This site is dedicated to the memory of Dr. Alan William Smolowe who gave birth to the creation of this database.
When something an affliction happens to you, you either let it defeat you, or you defeat it.
Affliction | Defeat |
John Steinbeck, fully John Ernst Steinbeck
The writer is delegated to declare and to celebrate man's proven capacity for greatness of heart and spirit - for gallantry in defeat - for courage, compassion and love. In the endless war against weakness and despair, these are the bright rally-flags of hope and of emulation.
Capacity | Compassion | Defeat | Greatness | Heart | Hope | Spirit | War | Weakness |
Imagine there's no heaven, it's easy if you try,no hell below us, above us only sky,imagine all the people, living for today. Imagine there's no countries,it isn't hard to do, nothing to kill or die for, and no religion too,imagine all the people, living life in peace. You may say I'm a dreamer, but I'm not the only one,I hope someday you'll join us, and the world will be as one. Imagine no possessions, I wonder if you can, no need for greed or hunger, a brotherhood of man, imagine all the people, sharing all the world. You may say I'm a dreamer, but I'm not the only one, I hope someday you'll join us, and the world will live as one.
Brotherhood | Greed | Hell | Hope | Kill | Life | Life | Need | Nothing | Religion | Will | Wonder | World |
John F. Kennedy, fully John Fitzgerald "Jack" Kennedy
Victory has a thousand fathers, but defeat is an orphan.
Defeat |
John Steinbeck, fully John Ernst Steinbeck
If everything is coming your way, you are probably in the wrong lane. Adversity and defeat are more conducive to spiritual growth than prosperity and victory.
Adversity | Defeat | Growth | Prosperity | Wrong |
Death may be a supreme spiritual act, turning oneself over to eternity: The moment of death, a moment of ecstasy. A moment of no return to vanity. Thus afterlife is felt to be a reunion and all life a preparation for it… Death is not sensed as a defeat but as a summation, an arrival, a conclusion.
Jack Welch, fully John Francis "Jack" Welch, Jr.
We are constantly amazed by how much people will do when they are not told what to do by management." In the new knowledge-based economy, people should make their own decision. Managing less is managing better. Close supervision, control and bureaucracy kill the competitive spirit of the company. "Weak managers are the killers of business; they are the job killers. You can't manage self-confidence into people.
Jonathan Schell, fully Jonathan Edward Schell
The use of a mere dozen nuclear weapons ... would be a human catastrophe without parallel. ... Because so few weapons can kill so many people, even far-reaching disarmament proposals would leave us implicated in plans for unprecedented slaughter of innocent people. The sole measure that can free us from this burden is abolition.
It has become almost banal to say that the atomic age has fundamentally altered the nature of war. No nuclear power can tell another: “Do as I say or I shall kill you,” but is reduced to saying: “Do as I say or I shall kill us both,” which is an entirely different matter.
To consider the world in its length and breadth, its various history, the many races of man, their starts, their fortunes, their mutual alienation, their conflicts; and then their ways, habits, governments, forms of worship; their enterprises, their aimless courses, their random achievements, and acquirements, the impotent conclusion of long-standing facts, the tokens so faint and broken of a superintending design, the blind evolution of what turn out to be great powers or truths, the progress of things, as if from unreasoning elements, not toward final causes, the greatness and littleness of man, his far-reaching aims, his short duration, the curtain hung over his futurity, the disappointments of life, the defeat of good, the success of evil, physical pain, mental anguish, the prevalence of sin, the pervading idolatries, the corruptions, the dreary hopeless irreligion, that condition of the whole race, so fearfully yet exactly described in the Apostle's words, "having no hope and without God in the world," - all this is a vision to dizzy and appall; and inflicts upon the mind the sense of a profound mystery, which is absolutely beyond human solution.
Defeat | Evolution | God | Greatness | Hope | Mind | Progress | Sense | Success | Vision | World | God |
Karl Popper, fully Sir Karl Raimund Popper
Good tests kill flawed theories; we remain alive to guess again.
Kill |
William O. Douglas, fully Judge William Orville Douglas
Restriction of free thought and free speech is the most dangerous of all subversions. It is the one un-American act that could most easily defeat us.
Defeat | Free speech | Speech | Thought | Thought |
Lester Thurow, fully Lester Carl Thurow, aka L.C. Thurow
No country without a revolution or a military defeat and subsequent occupation has ever experienced such a sharp a shift in the distribution of earnings as America has in the last generation. At no other time have median wages of American men fallen for more than two decades. Never before have a majority of American workers suffered real wage reductions while the per capita domestic product was advancing.
Defeat | Majority | Men | Occupation | Revolution | Time |