This site is dedicated to the memory of Dr. Alan William Smolowe who gave birth to the creation of this database.
Julian Huxley, fully Sir Julian Sorell Huxley
Biology… has thus revealed man’s place in nature. Hs is the highest form of life produced by the evolutionary process on this planet, the latest dominant type, and the only organism capable of further advance or progress. Whether he knows it or not, whether he wishes it or not, he is now the main agency for the further evolution of the earth and its inhabitants. In other words, his destiny is to realize new possibilities for the whole terrestrial sector of the cosmic process, to be the instrument of further evolutionary progress on this planet.
Destiny | Earth | Evolution | Life | Life | Man | Nature | Progress | Wishes | Words |
We can flow along with the mainstream of a culture that does not serve us well – does not really make us comfortable, does not really make us safe; but only offers illusions of happiness, comfort, safety – or we can begin the oftentimes prickly work of searching our own hearts, of asking who and what we love, who and what we feel strongly enough about to change our lives for, to fight for, to live for.
Mother Jones, referring to Mary Harris Jones
Pray for the dead and fight like hell for the living.
Hell |
The truly religious man is always more concerned about what God will do in him that what He will do to him; in this intense desire for purification of his motives he almost wishes that heaven and hell were blotted out, that he might serve God for Himself alone.
Desire | God | Heaven | Hell | Man | Motives | Will | Wishes | God |
John Hick, fully John Harwood Hick
To see the world as being ruled by a divine love which sets infinite value upon each individual and includes all men in its scope, and yet to live as though the world were a realm of chance in which each must fight for his own interests against the rest, argues a very dim and wavering vision of God’s rule.
Chance | God | Individual | Love | Men | Rest | Rule | Vision | Wavering | World | Value |
Faith is the song of life. Woe to him who wishes to rob life of its splendid poetry. The whole mass of prosaic literature and knowledge is of value only when it is founded on the perception of the poetry of life.
Faith | Knowledge | Life | Life | Literature | Perception | Poetry | Wishes | Woe | Value |
Built me a son, O Lord, who will be strong enough to know when he is weak and when he is afraid... whose wishes will not take the place of deeds; a son who will know Thee... whose heart will be clear, whose goal will be high, a son who will master himself before he seeks to master other men.
Niccolò Machiavelli, formally Niccolò di Bernardo dei Machiavelli
A prince… who wishes to guard against conspiracies should fear those on whom he has heaped benefits quite as much, and even more, than those whom he has wronged; for the latter lack the convenient opportunities which the former have in abundance. The intention of both is the same for the thirst of dominion is as great as that of revenge, and even greater. A prince, therefore, should never bestow so much authority upon his friends but that there should always be a certain distance between them and himself, and that there should always be something left for them to desire.
Abundance | Authority | Desire | Fear | Intention | Revenge | Wishes | Friends |
The life of an honest man must be an apostasy and a perpetual desertion... For the man who wishes to remain faithful to truth must make himself continually unfaithful to all the continual, successive, indefatigable renascent errors.
Religion indeed wishes to be useful and beautiful, but it also means to be true.
Human happiness does not consist in satisfying one’s personal wishes but in the certainty of being needed, in having the visions of goals still unattained.
We may fight against what is wrong, but if we allow ourselves to hate, that is to insure our spiritual defeat and our likeness to what we hate.
Lu Xun, or Lu Hsün, pen name of Zhou Shuren
If there are still men who really want to live in this world, they should first dare to speak out, to laugh, to cry, to be angry, to accuse, to fight – that they may at least cleanse this accursed place of its accursed atmosphere!
Human beings can attain a worthy and harmonious life only if they are able to rid themselves, within the limits of human nature, of striving to fulfill wishes of the material kind.
Human nature | Life | Life | Nature | Wishes |