This site is dedicated to the memory of Dr. Alan William Smolowe who gave birth to the creation of this database.
This is the attitude of the A. F. of L. on the color question. If a man or set of men array themselves for any cause against the interest of the workers their organizations have the right to say that their membership is barred. It should be at the wrong-doer against labor, it should not be a nationality or a race against whom the doors are barred.
Conspiracy | Effort | Improvement | Public | Purpose | Purpose | Right | Sentiment | Time |
Samuel Johnson, aka Doctor Johnson
An Italian philosopher said that time was his estate; an estate indeed which will produce nothing without cultivation, but will always abundantly repay the labors of industry, and generally satisfy the most extensive desires, if no part of it be suffered to lie in waste by negligence, to be overrun with noxious plants, or laid out for show rather than for use.
Samuel Johnson, aka Doctor Johnson
There is no private house in which people can enjoy themselves so well as at a capital tavern... No, Sir; there is nothing which has yet been contrived by man by which so much happiness is produced as by a good tavern or inn.
Business | History | Improvement | Learning | Progress | Vicissitudes | Business | Govern |
Example teaches better than precept. It is the best modeler of the character of men and women. To set a lofty example is the richest bequest a man can leave behind him.
Samuel Johnson, aka Doctor Johnson
Why, sir, Sherry is dull, naturally dull; but it must have taken him a great deal of pains to become what we now see him. Such an excess of stupidity, Sir, is not in Nature.
Anti-essentialist thinking forces us to view the world differently. We must accept shadings and continua as fundamental. We lose criteria for judgment by comparison to some ideal: short people, retarded people, people of other beliefs, colors, and religions are people of full status.
Important | Improvement | Lesson | Love | Power | Reason | Regard | Science | World | Learn |
We live in an essential and unresolvable tension between our unity with nature and our dangerous uniqueness. Systems that attempt to place and make sense of us by focusing exclusively either on the uniqueness or the unity are doomed to failure. But we must not stop asking and questing because the answers are complex and ambiguous.
Argument | Day | Education | Enough | Good | Hope | Improvement | Little | Money | Problems | Recompense | Teach | Worth | Talent | Teacher | Value |
Management must think of itself not as producing products but as providing customer-creating value satisfactions”, in other words: “buying customer.”
Energy | Ideas | Improvement | Innovation | Life | Life |
It is of little use for us to pay lip-loyalty to the mighty men of the past unless we sincerely endeavor to apply to the problems of the present precisely the qualities which in other crises enabled the men of that day to meet those crises.
Administration | Agitation | Chance | Cunning | Equality | Excess | Improvement | Means | Opportunity | People | Reward | Temptation | Wisdom | Temptation | Think |
Might but the sense of moral evil be as strong in me as is my delight in external beauty!
Suffering times are sealing times. The primitive Christians found them so, and the suffering saints in Mary's days found them so. When the furnace is seven times hotter than ordinary, the Spirit of the Lord comes and seals up a man's pardon in his bosom, his peace with God, and his title to heaven. Blessed Bradford looked upon his sufferings as an evidence to him that he was on the right way to heaven.
Health is worth more than learning.
Ideas | Improvement | Light | Instruction |
The first principle of republicanism is that the lex majoris partis is the fundamental law of every society of individuals of equal rights; to consider the will of the society enounced by the majority of a single vote as sacred as if unanimous is the first of all lessons in importance, yet the last which is thoroughly learnt. This law once disregarded, no other remains but that of force, which ends necessarily in military despotism.
Association | Improvement | Object | Association |
The government is best which governs least.
Government | Improvement | Religion | Will | Government |
That it is their right and duty to be at all times armed; that they are entitled to freedom of person, freedom of religion, freedom of property and freedom
Ideas | Improvement | Instruction |
The danger to which the success of revolutions is most exposed, is that of attempting them before the principles on which they proceed, and the advantages to result from them, are sufficiently seen and understood.
Antiquity | Better | Character | Era | Famous | Improvement | Literature | Rank | Science | World | Circumstance |
Will Durant, fully William James "Will" Durant
The past is not dead. Indeed, it is often not even past.
Enlightenment | Improvement | Mind | Revolution |
My grandfather returned to what he called ‘studying.’ He sat looking down at his lap, his left hand idle on the chair arm, his right scratching his head, his white hair gleaming in the lamplight. I knew that when he was studying he was thinking, but I did not know what about. Now I have aged into knowledge of what he thought about. He thought of his strength and endurance when he was young, his merriment and joy, and how his life’s burdens had then grown upon him. He thought of that arc of country that centered upon Port William as he first had known it in the years just after the Civil War, and as it had changed, and as it had become; and how all that time, which would have seemed almost forever when he was a boy, now seemed hardly anytime at all. He thought of the people he remembered, now dead, and of those who had come and gone before his knowledge, and of those who would come after, and of his own place in that long procession.
Evidence | Heart | History | Hope | Improvement | Individual | Little | Protest | Public | Qualities | Spirit | Success |
W. Edwards Deming, fully William Edwards Deming
That's all window dressing. That's not fundamental. That's not getting at change and the transformation that must take place. Sure we have to solve problems. Certainly stamp out the fire. Stamp out the fire and get nowhere. Stamp out the fires puts us back to where we were in the first place. Taking action on the basis of results without theory of knowledge, without theory of variation, without knowledge about a system. Anything goes wrong, do something about it, overreacting; acting without knowledge, the effect is to make things worse. With the best of intentions and best efforts, managing by results is, in effect, exactly the same, as Dr. Myron Tribus put it, while driving your automobile, keeping your eye on the rear view mirror, what would happen? And that's what management by results is, keeping your eye on results.
Design | Improvement | System |
A human action becomes genuinely important when it springs from the soil of a clear-sighted awareness of the temporality and the ephemerally of everything human. It is only this awareness that can breathe any greatness into an action.