This site is dedicated to the memory of Dr. Alan William Smolowe who gave birth to the creation of this database.
How extraordinary is the situation of us mortals! Each of us is here for a brief sojourn; for what he knows not, though he sometimes thinks he senses it. But without going deeper than our daily life, it is plain we exist for our fellow men, in the first place for those upon whose smiles and welfare our happiness depends, and next for all those unknown to us personally but to whose destinies we are bound by the tie of sympathy. A hundred times every day I remind myself that my inner and outer life depend on the labors of other men, living and dead, and that I must exert myself in order to give in the measure as I have received and am still receiving.
Day | Life | Life | Men | Order | Sympathy | Wisdom | Happiness |
Fred Dretske, fully Frederick "Fred" Irwin Dretske
In the beginning there was information. The word came later. the transition was achieved by the development of organisms with the capacity for selectively exploiting this information in order to survive and perpetuate their kind.
Not until the creation and maintenance of decent conditions of life for all men are recognized and accepted as a common obligation of all men, shall we be able to speak of mankind as civilized.
No earthly purpose satisfies man’s longing to find his eternal reason for being... Man seeks incessantly for the meaning of life until he discovers the single eternal purpose for his existence. That purpose is the same for every man and woman. God created us because He longs to enter into fellowship with us. We belong to Him by right of creation. We can never know order and harmony in this life until we choose to establish a right relationship with God... Our search for meaning to life will end only when we establish that personal relationship with God and begin our walk with Him - for time and for eternity. Then comes that glorious personal fulfillment described in holy writ as the “peace that passes all understanding.”
Eternal | Eternity | Existence | Fulfillment | God | Harmony | Life | Life | Longing | Man | Meaning | Order | Peace | Purpose | Purpose | Reason | Relationship | Right | Search | Time | Understanding | Will | Wisdom | Woman | God |
Beneath a free government there is nothing but the intelligence of the people to keep the people’s peace. Order must be preserved, not by a military police or regiments of horse-guards, but by the spontaneous concert of a well-informed population, resolved that the rights which have been rescued from despotism shall not be subverted by anarchy.
Anarchy | Government | Intelligence | Nothing | Order | Peace | People | Rights | Wisdom | Government |
I believe that the political significance of the problem of sex is due to the fact that sex is located at the point of intersection of the discipline of the body and the control of the population.
Body | Control | Discipline | Wisdom |
We have in America the largest public school system on earth, the most expensive college buildings, the most extensive curriculum, but nowhere else is education so blind to its objectives, so indifferent to any specific outcome as in America. One trouble has been at the repression of faults rather than creation of virtues.
Earth | Education | Objectives | Public | System | Wisdom | Trouble |
François Fénelon, fully Francois de Salignac de la Mothe-Fénelon
I believe that we are conforming to the divine order and the will of Providence when we are doing even indifferent things that belong to our condition.
Order | Providence | Will | Wisdom |
One must remember that practically all of us have a number of significant learning disabilities. For example, I am grossly unmusical and cannot carry a tune. We happen to live in a society in which the child who has trouble learning to read is in difficulty. Yet we have all seen dyslexic children who have either superior visual-perception or visual-motor skills. My suspicion would be that in an illiterate society such a child would be in little difficulty and might in fact do better because of his superior visual-perception talents, while many of us who function here might do poorly in a society in which a quite different array of talents was needed in order to be successful. As the demands of society change will we acquire a new group of "minimally brain damaged?"
Better | Change | Children | Difficulty | Example | Learning | Little | Order | Perception | Society | Suspicion | Will | Wisdom | Society | Trouble | Child |
Martha Gellhorn, fully Martha Ellis Gellhorn
By its existence, the Peace Movement denies that governments know best; it stands for a different order of priorities: the human race comes first.
Three out of five of the Four Hundred [eminent individuals of the twentieth century] had serious school problems. In order of importance, their dissatisfactions were: with the curriculum; with dull irrational or cruel teachers; with others students who bullied, ignored, or bored them; and with school failure.
He only is happy as well as great who needs neither to obey nor command in order to be something.
A man should hear a little music, read a little poetry, and see a fine picture every day of his life, in order that worldly cares may not obliterate the sense of the beautiful which God has implanted in the human soul.
Day | God | Life | Life | Little | Man | Music | Order | Poetry | Sense | Soul | Wisdom | God |
Friedrich Fröbel, fully Friedrich Wilhelm August Fröbel
Play is the highest level of child development. It is the spontaneous expression of thought and feeling. It is the purest creation of the child's mind as it is also a pattern and copy of the natural life hidden in man and in all things.
Life | Life | Man | Mind | Play | Thought | Wisdom | Child | Thought |
Buckminster Fuller, fully Richard Buckminster "Bucky" Fuller
Children are born true scientists. They spontaneously experiment and experience and reexperience again. They select, combine, and test, seeking to find order in their experiences - "which is the mostest? which is the leastest?" They smell, taste, bite, and touch-test for hardness, softness, springiness, roughness, smoothness, coldness, warmness: the heft, shake, punch, squeeze, push, crush, rub, and try to pull things apart.
Children | Experience | Experiment | Order | Taste | Wisdom |
He who wishes to exert a useful influence must be careful to insult nothing. Let him not be troubled by what seems absurd, but concentrate his energies to the creation of what is good. He must not demolish, but build. He must raise temples where mankind may come and partake of the purest pleasure.
Absurd | Good | Influence | Insult | Mankind | Nothing | Pleasure | Wisdom | Wishes | Insult |