This site is dedicated to the memory of Dr. Alan William Smolowe who gave birth to the creation of this database.
The custom of frequent reflection will keep their minds from running adrift, and call their thoughts home from useless unattentive roving.
Custom | Reflection | Will | Wisdom |
H. L. Mencken, fully Henry Louis Mencken
The military caste did not originate as a party of patriots, but as a party of bandits.
Wisdom |
Joan Chittister, fully Sister Joan D. Chittister
Blind obedience is itself an abuse of human morality. It is a misuse of the human soul in the name of religious commitment. It is a sin against individual conscience. It makes moral children of the adults from whom moral agency is required. It makes a vow, which is meant to require religious figures to listen always to the law of God, beholden first to the laws of very human organizations in the person of very human authorities. It is a law that isn't even working in the military and can never substitute for personal morality.
Abuse | Children | Commitment | Conscience | God | Individual | Law | Morality | Obedience | Sin | Soul |
It was for the sake of security that the people of ancient ties turned to the Baals and other idols. Today, our oppressors turn to money and military power and to the so-called security forces. But their security is insecurity. We experience their security as intimidation and repression, terror, rape and murder. Those who turn to the idols for security demand our insecurity as the price that must be paid.
Experience | Insecurity | Intimidation | Money | Murder | People | Power | Price | Security | Terror |
Robert E. Carter, fully Robert Edgar Carter
All theories, all values, all reforms, all revolutions, all change, and all actions are built on the shifting sands of custom and opinion, and the winds of doubt and new circumstances and considerations are always blowing, always rising.
Change | Circumstances | Custom | Doubt | Opinion | Theories |
The cult of the hero is the absolutely necessary complement of the massification of society… The individual who is prevented by circumstances from becoming a real person, who can no longer express himself through personal thought or action, who finds his aspirations frustrated, projects onto the hero all he would wish to be. He lives vicariously and experiences the athletic or amorous or military exploits of the god with whom he lives in spiritual symbiosis.
Action | Circumstances | Cult | God | Hero | Individual | Society | Thought | God | Thought |
Leo Tolstoy, aka Count Lev Nikolayevich Tolstoy or Tolstoi
The aim and end of war is murder; the weapons employed in war are espionage, treachery and the encouragement of treachery, the ruining of a country, the plundering and robbing of its inhabitants for the maintenance of the army, and trickery and lying which all appear under the heading of the art of war. The military world is characterized by the absence of freedom – in other words, a rigorous discipline – enforced inactivity, ignorance, cruelty, debauchery, and drunkenness.
Absence | Art | Cruelty | Discipline | Freedom | Ignorance | Inactivity | Lying | Murder | Treachery | War | Weapons | Words | World | Art |
The pioneers of a warless world are the [youth] who refuse military service.
Custom should be followed only because it is custom, and not because it is reasonable or just. But people follow it for this sole reason, that they think it just. Otherwise they would follow it no longer, although it were the custom; for they will only submit to reason or justice. Custom without this would pass for tyranny; but the sovereignty of reason and justice is no more tyrannical than that of desire. They are principles natural to man.
Custom | Desire | Justice | Man | People | Principles | Reason | Tyranny | Will | Think |