This site is dedicated to the memory of Dr. Alan William Smolowe who gave birth to the creation of this database.
Paul Ehrlich, fully Paul Ralph Ehrlich
The idea that we can just keep growing forever on a finite planet is totally imbecilic... Julian Simon, a professor of junkmail marketing, and his kind, think technology will solve everything... We can use up the Earth then we can just jump into spaceships and fly somewhere else... Technology does nothing to solve problems of biodiversity or living space or arable cropland... Fresh water and arable cropland are finite resources... We are already far beyond what we can support sustainably... The provincial view you get from someone living in some wealthy American East Coast city is wildly different from reality. Most of the world is tropical, hungry and poor. Visit the developing world and southern hemisphere and you get a very different view of reality.
Earth | Nothing | Problems | Space | Technology | Will | World | Think |
Paul Ehrlich, fully Paul Ralph Ehrlich
A series of things have come up since then that have made the problem incredibly grimmer…. The ozone hole… acid rain… Three hundred million people have starved to death since THE POPULATION BOMB was written. The famines weren’t as large as agriculturists thought they would be… due to the spread of… Green Revolution technology into the poor countries…. What makes us nervous right now is that we’re faced with again having to do something desperate to increase our food production greatly... In 1965 we knew exactly how to do it, the question was could we deploy it fast enough—Today we have nothing left to deploy—that’s very scary... As a species we’re not able to live on our income; we’re living on our capital, our deep rich agricultural soils are being destroyed, water is being over-pumped, and our biodiversity, our life support system—we’re already far beyond what we can support.
Death | Life | Life | Nothing | People | Question | Revolution | Right | Technology | Thought | Thought |
The energy of hatred won't get you anywhere; but the energy of forgiveness, which reveals itself through love, will transform your life in a positive way… The warrior of light knows the importance of intuition. In the midst of battle, he does not have time to think of the enemy's blows, and so he uses his instinct and obeys his angel. In times of peace, he deciphers the signs that God sends him. People say, He's mad. Or, He lives in a fantasy world. Or even, How can he possibly believe in such illogical things? But the warrior knows that intuition is God's alphabet and he continues listening to the wind and talking to the stars.
Energy | God | Instinct | Intuition | Life | Life | Light | Listening | People | Talking | Time | Will | God | Think |
I want and need to like myself again; I have to convince myself that I’m capable of taking my own decision… I want to be someone capable of seeing the unseen faces, of seeing those who do not seek fame or glory who silently fulfill the role life has given them. I want to be able to do this because the most important things, those that shape our existence, are precisely the ones that never show their faces… I wanted to... feel hatred and love, despair and tedium -- all those simple, yet foolish things that make up everyday life but that give pleasure to your existence. If one day I could get out of here, I would allow myself to be crazy. Everyone is indeed crazy, but the craziest are the ones who don't know they are crazy; they just keep repeating what others tell them to… I want to continue being crazy; living my life the way I dream it, and not the way the other people want it to be.
Day | Despair | Fame | Glory | Important | Life | Life | Need | People | Pleasure |
Peter Benchley, fully Peter Bradford Benchley
But if we misuse the technology and destroy the very resources we intend to harvest, I think we deserve the blame.
Destroy | Technology | Think |
Hatred and unpopularity at the moment have fallen to the lot of all who have aspired to rule others; but where odium must be incurred, true wisdom incurs it for the highest objects. Hatred also is short-lived; but that which makes the splendour of the present and the glory of the future remains for ever unforgotten. Make your decision, therefore, for glory then and honour now, and attain both objects by instant and zealous effort: do not send heralds to Lacedaemon, and do not betray any sign of being oppressed by your present sufferings, since they whose minds are least sensitive to calamity, and whose hands are most quick to meet it, are the greatest men and the greatest communities.
Pitirim A. Sorokin, fully Pitirim Alexandrovich (Alexander) Sorokin
Ideational culture, has these characteristics: The defining principle is that true reality is supersensory, transcendent, spiritual. The material world is variously: an illusion (maya), temporary, passing away (“stranger in a strange land”), sinful, or a mere shadow an eternal transcendent reality. Religion often tends to asceticism, or attempts at zealous social reform. Mysticism and revelation are considered valid sources of truth and morality. Science and technology are comparatively de-emphasized... Economics is conditioned by religious and moral commandments (e.g., laws against usury). Innovation in theology, metaphysics, and supersensory philosophies. Flourishing of religious and spiritual art (e.g., Gothic cathedrals)
Art | Economics | Eternal | Illusion | Innovation | Mysticism | Reality | Religion | Revelation | Technology | Truth | World | Art |
As a matter of strict logic, perhaps, there is no contradiction in taking an interest in animals on both compassionate and gastronomic grounds. If a person is opposed to the infliction of suffering on animals, but not to the painless killing of animals, he could consistently eat animals that had lived free of all suffering and been instantly, painlessly slaughtered. Yet practically and psychologically it is impossible to be consistent in one's concern for nonhuman animals while continuing to dine on them. If we are prepared to take the life of another being merely in order to satisfy our taste for a particular type of food, then that being is no more than a means to our end. In time we will come to regard pigs, cattle, and chickens as things for us to use, no matter how strong our compassion may be; and when we find that to continue to obtain supplies of the bodies of these animals at a price we are able to pay it is necessary to change their living conditions a little, we will be unlikely to regard these changes too critically. The factory farm is nothing more than the application of technology to the idea that animals are means to our ends. Our eating habits are dear to us and not easily altered. We have a strong interest in convincing ourselves that our concern for other animals does not require us to stop eating them. No one in the habit of eating an animal can be completely without bias in judging whether the conditions in which that animal is reared caused suffering.
