This site is dedicated to the memory of Dr. Alan William Smolowe who gave birth to the creation of this database.
R. D. Laing, fully Ronald David Laing
When the Copernican Revolution superseded the ancient Polemic world view, the earth took its rightful place as one planet among many. Man was no longer the center of the universe and though his self-image was deflated, he grew in maturity. In the same way, we must take our rightful place in nature - not as its self-centered and profligate "master" with the divine right of kings to exploit and despoil, but as one species living in harmony with the whole.
Earth | Exploit | Harmony | Man | Nature | Revolution | Right | Self | Universe | Wisdom | World |
Elijah Levita, aka Elia Levita, Elias Levita, Élie Lévita, Eliahu Bakhur
There is no certainty without some doubt.
The scientist is not a person who gives the right answers, he's the one who asks the right questions.
André Maurois, born born Emile Salomon Wilhelm Herzog
You can take from a man his worldly belongings... but there is something no conqueror can take from him: that is his mind... Decorate and furnish with love that inner sanctuary of yours. We take a lot of trouble buying the right armchairs, tables and pictures; certainly we should take even more trouble to adorn the invisible walls of our minds.
This country, with its institutions, belongs to the people who inhabit it. Whenever they shall grow weary of the existing government, they can exercise their constitutional right of amending it or their revolutionary right to dismember or overthrow it.
Government | People | Right | Wisdom |
Let us have faith that right makes right, and in that faith, let us, to the end, dare to do our duty as we understand it.
Duty | Faith | Right | Wisdom | Understand |
The fundamental rights, like the right to existence and life; the right to personal freedom or to conduct one’s own life as master of oneself and of one’s acts, responsible for them before God and the law of the community; the right to the pursuit of the perfection of moral and rational human life; the right to keep one’s body whole; the right to private ownership of material goods, which is a safeguard of the liberties of the individual; the right to marry according to one’s choice and to raise a family which will be assured of the liberties due it; the right of association, the respect for human dignity in each individual, whether or not he represents an economic value for society - all these rights are rooted in the vocation of the person (a spiritual and free agent) to the order of absolute values and to a destiny superior to time.
Absolute | Association | Body | Choice | Conduct | Destiny | Dignity | Existence | Family | Freedom | God | Individual | Law | Life | Life | Order | Perfection | Personal freedom | Respect | Right | Rights | Society | Time | Will | Wisdom | Society | Respect | God | Value |
Every man is born with a double right. First, a right of freedom to his person, which no other man has a owner over, but the free disposal of it lies in himself. Secondly, a right before any other man, to inherit, with his brethren, his father’s goods.
Friedrich Nietzsche, fully Friedrich Wilhelm Nietzsche
Has anyone at the end of the nineteenth century a distinct conception of what poets of strong ages call inspiration? If not, I will describe it. If one had the slightest residue of superstition left in one, one would hardly be able to set aside the idea that one is merely incarnation, merely mouthpiece, merely medium of overwhelming forces. The concept of revelation , in the sense that something suddenly, with unspeakable certainty and subtlety, becomes visible, audible, something that shakes and overturns one to the depths, simply describes the fact. One hears, one does not seek; one takes, one does not ask who gives; a thought flashes up like lightning, with necessity, unfalteringly formed - I have never had any choice... Everything is in the highest degree involuntary but takes place as in a tempest of a feeling of freedom, of absoluteness, of power, of divinity... The involuntary nature of image, of metaphor is the most remarkable thing of all; one no longer has any idea what is image, what metaphor, everything presents itself as the readiest, the truest, the simplest means of expression.
Choice | Divinity | Freedom | Inspiration | Means | Nature | Necessity | Power | Revelation | Sense | Superstition | Thought | Will | Wisdom | Thought |
Friedrich Nietzsche, fully Friedrich Wilhelm Nietzsche
It is absurd to speak of right and wrong per se. Injury, violation, exploitation, annihilation, cannot be wrong in themselves, for life essentially presupposes injury, violation, exploitation, and annihilation.
Robert C. Pooley, fully Robert Cecil Pooley
Our responsibility as educators is to teach youth to have respect for those who differ from the customary ways as well as for those who conform. In simpler words, we have a profound obligation both to education and to society itself to support and strengthen the right to be different, and to create a sound respect for intellectual superiority.
Education | Obligation | Respect | Responsibility | Right | Society | Sound | Superiority | Teach | Wisdom | Words | Youth | Society | Respect | Youth |
What man in his right mind would conspire his own hurt? Men are beside themselves when they transgress against their convictions.
Whatever life is (and nobody can define it) it is something forever changing shape, fleeting, escaping us into death. Life is indeed the only thing that can die, and it begins to die as soon as it is born, and never ceases dying. Each of us is constantly experiencing cellular death. For the renewal of our tissues means a corresponding death of them, so that death and rebirth become, biologically, right and left hand of the same thing. All growing is at the same time a dying away from that which lived yesterday.