This site is dedicated to the memory of Dr. Alan William Smolowe who gave birth to the creation of this database.
Georg Hegel, fully Georg Wilhelm Friedrich Hegel
In duty the individual finds his liberation; liberation from independence on mere natural impulse.
Duty | Impulse | Individual |
Georg Hegel, fully Georg Wilhelm Friedrich Hegel
Love means in general terms the consciousness of my unity with another, so that I am not in selfish isolation but win my self-consciousness only as the reunification of my independence and through knowing myself as the unity of myself with another and of the other with me. Love, however, is feeling, that is, ethical life in the form of something natural. In the state, feeling disappears; there we are conscious of unity as law; there the content must be rational and known to us. The first moment in love is that I do not wish to be a self-subsistent and independent persona and that, if I were, then I would feel defective and incomplete. The second moment is that I find myself in another person, that I count for something in the other, while the other in turn comes to count for something in me. Love, therefore, is the most tremendous contradiction; the Understanding cannot resolve it since there is nothing more stubborn than this point of self-consciousness which is negated and which nevertheless I ought to possess as affirmative. Love is at once the propounding and the resolving of this contradiction. As the resolving of it, love is unity of an ethical type.
Consciousness | Contradiction | Isolation | Knowing | Law | Life | Life | Love | Means | Nothing | Self | Understanding | Unity |
I wonder whether even in the past total victory was not really an illusion from the standpoint of the victors. In a sense, there is not total victory short of genocide, unless it be a victory over the minds of men. But the total military victories are rarely victories over the minds of men.
Trust in memory, in expectation, in mutual communication of many minds might have issued in a system like modern psychologism: the view that all we see, say, and think is false, but that the only truth is that we see, say and think it. If nothing be real except experience, nothing can be true except biography.
Expectation | Experience | Memory | Nothing | System | Trust | Truth | Think |
Who are the really disloyal? Those who inflame racial hatreds, who sow religious and class dissensions. those who subvert the Constitution by violating the freedom of the ballot box. Those who make a mockery of majority rule by the use of the filibuster. Those who impair democracy by denying equal educational facilities. Those who frustrate justice by lynch law or by making a farce of jury trials. Those who deny freedom of speech and of the press and of assembly. Those who demand special favors against the interest of the commonwealth. Those who regard public office as a source of private gain. Those who exalt the military over the civil. Those who for selfish and private purposes stir up national antagonisms and expose the world to the ruin of war.
Democracy | Freedom of speech | Freedom | Justice | Law | Majority | Mockery | Office | Public | Regard | Rule | Speech | Trials | War | World |
We should take our example not from our political and military leaders shouting “Retaliate!” and “War!” but from the doctors and nurses and medical students and firefighters and police officers who have been saving lives in the midst of mayhem – whose first thoughts are not violence, but healing; not vengeance, but compassion.
Compassion | Example | Vengeance | War |
The money, technology, and human energy now devoted to the military could perform miracles in cleaning up the earth we live on. But the cost of the arms race is not only the enormous waste of resources. There is a psychic cost - the creation of an atmosphere of fear all over the world.
Cost | Earth | Energy | Fear | Miracles | Money | Race | Technology | Waste | World |
Freedom and the consciousness of it as a faculty of following the moral law with unyielding resolution is independence of inclinations, at least as motives determining (though not as affecting) our desire, and so far as I am conscious of this freedom in following my moral maxims, it is the only source of an unaltered contentment which is necessarily connected with it and rests on no special feeling.
Consciousness | Contentment | Desire | Freedom | Law | Maxims | Moral law | Motives | Resolution | Following |
Yes, we have in this country, dominated by corporate wealth and military power and two antiquated political parties, what a fearful conservative characterized as “a permanent adversarial culture” challenging the present, demanding a new future. It is a race in which we can all choose to participate, or to just watch. But we should know that our choice will help determine the outcome.
Choice | Culture | Future | Power | Present | Race | Wealth | Will |
A good educational system should have three purposes: it should provide all who want to learn with access to available resources at anytime in their lives; empower all who want to share what they know to find those who want to learn it from them; and finally, furnish all who want to present an issue to the public with the opportunity to make their challenge known.
Challenge | Good | Opportunity | Present | Public | System | Learn |
If Thomas Jefferson were in Washington yesterday walking down the street, he would have been arrested. He was too young, and he had long hair! And if Jefferson had been carrying the Declaration of Independence with him yesterday, he would have been indicted for conspiring to overthrow the government, along with his co-conspirators George Washington and John Adams and Tom Paine and a lot of others.
Should we welcome the huge growth of the military budget at the expense of health, education, the needs of children, one fifth of whom grow up in poverty? I suggest that a patriotic American who cares for his or her country might act on behalf of a different vision. Instead of being feared for our military prowess, we should want to be respected for our dedication to human rights.
Children | Dedication | Education | Growth | Health | Poverty | Prowess | Rights | Vision |
Instead of sending troops and planes and aircraft carriers, we could send food and medicine. That's what I mean by our becoming a humanitarian superpower instead of a military superpower.
Men pursue riches under the idea that their possession will set them at ease, and above the world. But the law of association often makes those who begin by loving old as a servant finish by becoming themselves its slaves; and independence without wealth is at least as common as wealth without independence.
Association | Law | Men | Riches | Wealth | Will | World | Riches | Association | Old |