This site is dedicated to the memory of Dr. Alan William Smolowe who gave birth to the creation of this database.
Excellence means when a man or woman asks of himself more than others do.
I always feel uncomfortable when people speak about ordinary mortals because I've never met an ordinary man, woman or child.
Kofi Annan, fully Kofi Atta Annan
Literacy is a bridge from misery to hope. It is a tool for daily life in modern society. It is a bulwark against poverty, and a building block of development, an essential complement to investments in roads, dams, clinics and factories. Literacy is a platform for democratization, and a vehicle for the promotion of cultural and national identity. Especially for girls and women, it is an agent of family health and nutrition. For everyone, everywhere, literacy is, along with education in general, a basic human right... is, finally, the road to human progress and the means through which every man, woman and child can realize his or her full potential.
Education | Family | Health | Life | Life | Means | Progress | Woman | Child |
In a time lacking in truth and certainty and filled with anguish and despair, no woman should be shamefaced in attempting to give back to the world, through her work, a portion of its lost heart.
Lou Holtz, fully Louis Leo "Lou" Holtz
I have never heard a successful man or woman get up and say, "I owe my success to drugs and alcohol."
There is nothing of such force as the power of a person content merely to be himself, nothing so invincible as the power of simple honesty, nothing so successful as the life of one who runs alone. Somewhere she had learned all this. She was like a woman to whom nothing could ever again happen.
Madonna Kolbenschlag, fully Madonna Claire Kolbenschlag
The promise of "beauty"- of being desirable- lulls the young woman [Sleeping Beauty] into an existential limbo where everything is measured by the expectation of one who is to come...The kiss that Sleeping Beauty waits for is not that of any Prince, but the embrace of her own being.
Beauty | Expectation | Promise | Woman | Beauty | Expectation |
The "ultimate" questions referred to above do not always come up in the encounter with the shadow. Much more often behind him or her another inner figure emerges as a personification of the unconscious. This takes the form of a woman in a man, and in a woman, that of a man. Often it is they who are at work behind the shadow, throwing up new problems. C. G. Jung called them anima and animus. The anima embodies all feminine psychic qualities in a man-moods, feelings, intuitions, receptivity to the irrational, his personal capacity for love, his sense of nature, and most important of all, his relationship to the unconscious.
Capacity | Important | Qualities | Relationship | Sense | Woman | Work |
It is easy to look back, self-indulgently, feeling pleasantly sorry for oneself and saying I didn't have this and I didn't have that. But it is only the grown woman regretting the hardships of a little girl who never thought they were hardships at all. She had the things that really mattered.
Mary Pipher, aka Mary Elizabeth Pipher or Mary Bray Pipher
I think anorexia is a metaphor. It is a young woman's statement that she will become what the culture asks of its women, which is that they be thin and nonthreatening. Anorexia signifies that a young woman is so delicate that, like the women of China with their tiny broken feet, she needs a man to shelter and protect her from a world she cannot handle. Anorexic women signal with their bodies "I will take up only a small amount of space. I won't get in the way." They signal "I won't be intimidating or threatening." (Who is afraid of a seventy-pound adult?)
Mary Kay Ash, fully Mary Kathlyn Wagner Ash
Faith is wanting something with all your heart. Faith is taking a chance on something before you are sure how everything will work out. Almost anything can be accomplished by the person who really wants to succeed. But no woman will ever believe she can move a mountain unless she really wants that mountain to move. Apply this definition of faith to your dreams.
May Sarton, pen name of Eleanore Marie Sarton
A man with a talent does what is expected of him, makes his way, constructs, is an engineer, a composer, a builder of bridges. It's the natural order of things that he construct objects outside himself and his family. The woman who does so is aberrant. We have to expiate for this cursed talent someone handed out to us, by mistake, in the black mystery of genetics.
Miguel de Cervantes, fully Miguel de Cervantes Saaversa
Beauty in a good woman is like fire at a distance or a sharp sword; the one does not burn, or the other wound, those who come not too close.