This site is dedicated to the memory of Dr. Alan William Smolowe who gave birth to the creation of this database.
The advantage of formal positions of authority is breadth. The disadvantage is distance from raw and relevant detail.
Learning to take the heat and receive people's anger in a way that does not undermine your initiative is one of the toughest tasks of leadership. In this sense, exercising leadership might be understood as disappointing people at a rate they can absorb.
None of what Barack Obama is doing or wants to do to this country is anything the rest of the world hasn't seen before and already failed at.
Disagreement | Doctrine | Fairness | Neutrality | Search | Think |
Simone de Beauvoir, fully Simone-Ernestine-Lucie-Marie Bertrand de Beauvoir
What should a society be, so that in his last years a man might still be a man?
Better | Individual | Slavery | Work |
A very sincere and serious freshman student came to my office with a question that had clearly been troubling him deeply. He said to me, I am a devout Christian and have never had any reason to doubt evolution, an idea that seems both exciting and well documented. But my roommate, a proselytizing evangelical, has been insisting with enormous vigor that I cannot be both a real Christian and an evolutionist. So tell me, can a person believe both in God and in evolution? Again, I gulped hard, did my intellectual duty, and reassured him that evolution was both true and entirely compatible with Christian belief—a position that I hold sincerely, but still an odd situation for a Jewish agnostic.
Man |
Biological evolution is a system of constant divergence without subsequent joining of branches. Lineages, once distinct, are separate forever. In human history, transmission across lineages is, perhaps, the major source of cultural change. Europeans learned about corn and potatoes from Native Americans and gave them smallpox in return.
Each worldview was a cultural product, but evolution is true and separate creation is not. […] Worldviews are social constructions, and they channel the search for facts. But facts are found and knowledge progresses, however fitfully. Fact and theory are intertwined, and all great scientists understand the interaction.
For peoples, generally, their story of the universe and the human role within the universe is their primary source of intelligibility and value. Only through this story of how the Universe came to be in the beginning and how it came to be as it is does a person come to appreciate the meaning of life or to derive the psychic energy needed to deal effectively with those crisis moments that occur in the life of the individual and in the life of the society. Such a story communicates the most sacred of mysteries. Our story not only interprets the past, it also guides and inspires our shaping of the future.
How, without clothes, could we possess the master organ, soul's seat and true pineal gland of the body social--I mean a purse?
Good | Man | Neutrality | Friendship |
Is there any man who has ever gone through a whole lifetime without dressing himself up, in his fancy, in the habit of a monk and enclosing himself in a cell where he sits magnificent in heroic austerity and solitude, while all the young ladies who hitherto were cool to his affections in the world come and beat on the gates of the monastery crying, "Come out, come out!"
Present |
A view or form of thought is more objective than another if it relies less on the specifics of the individual's makeup and position in the world, or on the character of the particular type of creature he is.
Character | Difficulty | Fame | Luck | Need | Opinion | Philosophy | Plenty | Position | Public | Receive | Will | Work | World | Luck | Think |
The long-range transformation may be characterized perhaps most dramatically thus. There was a time when “I believe” as a ceremonial declaration of faith meant, and was heard as meaning: “Given the reality of God, as a fact of the universe, I hereby proclaim that I align my life accordingly, pledging love and loyalty.” A statement about a person’s believing has now come to mean, rather, something of this sort: “Given the uncertainty of God, as a fact of modern life, so-and-so reports that the idea of God is part of the furniture of his mind.”
Correctness | Ideas | Knowing | Knowledge | Man | Mind | Neutrality | Thought | Thought |
W. Ian Thomas, fully Walter Ian Thomas
Faith in all its sheer simplicity! Faith that takes God precisely at His Word! Faith that simply says, "Thank You."
Capacity | Conformity | Contrast | God | Liberty | Man | Motives | Mystery | Nature | Object | Will | God | Understand |
Warren Bennis, fully Warren Gamaliel Bennis
The manager administers; the leader innovates. The manager has a short-range view; the leader has a long-range perspective. The manager asks how and when; the leader asks what and why. The manager has his eye on the bottom line; the leader has his eye on the horizon. The manager accepts the status quo; the leader challenges it.
Leader |
Warren Bennis, fully Warren Gamaliel Bennis
The manager asks how and when; the leader asks what and why.
Leader |
Wayne Dyer, fully Wayne Walter Dyer
If you knew who walked beside you at all times, on the path that you have chosen, you could never experience fear or doubt again.
Energy |
Vladimir Lenin, fully Vladimir Ilyich Lenin
The surest way to destroy a nation is to debauch its currency.
Change | Individual | Will |