This site is dedicated to the memory of Dr. Alan William Smolowe who gave birth to the creation of this database.
Under these circumstances, silence among such a large group of people is an uncomfortable thing to experience. Guilt spreads around even to those who have nothing to feel guilty about. Many held their breath. Or, as I heard later, many did what me and my mum did and closed their eyes. We closed our eyes in a bid to remove ourselves.
Randolph Bourne, fully Randolph Silliman Bourne
Society is one vast conspiracy for carving one into the kind of statue likes, and then placing it in the most convenient niche it has.
The millions of human beings who were shot, tortured, starved, treated like animals and made the object of a conspiracy of ridicule, can sleep in peace in their communal graves, for at least the struggle in which they died has enabled their descendants, isolated in their air-conditioned apartments, to believe, on the strength of their daily dose of television, that they are happy and free. The Communards went down, fighting to the last, so that you too could qualify for a Caribbean cruise.
Conspiracy | Fighting | Happy | Object | Peace | Strength | Struggle |
Reinhold Niebuhr, fully Karl Paul Reinhold Niebuhr
Our dreams of a pure virtue are dissolved in a situation in which it is possible to exercise the virtue of responsibility toward a community of nations only by courting the prospective guilt of the atomic bomb.
Dreams | Guilt | Nations | Responsibility | Virtue | Virtue |
If only everybody would agree to be a dove, every single individual would benefit. By simple group selection, any group in which all individuals mutually agree to be doves would be far more successful than a rival group sitting at the ESS (Evolutionary Stable Strategy) ratio.... Group selection theory would therefore predict a tendency to evolve towards an all-dove conspiracy... But the trouble with conspiracies, even those that are to everybody's advantage in the long run, is that they are open to abuse. It is true that everybody does better in an all-dove group than he would in an ESS group. But unfortunately, in conspiracies of doves, a single hawk does so extremely well that nothing could stop the evolution of hawks. The conspiracy is therefore bound to be broken by treachery from within. An ESS is stable, not because it is particularly good for the individuals participating in it, but simply because it is immune to treachery from within.
Better | Conspiracy | Evolution | Good | Individual | Nothing | Treachery | Trouble |
As a member of the avant-garde who is capable of perceiving the conspiracy before it is fully obvious to an as yet unaroused public, the paranoid is a militant leader. He does not see social conflict as something to be mediated and compromised, in the manner of the working politician. Since what is at stake is always a conflict between absolute good and absolute evil, what is necessary is not compromise but the will to fight things out to a finish. Since the enemy is thought of as being totally evil and totally unappeasable, he must be totally eliminated
Absolute | Conspiracy | Enemy | Evil | Good | Thought | Will | Thought |
If you want to have order in the commonwealth, you first have to have order in the individual soul.
Attainment | Conspiracy | Duty | Man | Men | Rights | Woman |
Saint Francis of Assisi, born Giovanni Francesco di Bernardone NULL
Should there be a brother anywhere in the world who has sinned, no matter how great soever his fault may be, let him not go away after he has once seen thy face without showing pity towards him; and if he seek not mercy, ask him if he does not desire it. And by this I will know if you love God and me.
Body | Day | Death | Devil | Guilt | Heart | Knowledge | Lord | Man | Nothing | Sin | Soul | Thought | Will | World | Think | Thought |
Salman Rushdie, fully Sir Ahmed Salman Rushdie
It’s fun to read things when you don't know all the words. Even children love it. One of the things any great children’s writer will tell you is that children like it if in books designed for their age group there is a vocabulary just slightly bigger than theirs.So they come up against weird words, and the weird words excite them. If you describe a small girl in a story as loquacious, it works so much better than talkative. And then some little girl will read the book and her sister will be shooting her mouth off and she will say to her sister, Don't be so loquacious. It is a whole new weapon in her arsenal.
Samuel Johnson, aka Doctor Johnson
How is it that we hear the loudest yelps for liberty among the drivers of negroes?
Guilt |
This is the attitude of the A. F. of L. on the color question. If a man or set of men array themselves for any cause against the interest of the workers their organizations have the right to say that their membership is barred. It should be at the wrong-doer against labor, it should not be a nationality or a race against whom the doors are barred.
Conspiracy | Effort | Improvement | Public | Purpose | Purpose | Right | Sentiment | Time |
Sigmund Freud, born Sigismund Schlomo Freud
In general people experience their present naively, as it were, without being able to form an estimate of its contents; they have first to put themselves at a distance from it — the present, that is to say, must have become the past — before it can yield points of vantage from which to judge the future.
Guilt | Inferiority | Meaning | Organic | Regard | Right | Self-perception | Sense | Child |
Sigmund Freud, born Sigismund Schlomo Freud
Man found that he was faced with the acceptance of "spiritual" forces, that is to say such forces as cannot be comprehended by the senses, particularly not by sight, and yet having undoubted, even extremely strong, effects. If we may trust to language, it was the movement of the air that provided the image of spirituality, since the spirit borrows its name from the breath of wind (animus, spiritus, Hebrew: ruach = smoke). The idea of the soul was thus born as the spiritual principle in the individual ... Now the realm of spirits had opened for man, and he was ready to endow everything in nature with the soul he had discovered in himself.
Body | Consciousness | Contemplation | Death | Distinction | Evil | Existence | Future | Grief | Guilt | Individual | Life | Life | Thought | Contemplation | Thought |
Algebra and money are essentially levelers; the first intellectually, the second effectively.
Crime | Guilt | Self-hatred | Sense | Soul |
Simone de Beauvoir, fully Simone-Ernestine-Lucie-Marie Bertrand de Beauvoir
The body is not a thing, it is a situation: it is our grasp on the world and our sketch of our project.
Conspiracy | Fate | Mankind | Proletariat | Question | Society | Fate | Society |
Simone de Beauvoir, fully Simone-Ernestine-Lucie-Marie Bertrand de Beauvoir
Even if one is neither vane nor self-obsessed, it is so extraordinary to be oneself - exactly oneself and no one else - and so unique, that it seems natural that one should also be unique for someone else.
The human race is just a chemical scum on a moderate-sized planet, orbiting around a very average star in the outer suburb of one among a hundred billion galaxies. We are so insignificant that I can't believe the whole universe exists for our benefit. That would be like saying that you would disappear if I closed my eyes.
When they are preparing for war, those who rule by force speak most copiously about peace until they have completed the mobilization process.
Conscience | Good | Guilt | Little |