This site is dedicated to the memory of Dr. Alan William Smolowe who gave birth to the creation of this database.
Vine Deloria, fully Vine Victor Deloria, Jr.
The white man is problem-solving. His conceptualizations merge into science and then emerge in his social life as problems, the solutions of which are the adjustments of his social machine. Slavery, prohibition, Civil Rights, and social services are all important adjustments of the white man's social machine. No solution he has reached has proven adequate. Indeed, it has often proven demonic.
Ability | Distinguish | Man | Sacred |
Vernon Howard, fully Vernon Linwood Howard
Always stay on the path of seeing what is wrong, then you will see what is right.
Viktor Frankl, fully Viktor Emil Frankl
The last of the human freedoms - to choose one's attitude in any given set of circumstances, to choose one's own way.
Ability |
Viktor Frankl, fully Viktor Emil Frankl
To draw an analogy: a man's suffering is similar to the behavior of a gas. If a certain quantity of gas is pumped into an empty chamber, it will fill the chamber completely and evenly, no matter how big the chamber. Thus suffering completely fills the human soul and conscious mind, no matter whether the suffering is great or little. Therefore the size of human suffering is absolutely relative.
Ability | Art | Day | Enough | Friend | Humor | Life | Life | Promise | Sense | Smile | Story | Weapons | Will | Work | Art |
Viktor Frankl, fully Viktor Emil Frankl
But there was no need to be ashamed of tears, for tears bore witness that a man had the greatest of courage, the courage to suffer.
Ability | Accident | Day | Growth | Life | Life | Meaning | Power | Psychology | Television | Time | Will |
Viktor Frankl, fully Viktor Emil Frankl
Just as a small fire is extinguished by the storm whereas a large fire is enhanced by it-likewise a weak faith is weakened by predicament and catastrophes whereas a strong faith is strengthened by them.
Ability |
The Encyclopoedia Britannica could be reduced to the volume of a matchbox. A library of a million volumes could be compressed into one end of a desk. If the human race has produced since the invention of movable type a total record, in the form of magazines, newspapers, books, tracts, advertising blurbs, correspondence, having a volume corresponding to a billion books, the whole affair, assembled and compressed, could be lugged off in a moving van. Mere compression, of course, is not enough; one needs not only to make and store a record but also to be able to consult it, and this aspect of the matter comes later. Even the modern great library is not generally consulted; it is nibbled by a few.
Ability | Difficulty | Experience | Important | Means | Present |
The previous regime — armed with its arrogant and intolerant ideology — reduced man to a force of production, and nature to a tool of production. In this it attacked both their very substance and their mutual relationship. It reduced gifted and autonomous people, skillfully working in their own country, to the nuts and bolts of some monstrously huge, noisy and stinking machine, whose real meaning was not clear to anyone.
Those who rebelled against totalitarian rule and those who simply managed to remain themselves and think freely, were all persecuted. We should not forget any of those who paid for our present freedom in one way or another.
The mighty angel broke the seal, rolled back the stone, and sat upon it as to say, Now look who’s in charge around here.
Ability |
When a person tries to act in accordance with his conscience, when he tries to speak the truth, when he tries to behave like a citizen, even in conditions where citizenship is degraded, it won't necessarily lead anywhere, but it might. There's one thing, however, that will never lead anywhere, and that is speculating that such behavior will lead somewhere.
Ability | Good | Heart | Man | Politics | Right | Sensibility |
There are times when we must sink to the bottom of our misery to understand truth, just as we must descend to the bottom of a well to see the stars in broad daylight.
Ability | Absurd | Awareness | Courage | Good | Gratitude | Irony | Life | Life | Meaning | Responsibility | Sense | Vigilance | Awareness |
There are no exact guidelines. There are probably no guidelines at all. The only thing I can recommend at this stage is a sense of humor, an ability to see things in their ridiculous and absurd dimensions, to laugh at others and at ourselves, a sense of irony regarding everything that calls out for parody in this world. In other words, I can only recommend perspective and distance. Awareness of all the most dangerous kinds of vanity, both in others and in ourselves. A good mind. A modest certainty about the meaning of things. Gratitude for the gift of life and the courage to take responsibility for it. Vigilance of spirit.
Ability | Absurd | Courage | Good | Gratitude | Life | Life | Meaning | Responsibility | Sense | Sensibility |
What makes the Anthropic Principle and the Gaia Hypothesis so inspiring? One simple thing: Both remind us, in modern language, of what we have long suspected, of what we have long projected into our forgotten myths and perhaps what has always lain dormant within us as archetypes. That is, the awareness of our being anchored in the earth and the universe, the awareness that we are not here alone nor for ourselves alone, but that we are an integral part of higher, mysterious entities against whom it is not advisable to blaspheme. This forgotten awareness is encoded in all religions. All cultures anticipate it in various forms. It is one of the things that form the basis of man's understanding of himself, of his place in the world, and ultimately of the world as such.
Ability | Politics | Sensibility |
Vauvenargues, Luc de Clapiers, Marquis de Vauvenargues NULL
The word courage is fearlessness in jeopardy.
Ability |
Vauvenargues, Luc de Clapiers, Marquis de Vauvenargues NULL
Wickedness supposed to taste the evil hidden malignancy wickedness.
Thomas Szasz, fully Thomas Stephen Szasz
Keeping another person waiting is a basic tactic for defining him as inferior and oneself as superior.
Ability | Conformity | Health | Play |
Thomas J. Watson, Jr., fully Thomas John Watson, Jr.
Once an organization loses its spirit of pioneering and rests on its early work, its progress stops.
Thomas L. Friedman, fully Thomas Lauren Friedman
The simple definition of globalization is the interweaving of markets, technology, information systems, and telecommunications networks in a way that is shrinking the world from a size medium to a size small. It began decades ago, but accelerated dramatically over the past 10 years, as the price of computing power fell and the world became an ever-more densely interconnected place. People resist this shift — see, for example, the G8 protests of 2001 (one of the bloodiest uprisings in recent European history) or the recent rioting in Pittsburgh at this year’s G20 conference—because they think it primarily benefits big business elites to the detriment of everyone else. But globalization didn’t ruin the world—it just flattened it. And on balance that can benefit everyone, especially the poor. Globalization has pulled millions of people out of poverty in India and China, and multiplied the size of the global middle class. It has raised the global standard of living faster than that at any other time in the history of the world, and it is supporting astounding growth. All world economic activity was valued at $7 trillion in 1950. That’s equal to how much growth took place over just the past decade, even including the recent downturn. Whatever people’s fears of change, globalization is here to stay—and, if properly managed, it will be a good thing.
Ability | Chance | Friend | Good | Important | Lesson | Listening | Meaning | News | People | Question | Respect | Talking | Will | World | Respect |