This site is dedicated to the memory of Dr. Alan William Smolowe who gave birth to the creation of this database.
The question of love is one that cannot be evaded. Whether or not you claim to be interested in it from the moment you are alive you are bound to be concerned with love because love is not just something that happens to you: It is a certain special way of being alive. Love is in fact an intensification of life a completeness a fullness a wholeness of life.
Better | Capacity | Choice | Education | Freedom | Life | Life | Light | Man | People | Perfection | Power | Purpose | Purpose | Relationship | Risk | Spirit | Taste | Wants | World |
The purpose of education is to show us how to define ourselves authentically and spontaneously in relation to our world—not to impose a prefabricated definition of the world, still less an arbitrary definition of ourselves as individuals. The world is made up of the people who are fully alive in it: that is, of the people who can be themselves in it and can enter into a living and fruitful relationship with each other in it. The world is, therefore, more real in proportion as the people in it are able to be more fully and more humanly alive: that is to say, better able to make a lucid and conscious use of their freedom. Basically, this freedom must consist first of all in the capacity to choose their own lives, to find themselves on the deepest possible level. A superficial freedom to wander aimlessly here and there, to taste this or that, to make a choice of distractions … is simply a sham. It claims to be a freedom of choice when it has evaded the basic task of discovering who it is that chooses. It is not free because it is unwilling to face the risk of self-discovery. Freedom of choice is not, itself, the perfection of liberty. But it helps us take our first step toward freedom or slavery, spontaneity or compulsion. The free man is the one whose choices have given him the power to stand on his own feet and determine his own life according to the higher light and spirit that are in him. The slave, in the spiritual order, is the man whose choices have destroyed all spontaneity in him and have delivered him over, bound hand and foot, to his own compulsions, idiosyncrasies and illusions, so that he never does what he really wants to do, but only what he has to do.
Willard Quine, fully Willard Van Orman Quine
If there is a case for mental events and mental states, it must be that the positing of them, like the positing of molecules, has some indirect systematic efficacy in the development of theory.
Willard Quine, fully Willard Van Orman Quine
Physics investigates the essential nature of the world, and biology describes a local bump. Psychology, human psychology, describes a bump on the bump.
Error |
Willard Quine, fully Willard Van Orman Quine
Confusion of sign and object is original sin coeval with the word.
Empiricist | Error | Experience | Future | Light | Myth | Past | Science | Think |
Willard Quine, fully Willard Van Orman Quine
Some have said that the thesis [of indeterminacy] is a consequence of my behaviorism. Some have said that it is a reductio ad absurdum of my behaviorism. I disagree with this second point, but I agree with the first. I hold further that the behaviorism approach is mandatory. In psychology one may or may not be a behaviorist, but in linguistics one has no choice.
Saw a film on cancer yesterday, shown by the English delegation. No doubt about it. I'm right. Migratory cancer cells are amoebic formations. They are produced from disintegrating tissue and thus demonstrate the law of tension and charge in its purest form - as does the orgastic convulsion. Now money is a must - cancer the main issue - in every respect, even political. It was a staggering experience. My intuition is good. I depend on it. Was absolutely driven to buy a microscope. The sight of the cancer cells was exactly as I had previously imagined it, had almost physically felt it would be. Cancer is an autoinfection of the body, of an organ. And researchers have no idea of what, hor, or where!!
Anxiety | Anxiety | Existence | Experience | Fighting | Freedom | Guilt | Knowledge | Love | Meaning | Means | Money | Organization | People | Power | Precision | Self-determination | Sin | Weapons | Will | Precision | Old |
No real English gentleman, in his secret soul, was ever sorry for the death of a political economist.
Advertising, in fact, is the effort of business men to take charge of consumption as well as production. They are not content to supply a demand, as the text-books say; they educate the demand as well. In the end, advertising rests upon the fact that consumers are a fickle and superstitious mob, incapable of any real judgment as to what it wants or how it is to get what it thinks it would like. A bewildered child in a toy shop is nothing to the ultimate consumer in the world market of today. To say, then, that advertising is merely a way of calling attention to useful goods is a gorgeous piece of idealization. Advertising is in fact the weed that has grown up because the art of consumption is uncultivated.
A regime, an established order, is rarely overthrown by a revolutionary movement; usually a regime collapses of its own weakness and corruption and then a revolutionary movement enters among the ruins and takes over the powers that have become vacant.
Warren Bennis, fully Warren Gamaliel Bennis
It is the capacity to develop and improve their skills that distinguishes leaders from followers.
Innovation | Will |
Wei Wu Wei, pen name for Terence James Stannus Gray
On the phenomenal plane we seek pleasure and the avoidance of pain. On the noumenal plane we know the absence of both - which is Bliss.
Attainment | People | Will | Think |
W. Brugh Joy, fully William Brugh Joy
Seeking world peace is not about peace, it is power and control all under the guise of service to humanity.
Ability | Appreciation | Enough | Experience | Means | Mind | Music | Nature | People | Quiet | Silence | Struggle | Talking | Writing | Appreciation |
Vladimir Lenin, fully Vladimir Ilyich Lenin
If Socialism can only be realized when the intellectual development of all the people permits it, then we shall not see Socialism for at least five hundred years.
Ursula Le Guin, fully Ursula Kroeber Le Guin
Translation is entirely mysterious. Increasingly I have felt that the art of writing is itself translating, or more like translating than it is like anything else. What is the other text, the original? I have no answer. I suppose it is the source, the deep sea where ideas swim, and one catches them in nets of words and swings them shining into the boat... where in this metaphor they die and get canned and eaten in sandwiches.
Thomas L. Friedman, fully Thomas Lauren Friedman
There is no future in vanilla for most companies in a flat world. A lot of vanilla making in software and other areas is going to shift to open-source communities.
Balance | Business | Global | Good | Growth | History | Past | People | Poverty | Power | Price | Size | Time | Will | World | Business | Think |
Thornton Wilder, fully Thornton Niven Wilder
He had lost that privilege of simple nature, the dissociation of love and pleasure. Pleasure was no longer as simple as eating; it was being complicated by love. Now was beginning that crazy loss of one's self, that neglect of everything but one's dramatic thoughts about the beloved, that feverish inner life all turning upon the [loved one].
Bitterness | Business | Capacity | Conduct | Distinction | Laughter | Love | Pride | Suffering | Tears | World | Youth | Youth | Business |
The divine shall mean for us only such a primal reality as the individual feels impelled to respond to solemnly and gravely, and neither by a curse nor a jest.
If I – as a beneficiary of that exact formula – will concede that my own life was indeed enriched by that precise familial structure, will the social conservatives please (for once!) concede that this arrangement has always put a disproportionately cumbersome burden on women? Such a system demands that mothers become selfless to the point of near invisibility in order to construct these exemplary environments for their families. And might those same social conservatives – instead of just praising mothers as sacred and noble – be willing to someday join a larger conversation about how we might work together as a society to construct a world where healthy children can be raised and healthy families can prosper without women have to scrape bare the walls of their own souls to do so?
Belief | Destiny | Faith | God | Life | Life | Meaning | Nature | God |