This site is dedicated to the memory of Dr. Alan William Smolowe who gave birth to the creation of this database.
A successful future for America depends on the meaning we attach to being citizens of the same republic--a meaning shattered every time the left questions the intelligence of their opponents and the right questions the patriotism of those who don’t share their views. That success also will be measured by the depth of our commitment to each other—a commitment that begins in our neighborhoods and PTAs and town councils and swells upward from there. Our success rest on the shape and power of our vision--how can we pursue “life, liberty and the pursuit of happiness” when the nation is a battleground of uncompromising ideas and ideologies? We need to change what’s in our minds but above all we need to change what’s in our hearts.
Change | Commitment | Future | Ideas | Intelligence | Liberty | Meaning | Need | Patriotism | Power | Rest | Right | Success | Time | Will |
Do you not see how necessary a world of pains and troubles is to school an intelligence and make it a soul?
Intelligence | Troubles | World |
John Holt, fully John Caldwell Holt
The true test of intelligence is not how much we know how to do, but how we behave when we don't know what to do.
Truth is an affair of history and is affected by all the relativities of history. Truth is an affair of the human subject. Truth, therefore, is an affair of experience. The question of truth as possessed brings into the whole problem the question the human person who must personally possess truth... And in the perception of truth the human intelligence has a function that must be conceived as being creative. This is the truth in the philosophical error of idealism. Somehow the mind creates truth in a sense. There is a truth here as there is in all errors.
Error | History | Intelligence | Mind | Perception | Question | Truth |
Artificial intelligence will never be a match for natural stupidity.
Intelligence | Will |
Let the American youth never forget, that they possess a noble inheritance, bought by the toils, and sufferings and blood of their ancestors; and capable, if wisely improved, and faithfully guarded, of transmitting to their latest posterity all the substantial blessings of life, the peaceful enjoyment of liberty, property, religion, and independence…Republics are created by the virture, public spirit, and intelligence of the citizens. They fall, when the wise are banished from the public councils, because they dare to be honest and the profligate are rewarded, because they flatter the people, in order to betray them.
Blessings | Enjoyment | Intelligence | Order | Posterity | Public | Wise | Youth | Youth |
Lincoln Steffens, fully Joseph Lincoln Steffens
Why is it that the less intelligence people have, the more spiritual they are? They seem to fill all the vacant, ignorant spaces in their heads with soul. Which explains how it is that the less knowledge they have, the more religion.
Intelligence | Knowledge | People |
Joseph Chilton Pearce, aka Joe
Play is the only way the highest intelligence of humankind can unfold.
The solutions lies within the problem. The answer is in every question. Infinite intelligence responds to you as you call upon it with faith and confidence.
Faith | Intelligence |
Karl Menninger, fully Karl Augustus Menninger
The voice of the intelligence is drowned out by the roar of fear. It is ignored by the voice of desire. It is contradicted by the voice of shame. It is biased by hate and extinguished by anger. Most of all it is silenced by ignorance.
Hate | Intelligence |
Henri Poincaré, fully Jules Henri Poincaré
Does the harmony the human intelligence thinks it discovers in nature exist outside of this intelligence? No, beyond doubt, a reality completely independent of the mind which conceives it, sees or feels it, is an impossibility.
Harmony | Intelligence | Mind | Nature | Reality |
Henri Poincaré, fully Jules Henri Poincaré
The scientist does not study nature because it is useful; he studies it because he delights in it, and he delights in it because it is beautiful. If nature were not beautiful, it would not be worth knowing, and if nature were not worth knowing, life would not be worth living. Of course I do not here speak of that beauty that strikes the senses, the beauty of qualities and appearances; not that I undervalue such beauty, far from it, but it has nothing to do with science; I mean that profounder beauty which comes from the harmonious order of the parts, and which a pure intelligence can grasp.
Beauty | Intelligence | Life | Life | Nature | Nothing | Order | Qualities | Study | Worth | Beauty |
Lactantius, fully Lucius Caecilius Firmianus Lactantius NULL
There is no one, who possesses intelligence and uses reflection, who does not understand that it is one Being who both created all things and governs them with the same energy by which He created them.
Energy | Intelligence | Understand |
Laurence J. Peter, fully Laurence Johnston Peter
The best intelligence test is what we do with our leisure.
If far-reaching discoveries regarding the nature of matter and energy and the laws which govern the Universe have been made and worked on by civilizations that have disappeared, and if some of them have been preserved throughout the ages (which is by no means certain) this could only have been done by people of superior intelligence and in a language necessarily incomprehensible to the ordinary man. If, however, we reject this hypothesis we can nevertheless imagine, from one age to another, a succession of beings of exceptional gifts able to communicate with one another. Such beings are well aware that it is not in their interests to display their powers openly.
Age | Display | Energy | Hypothesis | Intelligence | Language | Means | Nature | People | Universe | Govern |
Luis Buñuel, fully Luis Buñuel Portolés
You have to begin to lose your memory, if only in bits and pieces, to realize that memory is what makes our lives. Life without memory is no life at all, just as an intelligence without the possibility of expression is not really an intelligence. Our memory is our coherence, our reason, our feeling, even our action. Without it, we are nothing.
Intelligence | Life | Life | Memory |
The error of youth is to believe that intelligence is a substitute for experience, while the error of age is to believe experience is a substitute for intelligence.
Age | Error | Experience | Intelligence | Youth | Youth |
Ludwig Wittgenstein, fully Ludwig Josef Johann Wittgenstein
Philosophy is a battle against the bewitchment of our intelligence by means of language.
Battle | Intelligence | Means |
Religion grows with the intelligence of man, but all religions of the past and probably all of the future will sooner or later become petrified forms instead of living helps to mankind. Until that time comes, however, if religion of any name or nature makes man more happy, comfortable, and able to live peaceably with his brothers, it is good.
Future | Intelligence | Man | Nature | Past | Religion | Time | Will |