This site is dedicated to the memory of Dr. Alan William Smolowe who gave birth to the creation of this database.
What a commission it is to speak a future that none think imaginable! Of course that cannot be done by inventing new symbols for that is wishful thinking. Rather it means to move back into the deepest memories of this community and activate those very symbols that have always been the very basis for contradicting the regnant consciousness. Therefore the symbols of hope cannot be general and universal but must be those that have been known concretely in this particular history. And when the prophet returns with the community to those deep symbols they will discern that hope is not a late tacked on hypothesis to serve a crisis but rather the primal dimension of every memory of this community. The memory of this community begins in God's promissory address to the darkness of chaos, to barren Sarah, and to oppressed Egyptian slaves. The speech of God is first about an alternative future.
The greater of all perplexities in theology has been to reconcile the infinite goodness of God with His omnipotence.
Walt Whitman, fully Walter "Walt" Whitman
What chemistry! That the winds are really not infectious, that this is no cheat, this transparent green-wash of the sea which is so amorous after me, that it is safe to allow it to lick my naked body all over with its tongues, that it will not endanger me with the fevers that have deposited themselves in it, that all is clean forever and forever,
Walter J. Ong, fully Walter Jackson Ong
The grapholect bears the marks of the millions of minds which have used it to share their consciousnesses with one another. Into it has been hammered a massive vocabulary of an order of magnitude impossible for an oral tongue. Webster's Third New World Dictionary (1971) states in its Preface that it could have included "many times" more than the 450,000 words it does include. Assuming that "many times" must mean at least three times, and rounding out the figures, we can understand that the editors have on hand a record of some million and a half words used in print in English. Oral languages and oral dialects can get along with perhaps five thousand words or less.
Walter J. Ong, fully Walter Jackson Ong
By removing words from the world of sound where they had first had their origin in active human interchange and relegating them definitively to visual surface, and by otherwise exploiting visual space for the management of knowledge, print encouraged human beings to think of their own interior conscious and unconscious resources as more and more thing-like, impersonal and religiously neutral. Print encouraged the mind to sense that its possessions were held in some sort of inert mental space.
Meaning | Need | Precision | Rest | Words | Writing | Precision |
Walter J. Ong, fully Walter Jackson Ong
Most persons are distressed, and many depressed, to learn that essentially the same objections commonly urged today against computers were urged by Plato in the Phaedrus and in the Seventh Letter against writing. Writing, Plato has Socrates say in the Phaedrus, is inhumane pretending to establish outside the mind what in reality can be only in the mind. It is a thing, a manufactured product.
Consciousness | Individual | Knowledge | Meaning | Sense | System | Unique | Words | Writing |
Warren Bennis, fully Warren Gamaliel Bennis
Great Groups need to know that the person at the top will fight like a tiger for them.
Change | Life | Life | Meaning | Opportunity | People | Search | Think |
Wang Yang-Ming or Yangming, aka Wang Shouren or Wang Shou-jen, courtesy name Bo'an
I say there are no principles but those of the mind, and nothing exists apart from the mind.
Blessings | Distinguish | Earth | Evil | Fortune | Good | Heaven | Intelligence | Man | Men | Will |
Warren Buffett, fully Warren Edward Buffett, aka Oracle of Omaha
I’ve seen more people fail because of liquor and leverage – leverage being borrowed money. You really don’t need leverage in this world much. If you’re smart, you’re going to make a lot of money without borrowing.
Warren Buffett, fully Warren Edward Buffett, aka Oracle of Omaha
I've seen more people fail because of liquor and leverage - leverage being borrowed money. You really don't need leverage in this world much. If you're smart, you're going to make a lot of money without borrowing.
A mother is the truest friend we have, when trials heavy and sudden, fall upon us; when adversity takes the place of prosperity; when friends who rejoice with us in our sunshine desert us; when trouble thickens around us, still will she cling to us, and endeavor by her kind precepts and counsels to dissipate the clouds of darkness, and cause peace to return to our hearts.
Evil | Father | Good | Love | Mother | Promise | Child | Think |
Wei Wu Wei, pen name for Terence James Stannus Gray
Let us live gladly! Quite certainly we are free to do it. Perhaps it is our only freedom, but ours it is, and it is only phenomenally a freedom. "Living free" is being "as one is." Can we not do it now? Indeed can we not-do-it? It is not even a "doing": It is beyond doing and not-doing. It is being as-we-are.
Authority | Meaning | Metaphysics | Method | People | Question | Sense | Understand |
Wayne Dyer, fully Wayne Walter Dyer
Transformation is the ability and willingness to live beyond your form.
Wei Wu Wei, pen name for Terence James Stannus Gray
Are we not wasps who spend all day in a fruitless attempt to traverse a window-pane – while the other half of the window is wide open?
Evil |