This site is dedicated to the memory of Dr. Alan William Smolowe who gave birth to the creation of this database.
Alexander Solzhenitsyn, fully Aleksandr Isayevich Solzhenitsyn
Violence can only be concealed by a lie, and the lie can only be maintained by violence. Any man who has once proclaimed violence as his method is inevitably forced to take the lie as his principle.
How much happier would the religious history of the world been if the different religions and sects had seen their role as contributors to a common stream of seeking for the Ultimate, which always escapes the conceptual net, yet perennially inspires the search. Actually many in the modern world are becoming tolerant toward religion in the wrong way. Their tolerance is not a product of understanding but is bred of indifference. They see the conventional forms in which religion is practiced as empty shells although they excite in their defense belligerent intolerance.
Defense | History | Indifference | Intolerance | Religion | Search | Understanding | World | Wrong |
The widespread modern rejection of ritual in religion is depriving people of powerful aids for spiritual development and for defense against evil... Action cannot lead beyond action, and therefore no ritual can produce Liberation... But there are many who do not specifically seek Liberation but simply greater purity, greater devotion, general spiritual betterment, or who seek Liberation as the still unseen goal of a winding path; and it is for such as these that the appropriate ritual would be a powerful armament for progress and defense.
Action | Defense | Devotion | Evil | People | Progress | Purity | Religion |
Arthur Meier Schlesinger, Jr., born Arthur Bancroft Schlesinger
If unlimited private indulgence means that there are not enough resources left for national defense or for education or medical care or decent housing or intelligent community planning, then in a sane society private indulgence can no longer be unlimited.
Care | Defense | Education | Enough | Indulgence | Means | Society | Society |
Most do violence to their natural aptitude, and thus attain superiority in nothing.
Aptitude | Nothing | Superiority |
It is a strange and tedious war when violence attempts to vanquish truth. All the efforts of violence cannot weaken truth, and only serve to give it fresh vigor. All the lights of truth cannot arrest violence, and only serve to exasperate it.
Claudian, latin Claudius Claudianus NULL
Gentleness is able to accomplish what violence can not.
The violence done us by others is often less painful than that which we do to ourselves.
Truth telling is not compatible with the defense of the realm.
Henry Kissinger, fully Henry Alfred Kissinger
In crisis the most daring course is often the safest. The riskiest course in my experience has been gradual escalation that the opponent matches step by step, inevitably reaching a higher level of violence and often an inextricable stalemate.
Daring | Experience | Crisis |
Human beings do not naturally support violence and terror. They do so only when they believe their lives or country are at stake.
Terror |
The unique ability of humans to imagine gives enormous power to idealism, an imagining of a better state of things not yet in existence. That power has been misused to send young men to war. But the power of idealism can also be used to attain justice, to end the massive violence of war.
Ability | Better | Existence | Idealism | Justice | Men | Power | Unique | War |
I will not serve that in which I no longer believe, whether it calls itself my home, my fatherland, or my church: and I will try to express myself in some mode of life or art as freely as I can and as wholly as I can, using for my defense the only arms I allow myself to use -- silence, exile, and cunning.
Joseph Chilton Pearce, aka Joe
The worst is yet to come, however. Far more devastating that this pruning is that nature then brings about a corresponding increase of the connecting links of the emotional circuits in this cyngulate gyrus with the lower survival fight-or-flight structures of the amygdala, that neural module linked directly with our ancient defense and survival system in the reptilian brain. In this way, a sharp curtailment of connections with the higher, transcendent frequencies of mind and heart is brought about in order to shift growth toward the lower, protective survival systems.
Defense | Growth | Heart | Mind | Nature | Order | Survival | System |
The chief cause of our misery is less the violence of our passions than the feebleness of our virtues.
Cause |
Leonardo da Vinci, fully Leonardo di ser Piero da Vinci
Force is only a desire for flight: it lives by violence and dies from liberty.
What is slander? A verdict of “guilty” pronounced in the absence of the accused, with closed doors, without defense or appeal, by an interested and prejudiced judge.