This site is dedicated to the memory of Dr. Alan William Smolowe who gave birth to the creation of this database.
Maya Angelou, born Marguerite Annie Johnson
To be left alone on the tightrope of youthful unknowing is to experience the excruciating beauty of full freedom and the threat of eternal indecision. Few, if any, survive their teens. Most surrender to the vague but murderous pressure of adult conformity. It becomes easier to die and avoid conflict than to maintain a constant battle with the superior forces of maturity.
Battle | Beauty | Eternal | Experience | Freedom | Surrender | Beauty |
The necessity of reform mustn’t be allowed to become a form of blackmail serving to limit, reduce, or halt the exercise of criticism. Under no circumstances should one pay attention to those who tell one: “Don’t criticize, since you’re not capable of carrying out a reform.” That’s ministerial cabinet talk. Critique doesn’t have to be the premise of a deduction that concludes, “this, then, is what needs to be done.” It should be an instrument for those for who fight, those who resist and refuse what is. Its use should be in processes of conflict and confrontation, essays in refusal. It doesn’t have to lay down the law for the law. It isn’t a stage in a programming. It is a challenge directed to what is.
Attention | Challenge | Circumstances | Law | Necessity | Reform |
To observe people in conflict is a necessary part of a child's education. It helps him to understand and accept his own occasional hostilities and to realize that differing opinions need not imply an absence of love.
Absence | Need | People | Understand |
Mahatma Gandhi, fully Mohandas Karamchand Gandhi, aka Bapu
I reject any religious doctrine that does not appeal to reason and is in conflict with morality.
Chemistry and the Nature of Science and electricity are small. And religion is a science major, which includes all science in the core. No conflict between science and religion, because religion in itself is very science that contains essentially all the sciences. And religion is necessary and required for it is he who draws a small science goals, objectives, and puts her in the sound of its functions under the best of life .. religion is the conscience of residence .. Conscience and in turn chooses Atomic Energy Agency and constructive function .. Not cast out destruction and death on the innocent .. He calls on us to make electricity and lighting means no way to destruction.
Conscience | Death | Energy | Life | Life | Means | Nature | Religion | Science | Sound |
Educators may bring upon themselves unnecessary travail by taking a tactless and unjustifiable position about the relation between scientific and religious narratives. We see this, of course, in the conflict concerning creation science. Some educators representing, as they think, the conscience of science act much like those legislators who in 1925 prohibited by law the teaching of evolution in Tennessee. In that case, anti-evolutionists were fearful that a scientific idea would undermine religious belief. Today, pro-evolutionists are fearful that a religious idea will undermine scientific belief. The former had insufficient confidence in religion; the latter insufficient confidence in science. The point is that profound but contradictory ideas may exist side by side, if they are constructed from different materials and methods and have different purposes. Each tells us something important about where we stand in the universe, and it is foolish to insist that they must despise each other.
Confidence | Conscience | Despise | Evolution | Ideas | Important | Law | Position | Science | Will |
There is no conflict between the ideal of religion and the ideal of science, but science is opposed to theological dogmas because science is founded on fact. To me, the universe is simply a great machine which never came into being and never will end. The human being is no exception to the natural order. Man, like the universe, is a machine. Nothing enters our minds or determines our actions which is not directly or indirectly a response to stimuli beating upon our sense organs from without.
Otto Rank, born Otto Rosenfeld
The struggle of the artist against the art-ideology, against the creative impulse and even against his own work also shows itself in his attitude towards success and fame; these two phenomena are but an extension, socially, of the process which began subjectively with the vocation and creation of the personal ego to be an artist. In this entire creative process, which begins with self-nomination as artist and ends in the fame of posterity, two fundamental tendencies — one might almost say, two personalities of the individual — are in continual conflict throughout: one wants to eternalize itself in artistic creation, the other in ordinary life — in brief, immortal man vs. the immortal soul of man.
