This site is dedicated to the memory of Dr. Alan William Smolowe who gave birth to the creation of this database.
The cosmic religious experience is the strongest and the noblest driving force behind scientific research.
Experience | Force | Research | Wisdom |
The fear of losing one's job has kept education in America fifty years behind its possible improvement.
Education | Fear | Improvement | Wisdom |
The fear of losing one's job has kept education in America fifty years behind its possible improvement.
Education | Fear | Improvement | Wisdom |
An education isn't how much you have committed to memory, or even how much you know. It's being able to differentiate between what you do know and what you don't. It's knowing where to go to find out what you need to know; and it's knowing how to use the information once you get it.
Getting education is like getting measles; you have to go where the measles is.
We have in America the largest public school system on earth, the most expensive college buildings, the most extensive curriculum, but nowhere else is education so blind to its objectives, so indifferent to any specific outcome as in America. One trouble has been at the repression of faults rather than creation of virtues.
Earth | Education | Objectives | Public | System | Wisdom | Trouble |
David Gardner, fully David Pierpont Gardner
We learn simply by the exposure of living. Much that passes for education is not education at all but ritual. The fact is that we are being educated when we know it least.
Virginia Gildersleeve, fully Virginia Crocheron Gildersleeve
The ability to think straight, some knowledge of the past, some vision of the future, some skill to do useful service some urge to fit that service into the well-being of the community - these are the most vital things education must try to produce.
Ability | Education | Future | Knowledge | Past | Service | Skill | Vision | Wisdom | Think |
Sigmund Freud, born Sigismund Schlomo Freud
Religion is an attempt to get control over the sensory world, in which we are placed, by means of the wish-world, which we have developed inside us as a result of biological and psychological necessities. But it cannot achieve its end. Its doctrines carry with them the stamp of the times in which they originated, the ignorant childhood days of the human race. Its consolations deserve no trust. Experience teaches us that the world is not a nursery. The ethical commands, to which religion seeks to lend its weight, require some other foundations instead, for human society cannot do without them, and it is dangerous to link up obedience to them with religious belief. If one attempts to assign to religion its place in man’s evolution, it seems not so much to be a lasting acquisition, as a parallel to the neurosis which the civilized individual must pass through on his way from childhood to maturity.
Belief | Childhood | Control | Evolution | Experience | Human race | Individual | Man | Means | Obedience | Race | Religion | Society | Trust | Wisdom | World | Society |
One of the chief objects of education should be to widen the windows through which we view the world.
The free expression of opinion, as experience has taught us, is the safety-valve of passion.
Experience | Opinion | Passion | Wisdom |
Sigmund Freud, born Sigismund Schlomo Freud
If we may assume as an experience admitting of no exception that everything living dies from causes within itself, and returns to the inorganic, we can only say “the goal of all life is death,” and, casting back, “The inanimate was there before the animate.”
Death | Experience | Life | Life | Wisdom |