This site is dedicated to the memory of Dr. Alan William Smolowe who gave birth to the creation of this database.
We live in a spelling bee culture where the demand is factual accuracy and everybody overlooks the absence of art or meaning in what's said. Too many people sent letters to Nero telling him he was fingering his fiddle wrong. This passion for data is a way of avoiding coming to terms with things.
Absence | Accuracy | Art | Culture | Meaning | Passion | People | Wisdom | Wrong | Art |
Some people speak as if hypocrites were confined to religion; but they are everywhere; people pretending to wealth when they have not a sixpence, assuming knowledge of which they are ignorant; shamming a culture they are far removed from adopting opinions they don't hold.
He that acts unjustly is the worst rebel to himself; and though now ambition’s trumpet and drum of power may drown the sound, yet conscience with one day speak loudly to him.
The steady pressure to consume, absorb, participate, receive, by eye, ear, mouth and mail involves a cruelty to intestines, blood pressure, and psyche unparalleled in history. We are being killed with kindness. We are being stifled with culture and material joys.
Cruelty | Culture | History | Kindness | Receive | Wisdom | Cruelty |
Hugo Grotius, also known as Huig de Groot, Hugo Grocio or Hugo de Groot
It is not in the power of man to devise any form of government free from imperfections and dangers.
Government | Man | Power | Wisdom | Government |
God then, is the source of all things; the Aeon is the power of God; and the work of the Aeon is the Kosmos which never came into being, but is ever coming into being, by the action of the Aeon, and that which olds the universe together is the Aeon.
Central to the notion of masculinity is its rejection of everything that is defined by a culture as feminine and its legitimated control of whatever counts as the feminine... Gender is an asymmetrical category of human thought, social organization, and individual identity and behavior.
Behavior | Control | Culture | Individual | Organization | Thought | Wisdom |
S. I. Hayakawa, fully Samuel Ichiye Hayakawa
If you see in any given situation only what everybody else can see, you can be said to be so much a representative of your culture than you are a victim of it.
John Alexander Hammerton, fully Sir John Alexander Hammerton
One of the most melancholy things in the world is the enormous power for evil of the dead over things living. There is hardly a great painter or writer, or a man who had achieved greatness in any direction, whose name has not been used to repress rising genius.
Evil | Genius | Greatness | Man | Melancholy | Power | Wisdom | World |
Dreaming is an act of pure imagination, attesting in all men a creative power which, if it were available in waking, would make every man a Dante or a Shakespeare.
Imagination | Man | Men | Power | Wisdom |
Robert A. Heinlein, fully Robert Anson Heinlein, pen name for Anson MacDonald
Never underestimate the power of human stupidity.
The patriotism of antiquity becomes in modern societies a caricature. In antiquity, it developed naturally from the whole condition of a people, its youth, its situation, its culture - with us it is an awkward imitation. Our life demands, not separation from other nations, but constant intercourse; our city life is not that of the ancient city-state.
Antiquity | Culture | Imitation | Life | Life | Nations | Patriotism | People | Wisdom | Youth |
Part of our good consists in the endeavor to do sorrows away, and in the power to sustain them when the endeavor fails, to bear them nobly, and thus help others to bear them as well.
Nothing is more free than the imagination of man; and though it cannot exceed that original stock of ideas furnished by the internal and external senses, it has unlimited power of mixing, compounding, separating, and dividing these ideas, in all the varieties of fiction and vision. It can feign a train of events, with all the appearance of reality, ascribe to them a particular time and place, conceive them as existent, and paint them out of itself with every circumstance, that belongs to any historical fact, which it believes with the greatest certainty.
Appearance | Events | Ideas | Imagination | Man | Nothing | Power | Reality | Time | Vision | Wisdom |
The expansion of human power has hardly begun, and what we are going to do with our power may either save or destroy the planet. The earth may be of small significance within the infinite universe. But if it is of some significance, we hold the key to it. In our own age we have been force into the realization that there will be either one world, or no world.
Age | Destroy | Earth | Force | Power | Universe | Will | Wisdom | World |