This site is dedicated to the memory of Dr. Alan William Smolowe who gave birth to the creation of this database.
As a man is, so he sees. As the eye is formed, such are its powers.
Willa Cather, fully Willa Sibert Cather
Art, it seems to me, should simplify. That, indeed, is very nearly the whole of the higher artistic process; finding what conventions of form and what detail one can do without and yet preserve the spirit of the whole - so that all that one has suppressed and cut away is there to the reader's consciousness as much as if it were in type on the page.
Wernher von Braun, fully Wernher Magnus Maximilian, Freiherr von Braun
It [space travel] will free man from his remaining chains, the chains of gravity which still tie him to this planet. It will open to him the gates of heaven.
Age | Bible | Destroy | Enough | God | Good | History | Knowledge | Law | Moral law | Nature | Power | Question | Revelation | Science | Space | God | Bible | Learn |
Werner Heisenberg, fully Werner Karl Heisenberg
The exact sciences also start from the assumption that in the end it will always be possible to understand nature, even in every new field of experience, but that we may make no a priori assumptions about the meaning of the word understand.
Language | Life | Life | Man | Refinement | Science | Theoretical |
Werner Heisenberg, fully Werner Karl Heisenberg
Science no longer is in the position of observer of nature, but rather recognizes itself as part of the interplay between man and nature. The scientific method ... changes and transforms its object: the procedure can no longer keep its distance from the object.
Science |
Wernher von Braun, fully Wernher Magnus Maximilian, Freiherr von Braun
My friends there was dancing here in the streets of Huntsville when our first satellite orbited the earth. There was dancing again when the first Americans landed on the moon. I'd like to ask you, don't hang up your dancing slippers.
Werner Heisenberg, fully Werner Karl Heisenberg
Nature is made in such a way as to be able to be understood. Or perhaps I should put it—more correctly—the other way around, and say that we are made in such a way as to be able to understand Nature.
How, then,' I hear you ask, 'shall I attain my end, whether it be Christian love, socialism, or American democracy?' Your Christian love and your socialism and your American democracy are what you do each day, your manner of thinking each hour, of embracing your life companion and loving your child; they are your attitude of social responsibility towards your work, and your determination not to become like the crushers of life you so hate.
Wilfred Trotter, fully Wilfred Batten Lewis Trotter
The air of caricature never fails to show itself in the products of reason applied relentlessly and without correction. The observation of clinical facts would seem to be a pursuit of the physician as harmless as it is indispensable. [But] it seemed irresistibly rational to certain minds that diseases should be as fully classifiable as are beetles and butterflies. This doctrine ... bore perhaps its richest fruit in the hands of Boissier de Sauvauges. In his Nosologia Methodica published in 1768 ... this Linnaeus of the bedside grouped diseases into ten classes, 295 genera, and 2400 species.
Belief | Experience | Science | Think |
Man's right to know, to learn, to inquire, to make bona fide errors, to investigate human emotions must, by all means, be safe, if the word FREEDOM should ever be more than an empty political slogan.
Civilization | Culture | Distinguish | Dreams | Looks | Man | Peace | Present | Purpose | Purpose | Science |
Wilfred Trotter, fully Wilfred Batten Lewis Trotter
The mind likes a strange idea as little as the body likes a strange protein, and resists it with a similar energy. It would not perhaps be too fanciful to say that a new idea is the most quickly acting antigen known to science. It we watch ourselves honestly, we shall often find that we have begun to argue against a new idea even before it has been completely stated. I have no doubt that that last sentence has already met with repudiation—and shown how quickly the defense mechanism gets to work.
Science |
Walt Whitman, fully Walter "Walt" Whitman
Failing to catch me at first keep encouraged, missing me one place search another, I stop somewhere waiting for you.
Science |
The responsibility for insurrections rest in the last analysis upon the unimaginative greed and endless stupidity of the dominant classes. . . . Confronted with the deep insurgency of labor what do capitalists and their spokesmen do? They resist every demand, submit only after a struggle, and prepare a condition of war to the death.
The notion of a farseeing and despotic statesman, who can lay down plans for ages yet unborn, is a fancy generated by the pride of the human intellect to which facts give no support.
Refinement | Sagacity |
Walter J. Ong, fully Walter Jackson Ong
For oral cultures, the cosmos is an ongoing event with man at its center. Only after print and the extensive experience with maps that print implemented would human beings, when they thought about the cosmos or universe or "world", think primarily of something laid out before their eyes ready to be "explored".
Observation | Science | Survival |