This site is dedicated to the memory of Dr. Alan William Smolowe who gave birth to the creation of this database.
Eleanor Roosevelt, fully Anna Eleanor Roosevelt
It is better to light the candle than to curse the darkness.
J. P. Stern, fully Joseph Peter Maria Stern
Nietzsche’s approach developed eventually into a program for radically questioning all the foundations of Western thought. We are slaves to convention, he says - we base our whole lives on attitudes and ideas whose premises, if we ever get round to actually examining them, we reject. This makes ours an inauthentic way of living, a dead way of living. We must re-evaluate our values in the light of what we honestly do believe and feel.
Convention | Ideas | Light | Thought |
Adrienne Rich, fully Adrienne Cecil Rich
Our history is the history of a majority of the species, yet the struggles of women for a “human” status have been relegated to footnotes to the sidelines. Above all, women’s relationships with women have been denied or neglected as a force in history.
The cruelest insult… which can be offered to the unfortunate, is to appear to make light of their calamities.
Adrienne Rich, fully Adrienne Cecil Rich
[Responsibility to yourself] means that you refuse to sell your talents and aspirations short, simply to avoid conflict and confrontation. And this, in turn, means resisting the forces in society which say that women should be nice, play safe, have low professional expectations, drown in love and forget about work, live through others, and stay in places assigned to us. It means that we insist on a life of meaningful work, insist that work be as meaningful as love and friendship in our lives. It means, therefore, the courage to be “different”; not to be continuously available to others when we need time for ourselves and our work; to be able to demand of others – parents, friends, roommates, teachers, lovers, husbands, children – that they respect our sense of purpose and our integrity as persons.
Children | Courage | Integrity | Life | Life | Love | Means | Need | Parents | Play | Purpose | Purpose | Respect | Responsibility | Safe | Sense | Society | Time | Work | Friendship | Society | Respect |
If you want to bring a difficult relationship into the light of love, make up your mind to change your image of who both of you are.
Change | Light | Love | Mind | Relationship |
Alan Alda, born Alphonso Joseph D'Abruzzo
Begin challenging your own assumptions. Your assumptions are your windows on the world. Scrub them off every once and a while, or the light won't come in.
By the time I got to school, I had already read a couple hundred books. I knew in the first grade that they were lying to me because I had already been exposed to other points of view. School is basically about one point of view -- the one the teacher has or the textbooks have. They don't like the idea of having different points of view, so it was a battle. Of course I would pipe up with my five-year-old voice.
Alan Alda, born Alphonso Joseph D'Abruzzo
Your assumptions are your windows on the world. Scrub them off every once in a while, or the light won't come in.
We only regard those unions as real examples of love and real marriages in which a fixed and unalterable decision has been taken. If men or women contemplate an escape, they do not collect all their powers for the task. In none of the serious and important tasks of life do we arrange such a "getaway." We cannot love and be limited.