This site is dedicated to the memory of Dr. Alan William Smolowe who gave birth to the creation of this database.
It is an essential part of the scientific enterprise to admit ignorance, even to exult in ignorance as a challenge to future conquests.
Robert J. Shiller, fully Robert James "Bob" Shiller
It amazes me how people are often more willing to act based on little or no data than to use data that is a challenge to assemble.
The people whom the sons and daughters find it hard to understand are the fathers and mothers, but young people can get on very well with the grandfathers and grandmothers.
Ronald Reagan, fully Ronald Wilson Reagan
The size of the federal budget is not an appropriate barometer of social conscience or charitable concern.
Challenge | Day | Defense | Mankind | Prison | Security | Technology | Weapons |
Ronald Reagan, fully Ronald Wilson Reagan
They have answered the stirrings of liberty with brute force, killings, mass arrests, and the setting up of concentration camps.
Having been denied formal authority roles in most societies, some women have learned strategies for leading without authority, and some have learned not to try leading at all. The same can be said of many disempowered groups.
As we shall see, a strategy of leadership to accomplish adaptive work accounts for several conditions and values that are consonant with the demands of a democratic society. In addition to reality testing, these include respecting conflict, negotiation, and a diversity of views within a community; increasing community cohesion; developing norms of responsibility-taking, learning, and innovation; and keeping social distress within a bearable range.
Challenge | Distress | Organization | People | Reality |
As a columnist noted in late 1975, ‘Today it is almost as though the war never happened. Americans have somehow blocked it out of their consciousness. They don’t talk about it. They don’t talk about its consequences.’ Vietnam was barely mentioned in the presidential campaign of 1976. It took us nearly a decade before we even began to face the sacrifices, mistakes, and costs of the Vietnam War, before we began to build monuments, make documentaries and films, embrace the soldiers who fought the war, and capture its lessons.’
The absence of authority enables one to deviate from the norms of authoritative decision-making.
Challenge | Conversation | Creativity | Ideas | People |
For Gandhi to challenge these ways of life demanded knowing them deeply, by experience, by operating close to the frontline, where the stakeholders of India lived. Gandhi could speak to people, to their hopes, fears, weaknesses, and needs because he spent time knowing them. He could touch and inspire people because they touched and inspired him.
It should be obvious from reflecting on our daily lives that authority relationships are enormously productive. The human capacity for generating complex systems of authority is essential to our extraordinary adaptability and creativity as social creatures.
Challenge | Problems | Will | Leadership | Learn |
The term ‘holding environment’ originated in psychoanalysis to describe the relationship between the therapist and the patient. The therapist ‘holds’ the patient in a process of developmental learning in a way that has some similarities to the way a mother and father hold their newborn and maturing children. For a child, the holding environment serves as a containing vessel for the developmental steps, problems, crises, and stresses of growing up.
Salman Rushdie, fully Sir Ahmed Salman Rushdie
I haven't seen the book, I have seen the passages that were compared between the two books, I must say I don't accept the idea that this could have been accidentally or innocently done. The passages are too many and the similarities are too extensive.
Whether sixty or sixteen, there is in every human being's heart the lure of wonder, the unfailing child-like appetite of what's next, and the joy of the game of living. In the center of your heart and my heart there is a wireless station; so long as it receives messages of beauty, hope, cheer, courage and power from men and from the infinite, so long are you young.
Simone de Beauvoir, fully Simone-Ernestine-Lucie-Marie Bertrand de Beauvoir
It is not in giving life but in risking life that man is raised above the animal that is why superiority has been accorded in humanity not to the sex that brings forth but to that which kills.
Absolute | Adventure | Challenge | Existence | Humanity | Hypocrisy | Man | Miracles | Nonsense | Opposition | Pleasure | Reciprocity | Slavery | System | Will | Woman | Words |
Starhawk, born Miriam Simos NULL
Spirituality leaps where science cannot yet follow, because science must always test and measure, and much of reality and human experience is immeasurable.
It may be said that natural selection is daily and hourly scrutinizing, throughout the world, every variation, even the slightest; rejecting that which is bad, preserving and adding up all that is good; silently and invisibly working…We see nothing of theses slow changes in progress until the hand of time has marked the long lapse of ages.
Will we ever again be able to view a public object with civic dignity, unencumbered by commercial messages? Must city buses be fully painted as movable ads, lampposts smothered, taxis festooned, even seats in concert halls sold one by one to donors and embellished in perpetuity with their names on silver plaques?