This site is dedicated to the memory of Dr. Alan William Smolowe who gave birth to the creation of this database.
Arianna Huffington, born Arianna Stassinopoulos
Both these perspectives - that the government is responsible for us, and that we are responsible only for ourselves - are dehumanizing. To be fully human, we can neither give up responsibility for ourselves nor refuse responsibility for others. Indeed, we need to redefine individual responsibility to include social responsibility.
Government | Individual | Need | Responsibility | Wisdom | Government |
Arianna Huffington, born Arianna Stassinopoulos
The answer to the accumulating casualties of the welfare state’s “war” on poverty is the home-grown, grass-roots, all-volunteer army of ordinary people armed with food, books, skills and a determination to make a difference. The entrepreneurial creativity that catapulted this nation to a position of global leadership can now be harnessed to do for community what it did for productivity. When we provide imaginative, entrepreneurial alternatives to the welfare state, we won’t need to confront it. It will simply wither away. And the rewards of this work are a bounty of spiritual renewal: an abundance of love, meaning and connectedness.
Abundance | Books | Creativity | Determination | Global | Love | Meaning | Need | People | Position | Poverty | War | Will | Wisdom | Work | Leadership |
As children we all possess a natural, uninhibited curiosity, a hunger for explanation, which seems to die slowly as we age - suppressed, I suppose, by the high value we place on conformity and by the need not to appear ignorant. It betokens a conviction that somehow science is innately incomprehensible. It precludes reaching deeper, thereby denying the profound truth that understanding enriches experience, that explanation vastly enhances beauty of the natural world in the eye of the beholder.
Age | Beauty | Children | Conformity | Curiosity | Experience | Hunger | Need | Science | Truth | Understanding | Wisdom | World | Beauty | Value |
When shall we learn that he who multiplieth possessions, multiplieth troubles, and that the one single use of things which we call our own, is that they may be his who hath need of them?
Need | Possessions | Troubles | Wisdom | Learn |
Instead of production, primarily, we have to think of sustainability. Instead of dominating nature, we have to acknowledge that nature is our source and best teacher. Instead of understanding the world in parts, we need to think about the whole.
If you have built castles in the air, your work need not be lost. Now put foundations under them.
Roger L'Estrange, fully Sir Roger L'Estrange
Parasites and liars have need of good memories.
Charles F. Kettering, fully Charles Franklin Kettering
We need to teach the highly educated person that it is not a disgrace to fail and that he must analyze every failure to find its cause. He must learn how to fail intelligently, for failing is one of the greatest arts in the world.
Cause | Disgrace | Failure | Need | Teach | Wisdom | World | Failure | Learn |
Gottfried Leibniz, fully Gottfried Wilhalm von Leibniz, Baron von Leibnitz
All things are understood by God a priori, as eternal truths; for he does not need experience, and yet all things are known by him adequately. We, on the other hand, know scarcely anything adequately, and only a few things a priori; most things we know by experience, in the case of which other principles and other criteria must be applied.
Eternal | Experience | God | Need | Principles | Wisdom | God |
The legitimate object of government is to do for a community of people whatever they need to have done, but cannot do at all, or cannot so well do for themselves in their separate and individual capacities. In all that the people can individually do as well for themselves, government ought not to interfere.
Government | Individual | Need | Object | People | Wisdom | Government |
Neil MacCormick, Sir Donald Neil MacCormick
When we say that law ‘embodies’ values we are talking metaphorically. What does it mean? Values are only ‘embodied’ in law in the sense that and to the extent that human beings approve of the laws they have because of the state of affairs they are supposed to secure, being states of affairs which are on some ground deemed just or otherwise good. This need not be articulated at all.
We need to get rid of some false meanings that we give to the words eternal and eternity. The psychological idea connected with eternal life cannot be limited to the view that man is changed into another state at death, merely by the act of dying. It would be far more correct to say that it refers, first of all, to some change that man is capable of undergoing now, in this life, and one that is connected with the attainment of unity. The modern term psychology means literally the science of the soul. But in former times there actually existed a science of the soul based upon the idea that man is an imperfect state but capable of reaching a further state... No totality-act is possible; the will is separate from knowledge, the feeling from intellect.
Attainment | Change | Death | Eternal | Eternity | Knowledge | Life | Life | Man | Means | Need | Psychology | Science | Soul | Unity | Will | Wisdom | Words |