Ego | Ends | Fame | Impulse | Individual | Life | Life | Man | Phenomena | Soul | Struggle | Success | Wants | Work |
Osho, born Chandra Mohan Jain, also known as Acharya Rajneesh and Bhagwan Shree Rajneesh NULL
D.H. Lawrence was very much against your so-called education — it is not education, it is mis-education. Real education can only be based on love, not on knowledge. Real education cannot be utilitarian, real education cannot be of the marketplace. Not that real education will not give you knowledge; first, real education will prepare your heart, your love, and then whatever knowledge is needed to pass through life will be given to you, but that will be secondary. And it will never be overpowering; it will not be more valuable than love. And whenever there is a possibility of any conflict between love and knowledge, real education will help you to be ready to drop your knowledge and move with your love; it will give you courage, it will give you adventure. It will give you space to live, accepting all risks, insecurities; it will help you to be ready to sacrifice yourself if love demands it. It will put love not only above knowledge but even above life, because life is meaningless without love. Love without life is still meaningful; even if your body dies it makes no difference to your love energy. It continues, it is eternal, it is not a time phenomenon. To have a loving heart, you need a little less calculating head. To be capable of loving you need to be capable of wondering. That’s why, Nur, I always say that awe and childlike innocence are deeply related with the energy called love. In fact they are different names for the same thing.
Awe | Body | Education | Energy | Innocence | Knowledge | Life | Life | Little | Love | Need | Sacrifice | Space | Time | Will |
Otto von Bismarck, Otto Eduard Leopold, Prince of Bismarck, Duke of Lauenburg
All treaties between great states cease to be binding when they come in conflict with the struggle for existence.
Struggle |
The battle is long and arduous. Let there be no mistake as to that. Go not forth to this battle without counting the cost. Ages have gone to the strengthening of the foe. Ages of conflict must be spent, ere the foe, wholly conquered, becomes the servant, the Soul’s minister to mankind.
And from these long past ages, in hours when the contest flags, will come new foes, mind-born children springing up to fight for mind, reinforcements coming from forgotten years, forgotten lives. For once this conflict is begun; it can be ended only by sweeping victory, and unconditional, unreserved surrender of the vanquished.
Paul Feyerabend, fully Paul Karl Feyerabend
There is no "scientific worldview" just as there is no uniform enterprise "science"- except in the minds of metaphysicians, school masters, and scientists blinded by the achievements of their own particular niche... There is no objective principle that could direct us away from the supermarket "religion" or the supermarket "art" toward the more modern and much more expensive supermarket "science." Besides, the search for such guidance would be in conflict with the idea of individual responsibility which allegedly is an important ingredient of a "rational" or scientific age.
Guidance | Important | Individual | Responsibility | Search | Guidance |
The question that continues to reverberate to this day is whether human rights trump the rights of business, or vice versa, a conflict that has been ongoing for more than three hundred years... From an economic viewpoint, what citizens have been trying to do for two hundred years is to force business to pay full freight, to internalize their costs to society instead of externalizing them onto a river, a town, a single patient, or a whole generation.
Business | Day | Force | Question | Rights | Society | Society | Business | Vice |
I have treated many artists. There are among them many neurotics, so many that one finally comes to believe that one cannot be an artist without being neurotic. Again I found in them that inner conflict which is characteristic of modern man: the conflict between a right intuition (namely, that their vocation has fundamental importance for the destiny of humanity) and a false idea (namely, that art is superfluous luxury).
Washing one's hands of the conflict between the powerful and the powerless means to side with the powerful, not to be neutral.
Means |
This conflict with the sacred is what gives us the blessing and makes us grow up… When you are loved, you can do anything in creation. When you are loved, there's no need at all to understand what's happening, because everything happens within you… To live is to experience things, not sit around pondering the meaning of life… To realize one's destiny is a person's only real obligation… To love is to be in communion with the other and to discover in that other the spark of God… Today don't beg, don't ask, just thank God in silence for all the blessings in your life… To die tomorrow was no worse than dying on any other day. Every day was there to be lived or to mark one’s departure from this world… To injure your opponent is to injure yourself.
Blessings | Day | Destiny | Experience | God | Love | Meaning | Need | Sacred | Silence | Tomorrow | God | Understand |
Peter F. Drucker, fully Peter Ferdinand Drucker
This society in which knowledge workers dominate is in danger of a new 'class conflict'; the conflict between the large minority of knowledge workers and the majority of people who will make their living through traditional ways, either by manual work, whether skilled or unskilled, or by services work, whether skilled or unskilled.
Danger | Knowledge | Majority | People | Society | Will | Society | Danger |
Peter F. Drucker, fully Peter Ferdinand Drucker
Commitment in the face of conflict produces character.
Peter Senge, fully Peter Michael Senge
New insights fail to get put into practice because they conflict with deeply held internal images of how the world works... images that limit us to familiar ways of thinking and acting. That is why the discipline of managing mental models -- surfacing, testing, and improving our internal pictures of how the world works -- promises to be a major breakthrough for learning organizations.
Discipline | Learning | Practice | Thinking | World |