This site is dedicated to the memory of Dr. Alan William Smolowe who gave birth to the creation of this database.
Muriel Spark, fully Dame Muriel Sarah Camberg Spark
Sex is a mystery, and I often think of it from that point of view. I wish it weren’t so much of an illusion. Sex in a relationship never lasts as long as people think, but one’s interest in sex never goes. I know a sexy man from a non-sexy man, I can tell you. I have not lost the power of sizing up. I don’t want people for myself, but there is a sexual way of looking at life and I don’t think one can not think sexually.
The ideal of romantic love stands in opposition to much of our history, as we shall see. First of all, it is individualistic. It rejects the view of human beings as interchangeable units, and it attaches the highest importance to individual differences as well as to individual choice. Romantic love is egoistic, in the philosophical, not in the petty, sense. Egoism as a philosophical doctrine holds that self-realization and personal happiness are the moral goals of life, and romantic love is motivated by the desire for personal happiness. Romantic love is secular. In its union of physical with spiritual pleasure in sex and love, as well as in its union of romance and daily life, romantic love is a passionate commitment to this earth and to the exalted happiness that life on earth can offer.
Commitment | Desire | Doctrine | Earth | Goals | Individual | Life | Life | Love | Opposition | Pleasure | Romance | Self-realization | Happiness |
The difference between American parties is actually simple. Democrats are in favor of higher taxes to pay for greater spending, while Republicans are in favor of greater spending, for which the taxpayers will pay. In foreign policy, Republicans intend to pursue the war in Iraq but to do so with a minimal number of troops on the ground. This is not to be confused with the disastrous Bush/Cheney/Rumsfeld policy of using a minimal number of troops on the ground to pursue the war in Iraq. Democrats intend to end the war, but they don't know when. Democrats are making the 'high school sex promise': I'll pull out in time, honest!
Paramahansa Yogananda, born Mukunda Lal Ghosh
The relationship that exists between friends is the grandest of human loves. Friendly love is pure, because it is without compulsion. One freely chooses to love his friends; he is not bound by instinct. The love that manifests in friendship can exist between man and woman, woman and woman, man and man. But in the love of friendship, there is no sexual attraction. One must practice celibacy and absolutely forget sex if one wants to know divine love through friendship; then friendship nurtures the cultivation of divine love.
Cultivation | Love | Man | Practice | Relationship | Wants | Woman | Friendship | Friends |
Paramahansa Yogananda, born Mukunda Lal Ghosh
Lust applies to the abuse of any or all of the senses in the pursuit of pleasure or gratification. Through the sense of sight man may lust after material objects; through the sense of hearing, he craves the sweet, slow poison of flattery, and vibratory sounds as of voices and music that rouse his material nature; through the lustful pleasure of smell he is enticed toward wrong environments and actions; lust for food and drink causes him to please his taste at the expense of health; through the sense of touch he lusts after inordinate physical comfort and abuses the creative sex impulse. Lust also seeks gratification in wealth, status, power, domination—all that satisfies the "I, me, mine" in the egotistical man. Lustful desire is egotism, the lowest rung of the ladder of human character evolution. By the force of its insatiable passion, karma loves to destroy one's happiness, health, brain power, clarity of thought, memory, and discriminative judgment.
Abuse | Character | Comfort | Desire | Destroy | Force | Lust | Man | Music | Pleasure | Sense | Taste | Wrong |
All the particular moral judgments we intuitively make are likely to derive from discarded religious systems, from warped views of sex and bodily functions, or from customs necessary for the survival of the group in social and economic circumstances that now lie in the distant past.
Even in the era of AIDS, sex raises no unique moral issues at all. Decisions about sex may involve considerations about honesty, concern for others, prudence, and so on, but there is nothing special about sex in this respect, for the same could be said of decisions about driving a car. (In fact, the moral issues raised by driving a car, both from an environmental and from a safety point of view, are much more serious than those raised by sex.)
Philip Larkin, fully Philip Arthur Larkin
Sex is designed for people who like overcoming obstacles… Sex means nothing--just the moment of ecstasy, that flares and dies in minutes.
Phyllis Diller, born Phyllis Ada Driver
I admit I have a tremendous sex drive. My boyfriend lives forty miles away.
Phyllis Schlafly, fully Phyllis McAlpin Stewart Schlafly
Minors are an intended audience for the highly profitable sex industry. Impressionable teenagers are easily persuaded to have abortions, and homosexual clubs in high school are designed for the young.
Do we learn with one part of us, feel angry with another, and desire the pleasures of eating and sex with another? Or do we employ our mind as a whole when our energies are employed in any of these ways?
We can call the reflective element in the mind the reason, and the element with which it feels hunger and thirst, and the agitations of sex and other desires, the irrational appetite - an element closely connected with pleasure and satisfaction.
After many years of working with and listening to American adolescents, I don't believe they are ready for sex or its potential consequences--parenthood, abortion, sexually transmitted diseases--and I think we need to do everything in our power to discourage sexual activity and encourage abstinence. Young people can learn to value the intimacy of friendships with the opposite sex as well as their own, can enjoy being in groups as well as couples. Those kinds of relationships need adult support, including the time it takes to organize gatherings for kids, instead of turning them loose in malls, video arcades, or the streets. Homes, schools, churches, and communities should provide havens for kids who want an alternative. These same entities have to pitch in when it comes to educating kids about sex.
Listening | Need | People | Power | Time | Learn | Think | Value |
Over the last several years, there has been a dramatic increase in media stories of abducted & abused children. Where there has not been an increase in the overall numbers of such cases, many families, and children, are more fearful. I have pushed for legislation that would appoint a national coordinator for AMBER alerts, and alert system for missing children; provide additional protections for children, and establish stricter punishments for sex offenders. That legislation passed the Congress in 2003.
System |
Buckminster Fuller, fully Richard Buckminster "Bucky" Fuller
We shall have to stop looking askance on trends in relation to sex merely as a reproductive capability, i.e. that it is normal to make babies. Society will have to change in its assessment of what the proclivities of humanity may be. Our viewpoints on homosexuality, for example, may have to be reconsidered and more wisely adjusted.
Rainer Maria Rilke, full name René Karl Wilhelm Johann Josef Maria Rilke
Perhaps the sexes are more akin than people think, and the great renewal of the world will perhaps consist in one phenomenon: that man and woman, freed from all mistaken feelings and aversions, will seek each other not as opposites but as brother and sister, as neighbors, and will unite as human beings, in order to bear in common, simply, earnestly, and patiently, the heavy sex that has been laid upon them.
Rainer Maria Rilke, full name René Karl Wilhelm Johann Josef Maria Rilke
Sex is difficult; yes. But those tasks that have been entrusted to us are difficult; almost everything serious is difficult; and everything is serious. If you just recognize this and manage, out of yourself, out of your own talent and nature, out of your own experience and childhood and strength, to achieve a wholly individual relation to sex (one that is not influenced by convention and custom), then you will no longer have to be afraid of losing yourself and becoming unworthy of your dearest possession.
Childhood | Convention | Experience | Individual | Will | Talent | Afraid |