This site is dedicated to the memory of Dr. Alan William Smolowe who gave birth to the creation of this database.
William H. Whyte, Jr., fully William Hollingsworth "Holly" Whyte
[Groupthink] is rationalized conformity – an open, articulate philosophy which holds that group values are not only expedient but right as and good as well.
Conformity | Good | Philosophy | Right |
The social revolution means much more than the reorganization of conditions only: it means the establishment of new human values and social relationships, a changed attitude of man to man, as of one free and independent to his equal; it means a different spirit in individual and collective life, and that spirit cannot be born overnight.
Individual | Life | Life | Man | Means | Revolution | Spirit |
Sparta, Rome, the knights of Europe, the samurai - they worshipped strength because it is strength that makes all other values possible.
Strength |
Extremism in the defense of liberty is no vice. And moderation in the pursuit of justice is no virtue.
Defense | Justice | Liberty | Moderation | Virtue | Virtue | Moderation |
Love confronts hate in the one way hate cannot comprehend, with something beyond itself - with compassion. Hate cannot go beyond itself. It draws its strength from the self's defense of self. Love lives to go beyond itself, drawing strength from that very act. Love can thus comprehend hate, integrating it into something larger. Slowly, hate is defeated as a grain of salt dissolves into the sweetness of a pond.
Helen Keller. aka Helen Adams Keller
To compensate for the loss of our major connecting links, people have developed a private set of values based on their own subjective experiences.
The philosophy of restorative justice is not a new concept, but one we've forgotten. As a kid, when I broke a window next door, my grandmother took me over there to apologize. I had to find a way to pay for the window - collect bottles or mow the grass. Restorative justice is a return to the values of our grandmothers.
Justice | Philosophy |
In our modern society, in which knightly virtues are for the most part lacking, romanticizing the folklore heralding the virtues of friendship, trust, and heroism is understandable. I firmly believe that if the values held by the mythical knight in shining armor who stood up for right and good were followed or embodied today, they could in fact change the world.
The answer to [our social problems] lies in democratic free thought where ideas may be generated, challenged, and accepted or rejected on the basis of scientific examination and verification, and evaluated on the basis of the highest human values that emerge from the developing society.
Meaning in life is the creating of values in accordance with the needs and inclinations that belong to one's natural condition.
Human beings seek a prior meaning in everything as a defense against doubts about the importance of anything, including man's existence ... To affirm that there is a supreme meaning of life is to give the intellect an opportunity to escape the disquieting conclusion that nothing people do can possibly have more than slight importance.
Defense | Existence | Life | Life | Man | Meaning | Nothing | Opportunity | People | Intellect |
J. P. Stern, fully Joseph Peter Maria Stern
Nietzsche’s approach developed eventually into a program for radically questioning all the foundations of Western thought. We are slaves to convention, he says - we base our whole lives on attitudes and ideas whose premises, if we ever get round to actually examining them, we reject. This makes ours an inauthentic way of living, a dead way of living. We must re-evaluate our values in the light of what we honestly do believe and feel.
Convention | Ideas | Light | Thought |
Civil government, so far as it is instituted for the security of property, is in reality instituted for the defense of the rich against the poor, or of those who have some property against those who have none at all.
Defense | Government | Property | Reality | Security |