Change | Compassion | Contradiction | Habit | Life | Life | Means | Nothing | Order | Price | Regard | Suffering | Taste | Technology | Time | Will |
Petra Kelly, fully Petra Karin Kelley
The suffering people of this world must come together to take control of their lives, to wrest political power from their present masters pushing them towards destruction. The Earth has been mistreated and only by restoring a balance, only by living with the Earth, only by emphasizsing knowledge and expertise towards soft energies and soft technology for people and for life, can we overcome the patriarchal ego.
Control | Earth | Knowledge | People | Power | Present | Suffering | Technology | World |
Of what consequence to you, reader, is my obscure individuality? I live, like you, in a century in which reason submits only to fact and to evidence. My name, like yours, is truth-seeker. My mission is written in these words of the law: Speak without hatred and without fear; tell that which thou knowest! The work of our race is to build the temple of science, and this science includes man and Nature. Now, truth reveals itself to all; to-day to Newton and Pascal, tomorrow to the herdsman in the valley and the journeyman in the shop. Each one contributes his stone to the edifice; and, his task accomplished, disappears. Eternity precedes us, eternity follows us: between two infinites, of what account is one poor mortal that the century should inquire about him?
Eternity | Man | Mission | Mortal | Race | Reason | Science | Tomorrow | Truth | Words | Work |
Pope John Paul II, born Karol Józef Wojtyła, aka Saint John Paul the Great NULL
Never again war! Never again hatred and intolerance!
The fact that children are sacrificed to their parents’ needs is an uncomfortable truth that no adult likes to hear. Even adolescents find it difficult to bear, because they are bound to their parents by ambivalent feelings and would much rather direct their split-off hatred toward institutions and ‘society’ in the abstract. This provides them with objects they can unequivocally reject, and they hope in this way finally to rid themselves of their ambivalence.
Children who become too aware of things are punished for it and internalize the coercion to such an extent that as adults they give up the search for awareness. But because some people cannot renounce this search in spite of coercion, there is justifiable hope that regardless of the ever-increasing application of technology to the field of psychological knowledge, Kafka's vision of the penal colony with its efficient, scientifically minded persecutors and their passive victims is valid only for certain areas of our live and perhaps not forever. For the human soul is virtually indestructible, and its ability to rise from the ashes remains as long as the body draws breath.
Ability | Body | Coercion | Hope | People | Search | Soul | Technology | Vision |
Some of the most effective approaches to promoting affirmative living are those that involve the entire village. An annual event in Boston called Team Harmony brings middle and high school students together with local sports figures and business leaders to take a stand against prejudice and bigotry. After the Team Harmony event in 1994, many students wrote about the positive messages they received. Since the event, I want to do all that I can to stop racism, one of them wrote. I want everyone to live in peace and harmony, where there is no hatred and no violence.
A 2004 study found that teens who watch a lot of television with sexual content and more likely to initiate intercourse in the following year. Overexposure to highly-sexed television made kids act older--12-year-olds behaved like 14-year-olds. A decade of new research confirms that heavy exposure to violent and sexually explicit media triggers unhealthy responses from boys and girls alike, regardless of race. But we don't yet know the full effects of all this technology on our kids. CAMRA, the Children and Media Research Advancement Act, which I introduced in the Senate, would coordinate and fund new research into the effects of viewing and using electronic media, including television, computers, video games, and the Internet…
Boys | Children | Research | Study | Technology | Television | Following |
Buckminster Fuller, fully Richard Buckminster "Bucky" Fuller
Humanity is acquiring all the right technology for all the wrong reasons.
Right | Technology | Wrong |
Buckminster Fuller, fully Richard Buckminster "Bucky" Fuller
It seems to demonstrate that periods of industrial activity in technical syntheses of principles, data, free energy and energy as matter, find highest employment by the fear-amassed credits of warfare. Therefore the assumption approaches fact that war promotes the major technical advances of civilization... What has not been clear is that the potential of this emergency-born technology has always accrued to human's prewar individual initiatives taken in a humble but irrepressible progression of assumptions, measurements, deductions, and codifications of pure science.
Energy | Individual | Technology | War |
Buckminster Fuller, fully Richard Buckminster "Bucky" Fuller
Think of it. We are blessed with technology that would be indescribable to our forefathers. We have the wherewithal, the know-it-all to feed everybody, clothe everybody, and give every human on Earth a chance. We know now what we could never have known before -- that we now have the option for all humanity to make it successfully on this planet in this lifetime. Whether it is to be Utopia or Oblivion will be a touch-and-go relay race right up to the final moment.
Earth | Humanity | Oblivion | Race | Right | Technology | Utopia | Will | Blessed |
It has become appallingly obvious that our technology has exceeded our humanity.
Buckminster Fuller, fully Richard Buckminster "Bucky" Fuller
We are blessed with technology that would be indescribable to our forefathers. We have the wherewithal, the know-it-all to feed everybody, clothe everybody, and give every human on Earth a chance. We know now what we could never have known before--that we now have the option for all humanity to make it successfully on this planet in this lifetime. Whether it is to be Utopia or Oblivion will be a touch-and-go relay race right up to the final moment.
Earth | Humanity | Oblivion | Race | Right | Technology | Utopia | Will | Blessed |