This site is dedicated to the memory of Dr. Alan William Smolowe who gave birth to the creation of this database.
The political problem of mankind is to combine three things: Economic Efficiency, Social Justice, and Individual Liberty.
Efficiency | Individual | Justice | Liberty | Mankind |
No great improvements in the lot of mankind are possible, until a great change takes place in the fundamental constitution of their modes of thought.
As soon as mankind have unanimously accepted a truth, does the truth perish within them? The highest aim and best result of improved intelligence, is has hitherto been thought, is to unite mankind more and more in the acknowledgment of all important truths; and does the intelligence only last as long as it has not achieved its object? Do the fruits of conquest perish by the very completeness of the victory?
Conquest | Important | Intelligence | Mankind | Object | Thought | Truth |
If all mankind minus one were of one opinion, and only one person were of the contrary opinion, mankind would be no more justified in silencing that one person, than he, if he had the power, would be justified in silencing mankind.
Hitherto it is questionable if all the mechanical inventions yet made have lightened the day’s toil of any human being. They have enabled a greater population to live the same life of drudgery and imprisonment, and an increased number of manufacturers and others to make fortunes. They have increased the comforts of the middle classes. But they have not yet begun to effect those great changes in human destiny, which it is in their nature and in their futurity to accomplish. Only when, in addition to just institutions, the increase of mankind shall be under the deliberate guidance of judicious foresight, and the conquests made form the powers of nature by the intellect and energy of scientific discoverers, become the common property of the species, and the means of improving and elevating the universal lot.
Day | Destiny | Energy | Foresight | Guidance | Life | Life | Mankind | Means | Nature | Property | Guidance | Intellect |
When the “sacredness of property” is talked of, it should always be remembered, that any such sacredness does not belong in the same degree to landed property. No man made the land. It is the original inheritance of the whole species. Its appropriation is wholly a question of general expediency. When private property in land is not expedient, it is unjust. It is no hardship to any one, to be excluded from what others have produced: they were not bound to produce it for his use, and he loses nothing by not sharing in what otherwise would not have existed at all. But it is some hardship to be born into a world and to find all nature’s gifts previously engrossed, and no place left for the new-comer. To reconcile people to this, after they have once admitted into their minds the idea that any moral rights belong to them as human beings, it will always be necessary to convince them that the exclusive appropriation is good for mankind as a whole, themselves included. But this is what no sane human being could be persuaded of.
Good | Inheritance | Land | Man | Mankind | Nature | Nothing | People | Property | Question | Rights | Will | World | Hardship |
The convictions of the mass of mankind run hand in hand with their interests or with their class feelings.
Convictions | Feelings | Mankind |
Boredom is ... a vital problem for the moralist, since half the sins of mankind are caused by the fear of it.
The effect of custom, in preventing any misgiving respecting the rules of conduct which mankind impose on one another, is all the more complete because the subject is one on which it is not generally considered necessary that reasons should be given, either by one person to others or by each to himself.
The sole end for which mankind are warranted, individually or collectively, in interfering with the liberty of action of any of their number, is self-protection... The only purpose of which power can be rightfully exercised over any member of civilized community, against his will, is to prevent harm to others.
Action | Harm | Liberty | Mankind | Power | Purpose | Purpose | Self | Will |
So natural to mankind is intolerance in whatever they really care bout, that religious freedom has hardly anywhere been practically realized, except where religious indifference, which dislikes to have its peace disturbed by theological quarrels, has added its weight to the scale.
Care | Freedom | Indifference | Intolerance | Mankind | Peace |
If anything could testify to the magical powers of the priesthood of science and their technical acolytes, or declare unto mankind the supreme qualifications for absolute rulership held by the Divine Computer, this new invention alone should suffice. So the final purpose of life in terms of the megamachine at last becomes clear: it is to furnish and process an endless quantity of data, in order to expand the role and ensure the domination of the power system.
Absolute | Computer | Invention | Life | Life | Mankind | Order | Power | Purpose | Purpose | Science | 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.
The political unification of mankind cannot be realistically conceived except as part of [the] effort at self-transformation.