This site is dedicated to the memory of Dr. Alan William Smolowe who gave birth to the creation of this database.
Responsibility by definition means answerable or accountable for. And what is a person responsible for? Everything he thinks, says or does. Why? Because no matter what or whom one can blame for the circumstances of his life, he is still stuck with the consequences of everything he thinks, says or does. People can be terribly unreliable but never irresponsible. Thus there is no way a person can be irresponsible because everyone is answerable or accountable for everything he thinks, say or does, does not do or neglects to do. Until people fully realize that they are totally responsible for their lives, we as a society collectively will be operating under a false and distorted assumption of what responsibility means.
I was always puzzled by the fact that people have a great deal of trouble and pain when and if they are forced or feel forced to change a belief or circumstance which they hold dear. I found what I believe is the answer when I read that a Canadian neurosurgeon discovered some truths about the human mind which revealed the intensity of this problem. He conducted some experiments which proved that when a person is forced to change a basic belief or viewpoint, the brain undergoes a series of nervous sensations equivalent to the most agonizing torture.
Change | Life | Life | Means | Need | People | Will | Value |
The National Socialist (Nazi) party had 10 million members, of whom at most 150,000 were criminals. It would be grotesque to stick the label of criminal on every former member of the party.
Stanley Baldwin, 1st Earl of Bewdley
So it has always been with tyrants among our own people: when the King was tyrant, let him look out. And it has always been the same, and will be the same, whether the tyrant be the Barons, whether the tyrant be the Church, whether he be demagogue or dictator — let them look out.
Stanley Baldwin, 1st Earl of Bewdley
The Holy Bible is not only great but high explosive literature. It works in strange ways and no living man can tell or know how that book in its journeyings through the world has started an individual soul 10,000 different places into a new life, a new belief, a new conception and a new faith.
Stanley Baldwin, 1st Earl of Bewdley
The real need of the day is ... moral and spiritual rearmament ... God's Living Spirit can transcend conflicting political systems, can reconcile order and freedom, can rekindle true patriotism, can unite all citizens in the service of the nation, and all nations in the service of mankind.
And, in this case, science could learn an important lesson from the literati — who love contingency for the same basic reason that scientists tend to regard the theme with suspicion. Because, in contingency lies the power of each person, to make a difference in an unconstrained world bristling with possibilities, and nudgeable by the smallest of unpredictable inputs into markedly different channels spelling either vast improvement or potential disaster.
Absurd | Defense | Disagreement | Excellence | Failure | Mediocrity | Model | Reality | Society | Struggle | Teach | Thought | Understanding | Excellence | Society | Failure | Think | Thought |
Gaskell could not abide this indecorous version of his beloved linear progress theory. He could not bear to imagine that the grand procession from jellyfish to man, orchestrated by an ever-increasing mass of nervous tissue, once paused in its stately and orderly march toward human consciousness in order to execute a fancy little flip, a clever jig of inversion, just at the sublime and definitive moment of entrance into the vertebral home stretch.
Conformity | Order | Taste |
My dreams at the time were rather disturbed. Before my condition had been diagnosed, I had been very bored with life. There had not seemed to be anything worth doing. But shortly after I came out of hospital, I dreamt that I was going to be executed. I suddenly realized that there were a lot of worthwhile things I could do, if I were reprieved. Another dream that I had several times was that I would sacrifice my life to save others. After all, if I were going to die anyway, it might as well do some good.
Wonder |
Adultery is in most cases a theft in the dark. At such moments almost every woman betrays her husband's innermost secrets; becomes a Delilah who discloses to a stranger, discloses to her lover, the mysteries of her husband's strength or weakness. What seems to me treason is, not that women give themselves, but that a woman is prone, when she does so, to justify herself to herself by uncovering her husband's nakedness, exposing it to the inquisitive and scornful gaze of a stranger.
Nothing |
Theodor W. Adorno, born Theodor Ludwig Wiesengrund
What can oppose the decline of the west is not a resurrected culture but the utopia that is silently contained in the image of its decline.
Stoics, The Stoics or Stoicism NULL
The soul should know whither it is going and whence it came, what is good for it and what is evil, what it seeks and what it avoids, and what is that Reason which distinguishes between the desirable and the undesirable, and thereby tames the madness of our desires and calms the violence of our fears. [Seneca]
Choice | Dawn | Duty | Good | Harmony | Ideas | Morality | Nature | Object | Order | Worth | Value |
Ted Sorensen, fully Theodore Chalkin "Ted" Sorensen
Above all, we shall wage no more unilateral, ill-planned, ill-considered, and ill-prepared invasions of foreign countries that pose no actual threat to our security.
Ideas | Principles | Speech | Words |
Ted Sorensen, fully Theodore Chalkin "Ted" Sorensen
When, in the late 1940''s, we faced a global Cold War against another system of ideological fanatics certain that their authoritarian values would eventually rule the world, we prevailed in time; We prevailed because we exercised patience as well as vigilance, self-restraint as well as self-defense, and reached out to moderates and modernists, to democrats and dissidents, within that closed system.
I am breathing in and liberating my mind. I am breathing out and liberating my mind. One practices like this.
Alienation | Important | Learning | Practice | Respect | Tradition | Will | Respect | Understand |