This site is dedicated to the memory of Dr. Alan William Smolowe who gave birth to the creation of this database.
Air pollution is not merely a nuisance and a threat to health. It is a reminder that our most celebrated technological achievements - the automobile, the jet plane, the power plant, industry in general, and indeed the modern city itself - are, in the environment, failures.
We should be as careful of the books we read, as of the company we keep. The dead very often have more power than the living.
Change of opinion is often only the progress of sound thought and growing knowledge; and though sometimes regarded as an inconsistency, it is but the noble inconsistency natural to a mind ever ready for growth and expansion of thought, and that never fears to follow where truth and duty may lead the way.
Change | Duty | Growth | Inconsistency | Knowledge | Mind | Opinion | Progress | Sound | Thought | Truth | Wisdom | Thought |
Albert Flanders, Albert I, born Albert Leopold Clément Marie Meinrad
Sometimes only a change of viewpoint is needed to convert a tiresome duty into an interesting opportunity.
Change | Duty | Opportunity | Wisdom |
Anatole France, pen name of Jacques Anatole Francois Thibault
A people living under the... threat of war and invasion is very easy to govern. It demands no social reforms. It doesn't not haggle over armaments and military expenditures. It pays without discussion, it ruins itself, and that is a fine thing for the financiers and manufacturers for whom patriotic terrors are an abundant source of gain.
Discussion | People | War | Wisdom |
Martha Gellhorn, fully Martha Ellis Gellhorn
I hold the relay race theory of history: progress in human affairs depends upon accepting, generation after generation, the individual duty to oppose the evils of the time.
Duty | History | Individual | Progress | Race | Time | Wisdom |
Charlotte Perkins Gilman, a.k.a. Charlotte Anna (nee Perkins), Charlotte Perkins Stetson
The first duty of a human being is to assume the right functional relationship to society - more briefly, to find your real job, and do it.
It is the duty of government to make it difficult for people to do wrong, easy to do right.
Duty | Government | People | Right | Wisdom | Wrong | Government |
Sigmund Freud, born Sigismund Schlomo Freud
Philosophy is not opposed to science; it behaves itself as if it were a science, and to a certain extent it makes use of the same methods; but it parts company with science, in that it clings to the illusion that it can produce a complete and coherent picture of the universe, though in fact that picture must needs fall to pieces with every new advance in our knowledge.
Illusion | Knowledge | Philosophy | Science | Universe | Wisdom |