This site is dedicated to the memory of Dr. Alan William Smolowe who gave birth to the creation of this database.
The facts of nature are what they are, but we can only view them through the spectacles of our mind. Our mind works largely by metaphor and comparison, not always (or often) by relentless logic. When we are caught in conceptual traps, the best exit is often a change in metaphor — not because the new guideline will be truer to nature (for neither the old nor the new metaphor lies out there in the woods), but because we need a shift to more fruitful perspectives, and metaphor is often the best agent of conceptual transition.
Evolution | History | Progress | Revolution | Understanding |
Stoics, The Stoics or Stoicism NULL
When I see a man in a state of anxiety, I say, “What can this man want? If he did not want something which is not in his power, how could he still be anxious?” [Epictetus]
Administration | Body | Father | Force | God | Man | Men | Power | Revolution | Will | God |
Certainly no nation ever before abandoned to the avarice and jugglings of private individuals to regulate according to their own interests, the quantum of circulating medium for the nation — to inflate, by deluges of paper, the nominal prices of property, and then to buy up that property at 1s. in the pound, having first withdrawn the floating medium which might endanger a competition in purchase. Yet this is what has been done, and will be done, unless stayed by the protecting hand of the legislature. The evil has been produced by the error of their sanction of this ruinous machinery of banks; and justice, wisdom, duty, all require that they should interpose and arrest it before the schemes of plunder and spoliation desolate the country.
God | Justice | Means | Nature | People | Revolution | Thought | God | Thought |
A judiciary independent of a king or executive alone is a good thing; but independence of the will of the nation is a solecism, at least in a republican government.
Care | Principles | Revolution | Right | Safe |
Above all things I hope the education of the common people will be attended to, convinced that on their good sense we may rely with the most security for the preservation of a due degree of liberty.
Absolute | Age | Care | Commerce | Creed | Error | Freedom | Government | Justice | Labor | Peace | People | Principles | Public | Revolution | Right | Sacred | Safe | War | Will | Wisdom | Friendship | Government | Trial | Commerce | Parent | Understand |
The equal rights of man, and the happiness of every individual, are now acknowledged to be the only legitimate objects of government. Modern times have the signal advantage, too, of having discovered the only device by which these rights can be secured, to wit: government by the people, acting not in person, but by representatives chosen by themselves, that is to say, by every man of ripe years and sane mind, who contributes either by his purse or person to the support of his country.
Defeat | Democracy | Government | Lending | Revolution | Will | Government |
Our rulers can have authority over such natural rights only as we have submitted to them.
Duty | Freedom | Important | Little | Power | Principles | Revolution | Right | Search | Think |
The true foundation of republican government is the equal right of every citizen in his person and property and in their management.
Government | Liberty | Power | Present | Revolution | Government |
W. T. Stace, fully Walter Terence Stace
The essential character of Neo-Platonism comes out in its theory of the mystical exaltation of the subject to God. It is the extremity of subjectivism, the forcing of the individual subject to the centre of the universe, to the position of the Absolute Being. And it follows naturally upon the heels of Scepticism. In the Sceptics all faith in the power of thought and reason had finally died out. They {377} took as their watchword the utter impotence of reason to reach the truth. From this it was but a step to the position that, if we cannot attain truth by the natural means of thought, we will do so by a miracle. If ordinary consciousness will not suffice, we will pass beyond ordinary consciousness altogether. Neo-Platonism is founded upon despair, the despair of reason. It is the last frantic struggle of the Greek spirit to reach, by desperate means, by force, the point which it felt it had failed to reach by reason. It seeks to take the Absolute by storm. It feels that where sobriety has failed, the violence of spiritual intoxication may succeed. It was natural that philosophy should end here. For philosophy is founded upon reason. It is the effort to comprehend, to understand, to grasp the reality of things intellectually. Therefore it cannot admit anything higher than reason. To exalt intuition, ecstasy, or rapture, above thought--this is death to philosophy. Philosophy in making such an admission, lets out its own life-blood, which is thought. In Neo-Platonism, therefore, ancient philosophy commits suicide. This is the end. The place of philosophy is taken henceforth by religion. Christianity triumphs, and sweeps away all independent thought from its path. There is no more philosophy now till a new spirit of enquiry and wonder is breathed into man at the Renaissance and the Reformation. Then the new era begins, and gives birth to a new philosophic impulse, under the influence of which we are still living. But to reach that new era of philosophy, the human spirit had first to pass through the arid wastes of Scholasticism.
Age | Aims | Control | Effort | Faith | God | Inquiry | Invention | Life | Life | Man | Nature | Nothing | People | Pleasure | Principles | Purpose | Purpose | Revolution | Science | Spirit | Time | Universe | Vision | World | God |
Florentine Ingratitude: Sir Joshua sent his own portrait to The birthplace of Michael Angelo, And in the hand of the simpering fool He put a dirty paper scroll, And on the paper, to be polite, Did ‘Sketches by Michael Angelo’ write. The Florentines said ‘’Tis a Dutch-English bore, Michael Angelo’s name writ on Rembrandt’s door.’ The Florentines call it an English fetch, For Michael Angelo never did sketch; 10 Every line of his has meaning, And needs neither suckling nor weaning. ’Tis the trading English-Venetian cant To speak Michael Angelo, and act Rembrandt: It will set his Dutch friends all in a roar To write ‘Mich. Ang.’ on Rembrandt’s door; But you must not bring in your hand a lie If you mean that the Florentines should buy. Giotto’s circle or Apelles’ line Were not the work of sketchers drunk with wine; Nor of the city clock’s running … fashion; Nor of Sir Isaac Newton’s calculation.
Angels | Childhood | Father | Heaven | Revolution | Spirit | War | Blessed | Forgive | Friends |
Sing louder around to the bells' cheerful sound, while our sports shall be seen on the echoing green.
Happy | Revolution |
Will Durant, fully William James "Will" Durant
The past is not dead. Indeed, it is often not even past.
Enlightenment | Improvement | Mind | Revolution |
Most history is guessing, and the rest is prejudice.
Ability | History | Revolution | Strength | Wealth |
Popular opinion is oftenest, what Carlyle pronounced it to be, a lie!
Whittaker Chambers, born Jay Vivian Chambers, aka Jay David Whittaker Chambers
Political freedom is a political reading of the Bible.
Agony | Man | Money | Revolution | Vision |
Whittaker Chambers, born Jay Vivian Chambers, aka Jay David Whittaker Chambers
The Columbia faculty was not, of course, composed wholly of young skeptics and esthetes. By any count of academic noses, they were a small minority.
Revolution | War | World |
Wilferd Peterson, fully Wilferd Arlan Peterson
Make it a point to scatter creative seeds every day of your life!
Change | Discovery | Revolution | Will | Discovery |
Whittaker Chambers, born Jay Vivian Chambers, aka Jay David Whittaker Chambers
The pessimist stared at his visitor. He had never talked with the Devil before. But he had read descriptions of him by people who had and who remembered Satan as a goat, a bull, a dog, a cat, a big black man with horns, claws and a tail. The presence beside him looked distinguished, relaxed, urbane. Except for a face too characterful to be contemporary, the Devil might have been a movie magnate, an airline executive, a college president, a great surgeon or a grain speculator. “And yet,” thought the pessimist, “those are certainly not the eyes of a Yale man.”
Change | Politics | Power | Purpose | Purpose | Reform | Revolution |