This site is dedicated to the memory of Dr. Alan William Smolowe who gave birth to the creation of this database.
No morality can be founded on authority, even if the authority were divine.
Kenneth Boulding, fully Kenneth Ewart Boulding
There are three basic types of human transactions: (1) the threat system – “Give it to me or I’ll kill you” or today’s more sophisticated version: “How much will you pay me to stop harming or annoying you?”… (2) the exchange system, the narrow waveband of market transactions with which economics concerns itself, and (3) the integrative system, i.e., the transactions based on the love, sharing, and altruism of which human beings are capable in spite of the denial of these phenomena in economic theory.
Altruism | Economics | Kill | Love | Phenomena | System | Will |
The first things to be disputed by our commitment to nonviolence will be not the system but our own lives.
Commitment | System | Will |
Every new idea will… be troublesome to [the individual’s] entire being. He will defend himself against it because it threatens to destroy his certainties. He thus actually comes to hate everything opposed to what propaganda has made him acquire. Propaganda has created in him a system of opinions and tendencies which may not be subjected to criticism… Incidentally, this refusal to listen to new ideas usually takes on a vigorous propaganda will declare that all new ideas are propaganda.
Criticism | Destroy | Hate | Ideas | Individual | System | Will | Propaganda |
It is not impossible that to some infinitely superior being the whole universe may be as one plain, the distance between planet and planet being only as the pores in a grain of sand, and the spaces between system and system no greater than the intervals between one grain and the grain adjacent.
Equal rights for the sexes will be achieved when mediocre women occupy high positions.
Langdon Gilkey, fully Langdon Brown Gilkey
Idealism tends to absorb all of objective reality into a system made up solely of experience… Sooner or later the idealist has to admit that his experience touches something beyond its own content.
Experience | Idealism | Reality | System |
The school system can’t make up for family failure. The total education of our children is a cooperative effort requiring community solidarity. Apathetic parents who foster a permissive home atmosphere create a problem for everyone.
Children | Education | Effort | Failure | Family | Parents | System |
Never suffer an exception to occur till the new habit is securely rooted in your life. Each lapse is like the letting fall of a ball of string which one is carefully winding up, a single slip undoes more than a great many turns will wind again. Continuity of training is the great means of making the nervous system act infallible right.
Habit | Life | Life | Means | Right | System | Training | Will |
To make our nervous system our ally instead of our enemy… we must make automatic and habitual, as early as possible, as many useful actions as we can, and guard against the growing into ways that are likely to be disadvantageous to us, as we should guard against the plague.
Ron Leifer, fully Ronald Leifer
Refusal to cooperate with the [hospital] psychiatrist, rather than being within his rights under the Fifth Amendment, may be construed as evidence of a “paranoid illness” for which [the patient] requires further psychiatric hospitalization.
To accept passively an unjust system is to cooperate with that system; thereby the oppressed become as evil as the oppressor. Non-cooperation with evil is as much a moral obligation as is cooperation with good.
Cooperation | Evil | Good | Obligation | System |
Our legal system would be rendered useless and void if men refused to obey the laws, and the axiom “You can’t legislate morality” were accepted.
In the field of modern cosmology, the first principle is called “the Cosmological Principle.” It says that the universe has no center, that it has the same properties throughout. Every place in the universe has, in this sense, equal rights. How can the human race, which has evolved in a universe of such fundamental equality, fail to strive for a society without violence and terror? How can we fail to build a world in which the rights due to every human being from birth are respected?
Birth | Equality | Human race | Race | Rights | Sense | Society | Terror | Universe | World | Society |