This site is dedicated to the memory of Dr. Alan William Smolowe who gave birth to the creation of this database.
The mind of man, though perhaps the most splendid achievement of evolution, is not, surely, that answer to every problem of the universe. Hamlet suffers, but the Gravediggers go right on with their silly quibbles.
Achievement | Mind | Right |
You must intensify and render continuous by repeatedly presenting with suggestive ideas and mental pictures of the feast of good things, and the flowing fountain, which awaits the successful achievement or attainment of the desires.
Achievement | Attainment | Good | Ideas |
When an employer has a mass of unorganized working people working for him he is master of all he surveys, and any attempt upon the part of the workmen to petition or request a change is looked upon by him as a rebellion. It is an insult to his position and to his dignity, because he, in his mind, has furnished them with work and with the means by which they live. He is perturbed at the idea that his position as their benefactor has been called into question. On the other hand, the workmen, who have been docile all this time, who have regarded the employer as omnipotent and all powerful, when they finally revolt in desperation against this one-sided arrangement, when they are for a while -- possibly a short while -- out, they imagine themselves all powerful, and the employer as having no power at all.
The greatest enemy of progress is not stagnation, but false progress.
Sigmund Freud, born Sigismund Schlomo Freud
We are certainly getting ahead if I am Moses, then you are Joshua and will take possession of the promised land of psychiatry, which I shall only be able to glimpse from afar.
Achievement | Better | Cause | Civilization | Death | Duty | Existence | Illusion | Life | Life | Little | Man | Question | Reality | Truth | War | Will |
Free speech, exercised both individually and through a free press, is a necessity in any country where people are themselves free.
Achievement | Success |
Theodore Rubin, fully Theodore Isaac Rubin
Have you considered that if you don't make waves, nobody including yourself will know that you are alive?
Achievement | Work |
Gentlemen: you have now reached the last point. If anyone of you doesn’t mean business let him say so now. An hour from now will be too late to back out. Once in, you’ve got to see it through. You’ve got to perform without flinching whatever duty is assigned you, regardless of the difficulty or the danger attending it. If it is garrison duty, you must attend to it. If it is meeting fever, you must be willing. If it is the closest kind of fighting, anxious for it. You must know how to ride, how to shoot, how to live in the open. Absolute obedience to every command is your first lesson. No matter what comes you mustn’t squeal. Think it over — all of you. If any man wishes to withdraw he will be gladly excused, for others are ready to take his place.
Absolute | Achievement | Business | Civilization | Effort | Equality | Freedom | Good | Individual | Justice | Liberty | Life | Life | Man | Men | People | Progress | Reason | Reward | Rights | Spirit | Worth | Business | Learn | Understand |
Among the wise and high-minded people who in self-respecting and genuine fashion strive earnestly for peace, there are the foolish fanatics always to be found in such a movement and always discrediting it — the men who form the lunatic fringe in all reform movements.
Achievement | Better | Chance | Comfort | Health | Life | Life | Man | Nothing | Object | Qualities | Right | Sympathy | Woman | Work | Worth |
As regards capital cases, the trouble is that emotional men and women always see only the individual whose fate is up at the moment, and neither his victim nor the many millions of unknown individuals who would in the long run be harmed by what they ask. Moreover, almost any criminal, however brutal, has usually some person, often a person whom he has greatly wronged, who will plead for him. If the mother is alive she will always come, and she cannot help feeling that the case in which she is so concerned is peculiar, that in this case a pardon should be granted. It was really heartrending to have to see the kinfolk and friends of murderers who were condemned to death, and among the very rare occasions when anything governmental or official caused me to lose sleep were times when I had to listen to some poor mother making a plea for a criminal so wicked, so utterly brutal and depraved, that it would have been a crime on my part to remit his punishment.
Achievement | Business | Duty | Energy | Fortune | Good | Life | Life | Man | Means | Need | Power | Success | Wife | Woman | Business |
You and I toiling for earth may at the same time be toiling for heaven, and every day's work may be a Jacob's ladder reaching up nearer to God.
