems | Public | Rhetoric | Service | Success | Work | Government | Commerce |
John Robert Seeley, fully Sir John Robert Seeley
A grain of real knowledge, of genuine controllable conviction, will outweigh a bushel of adroitness and to produce persuasion there is one golden principle of rhetoric not put down in the booksto understand what you are talking about
Persuasion | Rhetoric | Talking | Will | Understand |
Michael Harrington, fully Edward Michael "Mike" Harrington
That the poor are invisible is one of the most important things about them. They are not simply neglected and forgotten as in the old rhetoric of reform; what is much worse, they are not seen.
Deborah Tannen, fully Deborah Frances Tannen
Many of us dismiss talk that does not convey important information as worthless - meaningless small talk if it's a social setting or empty rhetoric if it's public. Such admonitions as Skip the small talk, Get to the point, or Why don't you say what you mean? may seem to be reasonable. But they are reasonable only if information is all that counts. This attitude toward talk ignores the fact that people are emotionally involved with each other and that talking is the major way be establish, maintain, monitor and adjust our relationships.
John Chrysostom, fully Saint John Chrysostom
Enter into the Church and wash away your sins. For here there is a hospital and not a court of law. Do not be ashamed again to enter the Church, be ashamed when you sin, but not when you repent.
Absence | Absurd | Age | Business | Children | Deeds | Father | Folly | Man | Need | Reading | Reason | Rhetoric | Study | Will | World | Deeds | Business | Afraid | Blessed | Child |
As we discern a fine line between crank and genius, so also (and unfortunately) we must acknowledge an equally graded trajectory from crank to demagogue. When people learn no tools of judgment and merely follow their hopes, the seeds of political manipulation are sown.
The equation of evolution with progress represents our strongest cultural impediment to a proper understanding of this greatest biological revolution in the history of human thought.
Enemy | Intolerance | Mistake | Rhetoric |
Thomas Mann, fully Paul Thomas Mann
I must tell you that we artists cannot tread the path of Beauty without Eros keeping company with us and appointing himself as our guide.
Art | Enlightenment | Intolerance | Literature | Mankind | Passion | Reason | Rhetoric | Service | Slander | Virtue | Virtue | Slander | Art | Intellect |
Walter J. Ong, fully Walter Jackson Ong
Print produced exhaustive dictionaries and fostered the desire to legislate for "correctness" in language.
My father's father, his father's father, his— shadows like winds go back to a parent before thought, before speech, at the head of the past.
The certainty of punishment, even more than its severity, is the preventive of crime.
Rhetoric |
Child of earth and earthly sorrows--child of God and immortal hopes--arise from thy sadness, gird up the loins of thy mind, and with unfaltering energy press toward thy rest and reward on high.
To feel physically comfortable with someone else's body is not a decision you make. It has very little thing to do with how two people think or act or talk or even look. The mysterious magnet is either there, buried somewhere deep behind the sternum, or it is not.