This site is dedicated to the memory of Dr. Alan William Smolowe who gave birth to the creation of this database.
Reason provides a means of escaping from the constraints of belief-systems backed by authority and from the resentment which clever people feel at the power of their own passions. Because reason--in admittedly varying degrees--is available to everybody, it has a potential advantage over the truth you feel and the truth you are told.
Authority | Belief | Means | People | Power | Reason | Resentment | Truth |
Wayne Dyer, fully Wayne Walter Dyer
You'll seldom experience regret for anything that you've done. It is what you haven't done that will torment you. The message, therefore, is clear. Do it! Develop an appreciation for the present moment. Seize every second of your life and savor it. Value your present moments. Using them up in any self-defeating ways means you've lost them forever.
Appreciation | Experience | Life | Life | Means | Present | Regret | Self | Will | Appreciation | Value |
There is no such thing as ethical truth. However, those committed to humane-egalitarian ideals can make a truth-claim rare and precious: they can look reality and the truths of science in the face and find nothing that makes them flinch.
I think that a particle must have a separate reality independent of the measurements. That is an electron has spin, location and so forth even when it is not being measured. I like to think that the moon is there even if I am not looking at it.
Setting an example is not the main means of influencing another, it is the only means.
The most exciting breakthrough of the twenty-first century will occur not because of technology, but because of an expanding concept of what it means to be human.
Means | Technology | Will |
An integral part of possessing a genuine moral clarity may be to recognize that rarely, if ever, does any moral situation boil down to an instance of absolute good versus absolute evil...Genuine moral clarity involves ceaseless and rigorous questioning and evaluation of one's works and deeds and ends in life, and the means one chooses to realize one's works and deeds and ends.
Absolute | Deeds | Ends | Evil | Good | Life | Life | Means | Deeds |
Arthur Ponsonby, 1st Baron Ponsonby of Shulbrede
Anger is not only inevitable, it is necessary. Its absence means indifference - the most disastrous of all human failings.
Absence | Anger | Indifference | Inevitable | Means |
A bold policy to reduce the addiction to oil would be the most powerful weapon to win the epic struggle against terrorism. In the short term, this means saving energy through more efficient technologies, necessary anyway to slow the greenhouse effect and global warming.
Addiction | Energy | Global | Means | Policy | Struggle | Terrorism |
In no sense do I advocate evading or defying the law ... that would lead to anarchy. An individual who breaks a law that his conscience tells him is unjust, and who willingly accepts the penalty of imprisonment in order to arouse the conscience of the community over its injustice, is in reality expressing the highest respect for law.
Anarchy | Conscience | Individual | Injustice | Injustice | Law | Order | Reality | Respect | Sense | Respect |
Robert A. Millikan, fully Robert Andrews Millikan
Fullness of knowledge always and necessarily means some understanding of the depths of our ignorance, and that is always conducive to both humility and reverence.
Humility | Ignorance | Knowledge | Means | Reverence | Understanding |