This site is dedicated to the memory of Dr. Alan William Smolowe who gave birth to the creation of this database.
"Today education is perhaps the most important function of state and local governments. Compulsory school attendance laws and the great expenditures for education both demonstrate our recognition of the importance of education to our democratic society. It is required in the performance of our most basic public responsibilities, even service in the armed forces. It is the very foundation of good citizenship. Today it is a principal instrument in awakening the child to cultural values, in preparing him for later professional training, and in helping him to adjust normally to his environment. In these days, it is doubtful that any child may reasonably be expected to succeed in life if he is denied the opportunity of an education. Such an opportunity, where the state has undertaken to provide it, is a right which must be made available to all on equal terms." - Brown v. Board of Education NULL
"Education is the process by which the individual relates himself to the universe, gives himself citizenship in the changing world, shares the race's mind and enfranchises his own soul." - John Huston Finley
"There is a freedom greater even than the freedom conferred by citizenship and the possession of full human rights. It is the freedom of the soul - of the soul that "walks at liberty because it has sought God's precepts," that visualizes the best and strenuously aspires after it. The greatest of boons has still to be attained." - Morris Joseph
"The best way to teach our young people the meaning of our democratic freedoms is to demonstrate, by our own example, that we have mastered the 'three R's of citizenship' - Rights, Respects, and Responsibilities." - Earl James McGrath
"How are we to bring children to the spirit of citizenship and humanity which is postulated by democratic societies? By the actual practice of democracy at school. It is unbelievable that at a time when democratic ideas enter into every phase of life, they should have been so little utilized as instruments of education." - Jean Piaget
"Justice is the first virtue of social institutions, as truth is of systems of thought. A theory however elegant and economical must be rejected or revised if it is untrue; likewise laws and institutions no matter how efficient and well-arranged must be reformed or abolished if they are unjust. Each person possesses an inviolability founded on justice that even the welfare of society as a whole cannot override. For this reason justice denies that the loss of freedom for some is made right by a greater good shared by others. It does not allow that the sacrifices imposed on a few are outweighed by the larger sum of advantages enjoyed by many. Therefore in a just society the liberties of equal citizenship are taken as settled; the rights secured by justice are not subject to political bargaining or to the calculus of social interests." - John Rawls, fully John Bordley Rawls
"Fortunately or otherwise we live at a time when the average individual has to know several times as much in order to keep informed as he did only thirty or forty years ago. Being "educated" today requires not only more than a superficial knowledge of the arts and sciences, but a sense of interrelationship such as is taught in few schools. Finally, being "educated" today, in terms of the larger needs, means preparation for world citizenship; in short, education for survival." - Norman Cousins
"There can be no daily democracy without daily citizenship." - Ralph Nader
"Each person possesses and inviolability founded on justice that even the welfare of society as a whole cannot override. For this reason, justice denies that the loss of freedom for some is made right by a greater good shared by others. It does not allow that the sacrifices imposed on a few are outweighed by the larger sum of advantages enjoyed by many. Therefore in a just society the liberties of equal citizenship are taken as settled; the rights secured by justice are not subject to political bargaining or to the calculus of social interests. The only thing that permits us to acquiesce in an erroneous theory is the lack of a better one; analogously, an injustice is tolerable only when it is necessary to avoid an even greater injustice. Being first virtues of human activities, truth and justice are uncompromising" - John Rawls, fully John Bordley Rawls
"Freedom includes the right to say what others may object to and resent. . . The essence of citizenship is to be tolerant of strong and provocative words." - John Diefenbaker, fully John George Diefenbaker
"Because they claim to be concerned with the welfare of whole societies, governments arrogate to themselves the right to pass off as mere abstract profit or loss the human unhappiness that their decisions provoke or their negligence permits. It is a duty of an international citizenship to always bring the testimony of people's suffering to the eyes and ears of governments, sufferings for which it's untrue that they are not responsible. The suffering of men must never be a mere silent residue of policy. It grounds an absolute right to stand up and speak to those who hold power." - Michel Foucault
"Peter wanted a fellowship with Christ without consequence--official reprisal, ostracism, torture, execution. We want citizenship in the empire and its attendant goodies--a 'deterrent' nuclear blanket and the 'right' to consume seven times our share of the world's output, without consequences--war, ecological devastation, death in the Third and Fourth Worlds. We Christians forget (if we ever learned) that attempts to redress real or imagined injustice by violent means are merely another exercise in denial--denial of God and her nonviolence towards us, denial of love of neighbor, denial of laws essential to our being. 'I do not know the man' takes many forms, suffers many translations. But all end the same--a denial of our humanity, our daughtership or sonship in God." - Philip Berrigan
"I am by heritage a Jew, by citizenship a Swiss, and by makeup a human being, and only a human being, without any special attachment to any state or national entity whatsoever." - Albert Einstein
"At some time in our lives a devil dwells within us, causes heartbreaks, confusion and troubles, then dies." - Theodore “Teddy” Roosevelt
"Every man has a right to one country. He has a right to love and serve that country and to feel that it is absolutely his country and that he has in it every right possessed by anyone else. It is our duty to require the man of German blood who is an American citizen to give up all allegiance to Germany wholeheartedly and without on his part any mental reservation whatever. If he does this it becomes no less our duty to give him the full rights of an American, including our loyal respect and friendship without on our part any mental reservation whatever. The duties are reciprocal, and from the standpoint of American patriotism one is as important as the other." - Theodore “Teddy” Roosevelt
"Panics, in some cases, have their uses; they produce as much good as hurt. Their duration is always short; the mind soon grows through them and acquires a firmer habit than before. But their peculiar advantage is, that they are the touchstone of sincerity and hypocrisy, and bring things and men to light, which might have lain forever undiscovered." - Thomas Paine
"If you’re going to have sustainable agriculture, it has to be adapted locally. Local adaptation means that you observe in the economic landscape the same processes that you find in healthy natural landscapes: You must have diversity. You must have both plants and animals. You must waste nothing. You must obey the law of return — that is, you must return to the ground all the nutrients that you take from it. You must protect the soil from erosion at all times. You must make maximum use of sunlight. In those circumstances, you may leave the crops and animals pretty much to fend for themselves against diseases. The farm will have some disease, but it won’t have epidemics. If you look at a healthy forest, for instance, you see some prematurely dead trees, but not massive numbers of them. … It’s the diametric opposite of reductive science, and industrial agriculture is based on reductive science." - Wendell Berry
"In a time of disorder [Laertes] has returned to the care of the earth, the foundation of life and hope. And Odysseus finds him in an act emblematic of the best and most responsible kind of agriculture: an old man caring for a young tree." - Wendell Berry
"When a truth is not given complete freedom, freedom is not complete." - Václav Havel