Achievement | Commerce | Day | Eternity | Fear | God | Gold | Heart | Ideas | Love | Men | Omnipotence | Praise | Religion | Temptation | Truth | Will | Commerce | God | Temptation |
The absence of effective State, and, especially, national, restraint upon unfair money-getting has tended to create a small class of enormously wealthy and economically powerful men, whose chief object is to hold and increase their power. The prime need to is to change the conditions which enable these men to accumulate power which it is not for the general welfare that they should hold or exercise.
Achievement | Charity | Consideration | Equality | Moderation | Patience | People | Policy | Problems | Resolution | Spirit | Moderation |
Firstly, the primary status of the universe. The universe is, ‘the only self-referential reality in the phenomenal world. It is the only text without context. Everything else has to be seen in the context of the universe’. The second element is the significance of story, and in particular the universe as story. ‘The universe story is the quintessence of reality. We perceive the story. We put it in our language, the birds put it in theirs, and the trees put it in theirs. We can read the story of the universe in the trees. Everything tells the story of the universe. The winds tell the story, literally, not just imaginatively. The story has its imprint everywhere, and that is why it is so important to know the story. If you do not know the story, in a sense you do not know yourself; you do not know anything.’
Achievement | Addiction | Consequences | Control | Difficulty | Energy | Global | Individual | Order | Society | Society |
Wave on wave of life expansion took place for 65 million years. What we are doing when we extinguish the species of trees, extinguish the animals, extinguish the rainforest, we are negating 65 million years of effort. It's not that we are changing human history, we are changing Earth history; we're not just changing human life, we are bringing about a disastrous change in the total life development of the planet Earth.
Achievement | Earth | Energy | Existence | Nothing | Story | Will |
The only popularity worth aspiring after is a peaceful popularity—the popularity of the heart—the popularity that is won in the bosom of families and at the side of death-beds. There is another, a high and a far-sounding popularity, which is indeed a most worthless article, felt by all who have it most to be greatly more oppressive than gratifying,—a popularity of stare, and pressure, and animal heat, and a whole tribe of other annoyances which it brings around the person of its unfortunate victim,—a popularity which rifles home of its sweets, and by elevating a man above his fellows places him in a region of desolation, where the intimacies of human fellowship are unfelt, and where he stands a conspicuous mark for the shafts of malice, and envy, and detraction,—a popularity which, with its head among storms, and its feet on the treacherous quicksands, has nothing to lull the agonies of its tottering existence but the hosannahs of a drivelling generation.
Achievement | Education | Future | Habit | Law | Man | Righteousness | Time | Virtue | Virtue |
O poor mortals, how ye make this earth bitter for each other.
Achievement | Man | Obstacle |
There is a set of people whom I cannot bear—the pinks of fashionable propriety,—whose every word is precise, and whose every movement is unexceptionable, but who, though versed in all the categories of polite behaviour, have not a particle of soul or cordiality about them. We allow that their manners may be abundantly correct. There may be eloquence in every gesture, and gracefulness in every position; not a smile out of place, and not a step that would not bear the measurement of the severest scrutiny. This is all very fine: but what I want is the heart and gaiety of social intercourse; the frankness that spreads ease and animation around it; the eye that speaks affability to all, that chases timidity from every bosom, and tells every man in the company to be confident and happy. This is what I conceive to be the virtue of the text, and not the sickening formality of those who walk by rule, and would reduce the whole of human life to a wire-bound system of misery and constraint.
Achievement | Conquest | Deeds | Desire | Emotions | Force | Indulgence | Opposition | Power | Resolution | Virtue | Virtue | Worth | Deeds |
Thomas Mann, fully Paul Thomas Mann
Like any lover, he desired to please; suffered agonies at the thought of failure, and brightened his dress with smart ties and handkerchiefs and other youthful touches.
Achievement | Means | Work |
Thomas Mann, fully Paul Thomas Mann
A secret and ardent stirring within the frozen chastity of the universal.
Abstract | Achievement | Age | Ambition | Character | Eternal | Existence | Good | Impulse | Life | Life | Man | Meaning | Organic | Personality | Question | Regard | Silence | Time | Ambition |