This site is dedicated to the memory of Dr. Alan William Smolowe who gave birth to the creation of this database.
The first thing we have to do with heroism is to lay bare its underÂside, show what gives human heroics its specific nature and impetus. Here we introduce directly one of the great rediscoveries of modern thought: that of all things that move man, one of the principal ones is his terror of death. After Darwin the problem of death as an evolutionary one came to the fore, and many thinkers immediately saw that it was a major psychological problem for man.2 They also very quickly saw what real heroism was about, as Shaler wrote just at the turn of the century:3 heroism is first and foremost a reflex of the terror of death. We admire most the courage to face death; we give such valor our highest and most constant adoration; it moves us deeply in our hearts because we have doubts about how brave we ourselves would be. When we see a man bravely facing his own extinction we rehearse the greatest victory we can imagine. And so the hero has been the center of human honor and acclaim since probably the beginning of specifically human evolution. But even before that our primate ancestors deferred to others who were extrapowerful and courageous and ignored those who were cowardly. Man has elevated animal courage into a cult.
Ernest Hemingway, fully Ernest Miller Hemingway
The house was built on the highest part of the narrow tongue of land between the harbor and the open sea. It had lasted through three hurricanes and it was built solid as a ship. It was shaded by tall coconut palms that were bent by the trade wind and on the ocean side you could walk out of the door and down the bluff across the white sand and into the Gulf Stream. The water of the Stream was usually a dark blue when you looked out at it when there was no wind. But when you walked out into it there was just the green light of the water over that floury white sand and you could see the shadow of any big fish a long time before he could ever come in close to the beach. It was a safe and fine place to bathe in the day but it was no place to swim at night. At night the sharks came in close to the beach, hunting at the edge of the Stream, and from the upper porch of the house on quiet nights you could hear the splashing of the fish they hunted and if you went down to the beach you could see the phosphorescent wakes they made in the water. At night the sharks had no fear and everything else feared them. But in the day they stayed out away from the clear white sand and if they did come in you could see their shadows a long way away.
Politics |
Ernest Hemingway, fully Ernest Miller Hemingway
It is by riding a bicycle that you learn the contours of a country best, since you have to sweat up the hills and can coast down them. ... Thus you remember them as they actually are, while in a motorcar only a high hill impresses you, and you have no such accurate remembrance of country you have driven through as you gain by riding a bicycle.
Past |
Ernest Hemingway, fully Ernest Miller Hemingway
Life had seemed so simple that morning when I had wakened and found the false springÂ…But Paris was a very old city and we were young and nothing was simple there, not even poverty, nor sudden money, nor the moonlight, nor right and wrong nor the breathing of someone who lay beside you in the moonlight.
Past |
Ernest Hemingway, fully Ernest Miller Hemingway
Now he would never write the things that he had saved to write until he knew enough to write them well. Well, he would not have to fail at trying to write them either. Maybe you could never write them, and that was why you put them off and delayed the starting. Well he would never know, now.
E. F. Schumacher, fully Ernst Friedrich "Fritz" Schumacher
To mention these things, no doubt, means laying oneself open to the charge of being against science, technology, and progress. Let me therefore, in conclusion, add a few words about future scientific research. Man cannot live without science and technology any more than he can live against nature.
Better | Experience | Nothing | Problems | Question | Technology | World |
E. F. Schumacher, fully Ernst Friedrich "Fritz" Schumacher
All history – as well as all current experience – points to the fact that it is man, not nature, who provides the primary resource: that the key factor of all economic development comes out of the mind of man.
The intellect is a cold thing and a merely intellectual idea will never stimulate thought in the same manner that a spiritual idea does.
Human race | Race |
Che Guevara, fully Ernesto “Che” Guevara
The revolution is not an apple that falls when it is ripe. You have to make it fall.
Day | Revolution | Spirit |
E. F. Schumacher, fully Ernst Friedrich "Fritz" Schumacher
In his urgent attempt to obtain reliable knowledge about his essentially indeterminate future, the modern man of action may surround himself by ever-growing armies of forecasters, by ever-growing mountains of factual data to be digested by ever more wonderful mechanical contrivances: I fear that the result is little more than a huge game of make-believe and an ever more marvelous vindication of Parkinson's Law. The best decisions will still be based on the judgments of mature non-electronic brains possessed by men who have looked steadily and calmly at the situation and seen it whole.
Better | Technology |
Che Guevara, fully Ernesto “Che” Guevara
And yet every so often, the heart of America, shuddering with indignation, sends a nervous spasm through the gentle back of the Andes, and tumultuous shock waves assault the surface of the land. Three times the cuppola of proud Santo Domingo has collapsed from on high to the rhythm of broken bones and its worn walls have opened and fallen too. But the foundations they rest on are unmoved, the great blocks of the Temple of the Sun exhibit their gray stone indifferently; however colossal the disaster befalling its oppressor, not one of its huge rocks shifts from its place.
Che Guevara, fully Ernesto “Che” Guevara
This is the new man must be proactive, he has to develop his individual, and to be personal creative; In order to build the new society we do not need to dolls shaking her head approval on everything, but on the contrary, we need to militants active, not working for personal interests, but also participate in building a socialist society with creativity.
E. F. Schumacher, fully Ernst Friedrich "Fritz" Schumacher
That soul-destroying, meaningless, mechanical, monotonous, moronic work is an insult to human nature which must necessarily and inevitably produce either escapism or aggression, and that no amount of "bread and circuses" can compensate for the damage done – these are facts which are neither denied nor acknowledged but are met with an unbreakable conspiracy of silence – because to deny them would be too obviously absurd and to acknowledge them would condemn the central preoccupation of modern society as a crime against humanity.
Experience | Knowledge | Technology | Truth |
E. F. Schumacher, fully Ernst Friedrich "Fritz" Schumacher
There are always some things which we do for their own sakes, and there are other things which we do for some other purpose. One of the most important tasks for any society is to distinguish between ends and means-to-ends, and to have some sort of cohesive view and argument about this.
E. F. Schumacher, fully Ernst Friedrich "Fritz" Schumacher
The power of ordinary people, who today tend to feel utterly powerless, does not lie in starting new lines of action, but in placing their sympathy and support with minority groups which have already started.
Consequences | Poverty | Talking | Technology |
Che Guevara, fully Ernesto “Che” Guevara
If your heart vibrate looking Resist oppression then silence is a form of treason because
Beauty | Life | Life | People | Spirit | Understanding | Will | Beauty |
Erwin Schrödinger, fully Erwin Rudolf Josef Alexander Schrödinger
The unity and continuity of Vedanta are reflected in the unity and continuity of wave mechanics. This is entirely consistent with the Vedanta concept of All in One.