This site is dedicated to the memory of Dr. Alan William Smolowe who gave birth to the creation of this database.
The greatest triumphs of propaganda have been accomplished, not be doing something, but by refraining from doing. Great is truth, but still greater, from a practical point of view, is silence about truth.
Silence | Truth | Propaganda |
Bertrand Russell, fully Bertrand Arthur William Russell, 3rd Earl Russell
Real life is, to most men, a long second-best, a perpetual compromise between the ideal and the possible; but the world of pure reason knows no compromise, no practical limitations, no barrier to the creative activity embodying in splendid edifices the passionate aspiration after the perfect from which all great works springs. Remote from human passions, remote even from the pitiful facts of nature, the generations have gradually created an ordered cosmos, where pure thought can dwell as in its natural home, and where one, at least, of our nobler impulses can escape from the dreary exile of the actual world.
Aspiration | Life | Life | Men | Nature | Reason | Thought | World | Aspiration | Thought |
An intellectual… [is] a person who has learned to establish relationships between the different elements of his sum of knowledge, one who possesses a coherent system of relationships into which he can fit all such new items of information as he may pick up in the course of his life.
C. Wright Mills, fully Charles Wright Mills
Prestige involves at least two persons: one to claim it and another to honor the claim… In the status system of a society these claims are organized as rules and expectations which regulate who successfully claims prestige, from whom, in what ways, and on what basis. The level of self-esteem enjoyed by given individuals is more or less set by this status system.
Esteem | Honor | Self | Self-esteem | Society | System | Society |
Bob Dylan, born Robert Allen Zimmerman
Experience teaches us that silence terrifies people the most.
Experience | People | Silence |
Nothing, in truth, has such a tendency to weaken not only the powers of invention, but the intellectual powers in general, as a habit of extensive and various reading without reflection. The activity and force of mind are gradually impaired in consequence of disuse; and, not infrequently, all our principles and opinions come to be lost in the infinite multiplicity and discordancy of our acquired ideas.
Force | Habit | Ideas | Invention | Mind | Nothing | Principles | Reading | Reflection | Truth |
Marquis de Sade, born Donatien Alphonse François de Sade
So long as the laws remain such as they are today, employ some discretion: loud opinion forces us to do so; but in privacy and silence let us compensate ourselves for that cruel chastity we are obliged to display in public.
Chastity | Discretion | Display | Opinion | Public | Silence |
Doris Lessing, fully Doris May Lessing, born Doris May Tayler
Ideally, what should be said to every child, repeatedly, throughout his or her school life is something like this: "You are in the process of being indoctrinated. We have not yet evolved a system of education that is not a system of indoctrination. We are sorry, but it is the best we can do."
Compassion is the effortless radiance of emptiness, free of concepts and beyond description. That is how a buddha’s activity for beings can be limitless. If you understand this, you will know that even when a cool breeze blows upon a sick person burning with fever, that itself is the blessings and compassion of the buddhas.
Blessings | Compassion | Will | Understand |
Emily Dickinson, fully Emily Elizabeth Dickinson
Silence is all we dread. There's Ransom in a Voice - but Silence is Infinity.
Silence |
Akon says to Elizabeth: “The cradle of mankind, Venus, remained shrouded and bereft of life after the Pleistocene cycle of solar expansion, her fruitful aeons of fertility at an end, her vast warm seas that nurtured our beginning, dried out and barren. But her glory still remains as a reality in the electric mirage, perfected by her progeny, who were compelled to move from her protective surface, out into the far reaches of space to propagate their species on the surface of an alien planet called Earth, where we adapted to a different time-speed on a younger planet. Laying claim to Earth as a host to life, we continued to perfect our spaceships in rediness for the time when we would have to leave this solar system prior to another wave of mass extinctions from the star of this system.”
Earth | Glory | Life | Life | Reality | Space | System | Time |
Akon says to Elizabeth: “The Moon is alien to this system and came with Jupiter and its retinue of planets. Jupiter is a forming star, a star condensing, and thereby, retaining a high velocity of rotation, a large mass and low density and the usual heat in the core retained by the star. A solar system within a solar system. Seven of Jupiter’s planets have retained atmospheres and life as we know it.”