This site is dedicated to the memory of Dr. Alan William Smolowe who gave birth to the creation of this database.
Neil Armstrong, fully Neil Alden Armstrong
The important achievement of Apollo was demonstrating that humanity is not forever chained to this planet and our visions go rather further than that and our opportunities are unlimited.
Achievement | Humanity | Important |
Great achievement is usually born of great sacrifice, and is never the result of selfishness.
In an age when violence among school-children is at an unprecedented level, when children are bearing children with little knowledge of how to care for them, when the society and even the schools often concentrate on materialistic messages, it may be unnecessary to argue that we should care more genuinely for our children and teach them to care. However, many otherwise reasonable people seem to believe that our educational problems consist largely of low scores on achievement tests.
Achievement | Age | Care | Children | Knowledge | Little | People | Problems | Society | Teach | Society |
Nelson Mandela, fully Nelson Rolihlahla Mandela
The victory of democracy in South Africa is the common achievement of all humanity.
Achievement | Democracy |
We want our children to become warm, decent human beings who reach out generously to those in need. We hope they find values and ideals to give their lives purpose so they contribute to the world and make it a better place because they have lived in it. Intelligence, success, and high achievement are worthy goals, but they mean nothing if our children are not basically kind and loving people.
Achievement | Better | Children | Hope | Ideals | Nothing | Purpose | Purpose | World |
Optimism is essential to achievement and it is also the foundation of courage and true progress.
Achievement | Courage |
Paul Feyerabend, fully Paul Karl Feyerabend
Even bold and revolutionary thinkers bow to the judgment of science. Kropotkin wants to break up all existing institutions, but he does not touch science. Ibsen goes very far in his critique of bourgeois society, but he retains science as a measure of truth. Levi Strauss has made us realize that Western thought is not the lonely peak of human achievement it was once thought to be, but he and his followers exclude science from their relativization of ideologies. Marx and Engels were convinced that science would aid the workers in their quest for mental and social liberation.
Achievement | Aid | Judgment | Science | Thinkers | Thought | Wants | Thought |
One of the gravest obstacles to the achievement of liberation is that oppressive reality absorbs those within it and thereby acts to submerge human beings’ consiousness. Functionally, oppression is domesticating. To no longer be prey to its force, one must emerge from it and turn upon it. This can be done only by means of the praxis(practice): reflection and action upon the world in order to transform it.
Achievement | Action | Means | Oppression | Order | Reality | Reflection | World |
Piet Mondrian, fully Pieter Cornelis "Piet" Mondriaan, after 1906 Mondrian
Art on the contrary sought this harmony in practice (of art itself). More and more in its creations it has given inwardness to that what surrounds us in nature, until, in Neo-Plasticism, nature is no longer dominant. This achievement of balance may prepare the way for the fulfilment of man and signal the end of (what we call) art.
Achievement | Art | Balance | Harmony | Man | Nature | Practice | Art |
Pierre-Simon Laplace, Compte de Laplace, Marquis de Laplace
It is India that gave us the ingenious method of expressing all numbers by means of ten symbols, each symbol receiving a value of position as well as an absolute value a profound and important idea which appears so simple to us now that we ignore its true merit. But its very simplicity and the great ease which it has lent to computations put our arithmetic in the first rank of useful inventions and we shall appreciate the grandeur of the achievement the more when we remember that it escaped the genius of Archimedes and Apollonius, two of the greatest men produced by antiquity.
Absolute | Achievement | Genius | Important | Means | Men | Method | Position | Rank | Simplicity | Value |
Ronald Knox, fully Ronald Arbuthnott Knox
Hope is something that is demanded of us; it is not, then, a mere reasoned calculation of our chances. Nor is it merely the bubbling up of a sanguine temperament; if it is demanded of us, it lies not in the temperament but in the will... Hoping for what? For delivereance from persecution, for immunity from plague, pestilence, and famine...? No, for the grace of persevering in his Christian profession, and for the consequent achievement of a happy immortality. Strictly speaking, then, the highest exercise of hope, supernaturally speaking, is to hope for perseverance and for Heaven when it looks, when it feels, as if you were going to lose both one and the other.
Achievement | Grace | Happy | Heaven | Hope | Perseverance |
The aim of science is, on the one hand, as complete a comprehension as possible of the connection between perceptible experiences in their totality, and, on the other hand, the achievement of this aim by employing a minimum of primary concepts and relations.
Achievement | Science |
Ralph A. Habas, fully Ralph Alfred Habas
Even the best inborn potentialities for achievement do not render unnecessary patient and persistent practice.
Ram Dass, aka Baba Ram Dass, born Richard Alpert
My whole academic career was totally out of Jewish anxiety, and issues surrounding achievement and adequacy.
Reinhold Niebuhr, fully Karl Paul Reinhold Niebuhr
The final wisdom of life requires not the annulment of incongruity but the achievement of serenity within and above it.
Achievement | Life | Life | Serenity | Wisdom |
Richard Bach, fully Richard David Bach
Humanity is not a gift of nature, it is a spiritual achievement to be earned.
Richard Barnet, fully Richard Jackson Barnet
Revolution is a wasteful, destructive, and inhuman engine of political change. It must be allowed to happen if there is nothing better, but the great challenge to human ingenuity is to find alternative paths to economic and political reconstruction, which can bring basic changes without the massive use of violence. The societies of the- Third World can ill afford the economic and human costs of prolonged civil war. But virtually all of the thinking to date about revolutionizing underdeveloped societies through technology rather than through violence has been designed to serve the political interests of the donor country. The avoidance of revolution has been an end in itself, and very little commitment has been made to the achievement of radical political change through nonviolent means in societies needing revolution. A great nation has an inherent problem, and possibly an insoluble one, in devising a strategy for helping another society to remake its political life without injecting its own interests and values and without coming to dominate the weak.
Achievement | Challenge | Change | Commitment | Ingenuity | Life | Life | Little | Means | Nothing | Revolution | Society | Technology | Thinking | World | Society | Ingenuity |
And what corresponds to inching up the kindly, grassy slopes on the other side of the mountain? It is the slow, cumulative, one-step-at-a-time, non-random survival of random variants that Darwin called natural selection. The metaphor of Mount Improbable dramatizes the mistake of the sceptics quoted at the beginning of this chapter. Where they went wrong was to keep their eyes fixed on the vertical precipice and its dramatic height. They assumed that the sheer cliff was the only way up to the summit on which they are perched eyes and protein molecules and other supremely improbable arrangements of parts. It was Darwin's great achievement to discover the gentle gradients winding up the other side of the mountain.
Achievement | Beginning | Mistake | Survival | Wrong |
Robert Bork, fully Robert Heron Bork
If we recognize reward according to race, ethnicity, and sex as aspects or analogues of the blood principle, it is obvious how far the achievement principle has been discarded in America today in the name of equality.
Achievement | Reward |
The truth is that art does not teach; it makes you feel, and any teaching that may arise from the feeling is an extra, and must not be stressed too much. In the modern world, and in Canada as much as anywhere, we are obsessed with the notion that to think is the highest achievement of mankind, but we neglect the fact that thought untouched by feeling is thin, delusive, treacherous stuff.
Achievement | Art | Neglect | Thought | Truth | Art | Think | Thought |