This site is dedicated to the memory of Dr. Alan William Smolowe who gave birth to the creation of this database.
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.
The animosity which Nations reciprocally entertain is nothing more than what the policy of their Governments excites to keep up the spirit of the system. Each Government accuses the other of perfidy, intrigue, and ambition, as a means of heating the imagination of their respective Nations, and incensing them to hostilities. Man is not the enemy of Man, but through the medium of a false system of Government.
Ambition | Enemy | Government | Imagination | Intrigue | Man | Means | Nations | Nothing | Perfidy | Policy | Spirit | System | Government |
Richard Niebuhr, fully Helmut Richard Niebuhr
We know tradition as a living social process constantly changing, constantly in need of criticism, but constant also as the continuing memory, value system and habit structure of a society.
Criticism | Habit | Memory | Need | Society | System | Tradition | Value |
Boris Pasternak, fully Boris Leonidovich Pasternak
The great majority of us are required to live a life of constant, systematic duplicity. Your health is bound to be affected if, day after day, you say the opposite of what you feel, if you grovel before what you dislike and rejoice at what brings you nothing but misfortune. Our nervous system isn’t just fiction, it’s a part of our fortune. Our nervous system isn’t just a fiction, it’s a part of our physical body, and our soul exists in space and is inside us, like the teeth in our mouth. It can’t be forever violated with impunity.
Body | Day | Fortune | Health | Life | Life | Majority | Misfortune | Nothing | Soul | Space | System |
When, in countries that are called civilized, we see age going to the workhouse and youth to the gallows, something must be wrong in the system of government.
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 |
Computational irreducibility tends to make infinite questions undecidable. The presence of universality implies that there must at some level be computational irreducibility… This means that today’s mathematics will be viewed as small and surprisingly uncharacteristic sample of what is possible. If a system is computationally irreducible this means that there is in effect a tangible separation between the underlying rules for the system and its overall behavior associated with the irreducible amount of computational work needed to go from one to the other. And it is this separation that the basic origin of the apparent freedom we see in all sorts of system lie – whether those systems are abstract cellular automata or actual living brains.
Abstract | Behavior | Freedom | Mathematics | Means | System | Will | Work |
Replacing religious institutions that are thousands of years old and hostile to reason with a reason-based belief system would transform society in a positive way more than any mere political change or economic-policy change ever could.
Belief | Change | Policy | Reason | Society | System | Society | Old |
The pioneers of a warless world are the [youth] who refuse military service.
In our nation, the people are sovereign, not the government. It is the people, not the media or the financial system or megacorporations or the two political parties, who have the power to create change.
Change | Government | People | Power | System |