This site is dedicated to the memory of Dr. Alan William Smolowe who gave birth to the creation of this database.
The human mind has a greater need of the ideal even than of the real. It is by the real that we exist; it is by the ideal that we live.
Intolerance is to be found even among philosophers, and censorship even among democrats.
Imagination | Memory |
Nothing is stronger than an idea whose time has come.
Man does not simply exist but always decides what his existence will be, what he will become the next moment. By the same token, every human being has the freedom to change at any instant.
This young woman knew that she would die in the next few days. But when I talked to her she was cheerful in spite of this knowledge. 'I am grateful that fate has hit me so hard,' she told me. 'In my former life I was spoiled and did not take spiritual accomplishments seriously.' Pointing through the window of the hut, she said, 'This tree here is the only friend I have in my loneliness.' Through that window she could see just one branch of a chestnut tree, and on the branch were two blossoms. 'I often talk to this tree,' she said to me. I was startled and didn't quite know how to take her words. Was she delirious? Did she have occasional hallucinations? Anxiously I asked her if the tree replied. 'Yes.' What did it say to her? She answered, 'It said to me, I am here--I am here--I am life, eternal life.'
Desolation | Existence | Imagination | Important | Life | Life | Memory | Mind | Past | Poverty | Spirit | World |
My soul is ten thousand miles wide and extremely invisibly deep. It is the same size as the sea, and you cannot, you cannot cram it into beer cans and fingernails and stake it out in lots and own it. It will drown you all and never even notice.
Imagination | World |
I expect it will turn out that sexual intercourse is possible between Gethenian double-sexed and Hainish-norm one-sexed human beings, though such intercourse will inevitably be sterile. It remains to be proved; Estraven and I proved nothing except perhaps a rather subtler point.
Doubt | Imagination |
There’s no excuse for poverty in a state as rich as California. We can produce so much food that we have to dump it into our bay.
Distinguish | Dreams | Men | Music | Poetry | Sacred | Words | Friends |
As you can see, arenas, an act is not, as young people often think, like a stone, someone lifts and throws, and it succeeds or fails, that's all. When you lift this rock, the earth becomes lighter and hand to bear it becomes heavier. When you fly, the circuits of the stars respond, and where hit or falls the universe is changed. With each act of compromising the overall balance. The winds and seas, the forces of water, soil and light, animals and plants, and everything they do is good and correct us make. Because all of them act in the balance. Since the hurricane and the blare of the great whales, until the dried drop one sex and the flying gnats: it's all done with a view to balance the total. But we, to the extent that we have dominion over the universe and the one over the other, we must learn to do what the leaf and the whale and the wind do by their nature. We must learn to maintain balance. Once you have intelligence, you should not act out of ignorance. After you have choices, you should not behave irresponsibly.
Children | Imagination |
Most comic writers like to think they could play it straight if only their public would let them. Waugh is able to be grave without difficulty for he has always been comic for serious reasons. He has his own, almost romantic sense of propriety.
Awe | Imagination | Mind | Society | Society |
They knew that their anarchism was the product of a very high civilization, of a complex diversified culture, of a stable economy and a highly industrialized technology that could maintain high production and rapid transportation of goods. However vast the distances separating settlements, they held to the ideal of complex organicism.
Children | Despair | Evil | Happy | Pain | People | Praise | Treason | Trouble | Happiness |
If our friends do us a service, we think they owe it to us by their title of friend. We never think that they do not owe us their friendship.
Children | Dependence | Energy | Glory | Judgment | Love | Memory | Mind | Order | Success | Teach | Truth |
Whenever logical processes of thought are employed— that is, whenever thought for a time runs along an accepted groove— there is an opportunity for the machine. Formal logic used to be a keen instrument in the hands of the teacher in his trying of students' souls. It is readily possible to construct a machine which will manipulate premises in accordance with formal logic, simply by the clever use of relay circuits. Put a set of premises into such a device and turn the crank, and it will readily pass out conclusion after conclusion, all in accordance with logical law, and with no more slips than would be expected of a keyboard adding machine.
Absolute | Chance | Energy | Guidance | Meaning | Phenomena | Property | Science | Space | Time | Universe | Wonder | Guidance |
We need to send the message that anyone who orders suicide bombings against Americans, or protects those who do, commits suicide himself. And U.S. marines will search every cave in Afghanistan to make that principle stick. You order, you die — absolutely, positively, you die.
Basically all the world’s computer parts come from the same supply chain that runs from Korea, down through coastal China, over to Taiwan, and down to Malaysia.
Attention | Efficiency | Energy | Good | Nature | Will | World |
Improv time is over. This is crunch time. Iraq will be won or lost in the next few months. But it won't be won with high rhetoric. It will be won on the ground in a war over the last mile.
Energy | Focus | Revolution | Technology |