This site is dedicated to the memory of Dr. Alan William Smolowe who gave birth to the creation of this database.
Henry Kissinger, fully Henry Alfred Kissinger
The convictions that leaders have formed before reaching high office are the intellectual capital they will consume as long as they continue in office. There is little time for leaders to reflect. They are locked in an endless battle in which the urgent constantly gains on the important. The public life of every political figure is a continual struggle to rescue an element of choice from the pressure of circumstance.
Battle | Choice | Convictions | Important | Life | Life | Little | Office | Public | Struggle | Time | Will |
To be infatuated with the power of one’s own intellect is an accident which seldom happens but to those who are remarkable for the want of intellectual power. Whenever Nature leaves a hole in a person’s mind, she generally plasters it over with a thick coat of self-conceit.
Indira Gandhi, fully Indirā Priyadarśinī Gāndhī
Without courage, you cannot practice any other virtue. You have to have courage – courage of different kinds: first, intellectual courage, to sort out different values and make up your mind about which is the one which is right for you to follow. You have to have moral courage to stick up to that – no matter what comes in your way, no matter what the obstacle and the opposition is.
Courage | Mind | Opposition | Practice | Right | Virtue | Virtue | Obstacle |
James Froude, fully James Anthony Froude
Philosophy goes no further than probabilities, and in every assertion keeps doubt in reserve.
Assertion | Doubt | Philosophy | Reserve |
James Froude, fully James Anthony Froude
Morality, when vigorously alive, sees farther than intellect, and provides unconsciously for intellectual difficulties.
Morality |
Race prejudice, in its gravest and most typical form, is the passing judgment of criminality or of essential inferiority upon all the members of a racial or ethnic group, with no sufficient intellectual motive for such a judgment.
Inferiority | Judgment | Prejudice | Race |
Men lose their high aspirations as they lose their intellectual tastes, because they have not time or opportunity for indulging them; and they addict themselves to inferior pleasures, not because they deliberately prefer them, but because they are either the only ones to which they have access, or the only ones which they are any longer capable of enjoying. It may be questioned whether any one who has remained equally susceptible to both classes of pleasures, every knowingly and calmly preferred the lower; though many, in all ages, have broken down in an ineffectual attempt to combine both.
Men | Opportunity | Time |
There is a large difference between indolent impatience of labor and intellectual impatience of delay, large difference between leaving things unfinished because we have more to do or because we are satisfied with what we have done.
Delay | Impatience | Labor |
To be surprised, to wonder, is to begin to understand. This is the sport, the luxury, special to the intellectual man... If anyone in a discussion with us is not concerned with adjusting himself to truth, if he has no wish to find the truth, he is intellectually a barbarian. That, in fact, is the position of the mass-man when he speaks, lectures or writes... The man who discovers a new scientific truth has previously had to smash to atoms almost everything he had learnt, and arrives at the new truth with hands bloodstained from the slaughter of a thousand platitudes.
Discussion | Luxury | Man | Platitudes | Position | Truth | Wonder |
Joseph Chilton Pearce, aka Joe
We have ignored for half a century or more the studies that show some 95 percent of all a child’s learning or “structures of knowledge” form automatically in direct response to interactions with the environment, while only 5 percent form as a result of our verbal teaching or intellectual instruction.
Joseph Chilton Pearce, aka Joe
By observing a supposed objective truth out there, we become passive victims relieved of responsibility. Instead, we can use our eyes in active vision, to see with, not through. Rather than compounding our neighbor’s error through intellectual condemnation of him, we can enter actively into that relationship through our heart. Freeing him from error in our mind’s eye, we open him to deliverance in his own. There is only one heart, and it can take on any form.
Error | Heart | Mind | Relationship | Responsibility | Truth | Vision |
Who would have guessed that, thanks to all the ingenious tie-ins between advertising, entertainment, the popular arts, and the great corporations, the time would come when one of the most obvious aspects of the condition of the average American man is simply this: Most of the news he hears, most of the music he listens to, and most of the drama he witnesses - in fact almost all the intellectual or artistic experience he ever has - is provided by medicine shows.
Advertising | Entertainment | Experience | Man | Music | News | Time |
Joseph Chilton Pearce, aka Joe
A positive emotional state entrains, or unites, our systems for thought, feeling, and action; shifts our concentration and energy toward support of our intellectual and creative forebrain (old mammalian and neocortex); and allows us to both learn and remember easily. In very young children, the primary caregiver’s emotional state determines the child’s state, and therefore the child’s development in general. Any kind of negative response, any form of fear or anger shifts our attention and energy from verbal-intellectual brain to our oldest survival brain. This shift shortchanges our intellect, cripples our learning and memory, and can lock our neocortex into service of our lower brain.
Action | Anger | Attention | Children | Energy | Fear | Learning | Memory | Service | Survival | Thought | Learn |
Mikhail Bakunin, fully Mikhail Alexandrovich Bakunin
All temporal or human authority stems directly from spiritual and/or divine authority. But authority is the negation of freedom. God, or rather the fiction of God, is the consecration and the intellectual and moral source of all slavery on earth, and the freedom of mankind will never be complete until the disastrous and insidious fiction of a heavenly master is annihilated.
Authority | Consecration | Earth | Freedom | God | Mankind | Slavery | Will |