This site is dedicated to the memory of Dr. Alan William Smolowe who gave birth to the creation of this database.
Trust your hunches. They’re usually based on facts filed away just below the conscious level.
Trust |
The highest Wisdom would be to grasp that facts are the theory. Don’t look beyond the phenomena, they are the teaching.
How a report is framed, which facts it contains and emphasizes and which it ignores, and in what context, are as important to sharing opinion as the bare facts themselves.
It is dangerous to take human freedom for granted, to regard it as a prerogative rather than as an obligation, as an ultimate fact rather than as an ultimate goal. It is the beginning of wisdom to be amazed at the facts of our being free.
Beginning | Freedom | Obligation | Regard | Wisdom |
All information funnels through a chief of staff and the commanding officer expects his staff to present him with a recommended course of action, not simply the facts and the alternatives.
When the law is against you, argue the facts. When the facts are against you, argue the law. When both are against you, call the other lawyers’s names.
Law |
As nearly as I can see, all the new isms – Socialism, Communism, Fascism, and especially the late but not lamented Technocracy – outdo even Capitalism itself in their preoccupation with one thing: The distribution of more machine-made commodities to more people. They all proceed on the theory that if we can all keep warm and full, and all own a Ford and a radio, the good life will follow. Their programs differ only in ways to mobilize machines to this end. Though they despise each other, they are all, respect of this objective, as identically alike as peas in a pod. They are competitive apostles of a single creed: salvation by machinery.
Capitalism | Creed | Despise | Good | Life | Life | Machines | People | Respect | Salvation | Will | Respect |
Robert Byrd, fully Robert Carlyle Byrd
Truth has a way of asserting itself despite all attempts to obscure it. Distortion only serves to derail it for a time. No matter to what lengths we humans may go to obfuscate facts or delude our fellows, truth has a way of squeezing out through the cracks, eventually.
The man who questions opinions is wise. The man who quarrels with facts is a fool.
It is not so very important for a person to learn facts. For that he does not really need a college. He can learn them from books. The value of an education in a liberal arts college is not learning of many facts but the training of the mind to think something that cannot be learned from textbooks.
Books | Education | Important | Learning | Mind | Need | Training | Learn | Think | Value |
Even scholars of audacious spirit and fine instinct can be obstructed in the interpretation of facts by philosophical prejudices.
The problem with capitalism is that it best rewards the worst part of us: the ruthless, competitive, cunning, opportunistic, acquisitive drives, giving little reward and often much punishment – or at least much handicap – to honesty, compassion, fair play, many forms of hard work, love of justice, and a concern for those in need.
Capitalism | Compassion | Cunning | Giving | Honesty | Justice | Little | Love | Need | Play | Punishment | Reward | Work |
It has been said that the primary function of schools is to impart enough facts to make children stop asking questions. Some, with whom the schools do not succeed, become scientists... and I never stopped asking questions.
Lack of experience diminishes our power of taking a comprehensive view of the admitted facts. Hence those who dwell in intimate association with nature and its phenomena grow more and more able to formulate, as the foundation of their theories, principles such as to admit of a wide and coherent development: while those whom devotion to abstract discussions has rendered unobservant of the facts are too ready to dogmatize on the basis of a few observations.
Abstract | Association | Devotion | Experience | Nature | Phenomena | Power | Principles | Theories | Association |