This site is dedicated to the memory of Dr. Alan William Smolowe who gave birth to the creation of this database.
Israel was an experimental social revolution in that ancient world, to see whether social relationships could be organized in human, egalitarian, communitarian ways.
Enough | Knowledge | Power | Resilience | Terror |
Walter Gropius, fully Walter Adolph Georg Gropius
Let us therefore create a new guild of craftsmen without the class-distinctions that raise an arrogant barrier between craftsmen and artists! Let us desire, conceive, and create the new building of the future together. It will combine architecture, sculpture, and painting in a single form, and will one day rise towards the heavens from the hands of a million workers as the crystalline symbol of a new and coming faith.
Education | Effort | Experience | Important | Integration | Knowledge | Method | Right | Sense | Will |
Men who are orthodox when they are young are in danger of being middle-aged all their lives
It is clear that Torah in Israel is no once-for-all delivered dictum, but is rather the evocation of great Yahwistic claims that are subject to the many vagaries of historical impingement and to the imaginative and venturesome task of ongoing interpretation. Thus the Torah commands of YHWH are rooted in the jealous propensities of YHWH but are marked by a dynamism that continues to give fresh measure to commands and continues to make connections to new circumstance where God's people must live faithfully. That rooted dynamism is marked in rabbinic Judaism by the force of "oral Torah".
Walter J. Ong, fully Walter Jackson Ong
What functionally literate human beings really are: beings whose thought processes do not grow out of simply natural powers but out of these powers as structured, directly or indirectly, by the technology of writing. Without writing, the literate mind would not and could not think as it does, not only when engaged in writing but normally even when it is composing its thoughts in oral form. More than any other single invention, writing has transformed human consciousness.
Walter J. Ong, fully Walter Jackson Ong
Alphabet letterpress printing, in which each letter was cast on a separate piece of metal, or type, marked a psychological breakthrough of the first order. It embedded the word itself deeply in the manufacturing process and made it into a kind of commodity. The first assembly lie, a technique of manufacture which in a series of set steps produces identical complex objects made up of replaceable parts, was not one which produced stoves or shoes or weaponry but one which produced the printed book. In the late 1700s, the industrial revolution applied to other manufacturing the replaceable-part techniques which printers had worked with for three hundred years. Despite the assumptions of many semiotic structuralists, it was print, not writing, that effectively reified the word, and, with it, noetic activity.
Abstract | Knowledge | Organization | Thinking |
There is nothing so good for the human soul as the discovery that there are ancient and flourishing civilized societies which have somehow managed to exist for many centuries and are still in being though they have had no help from the traveler in solving their problems.
Walter J. Ong, fully Walter Jackson Ong
It is of course possible to count as "writing" any semiotic mark, that is, any visible or sensible mark which an individual makes and assigns a meaning to. Using the term "writing" in this extended sense trivializes its meaning. The critical and unique breakthrough into new worlds of knowledge was achieved within human consciousness not when simple semiotic marking was devised but when a coded system of visible marks was invented whereby a writer could determine the exact words that the reader would generate from the text. This is what we usually mean today by writing in its sharply focused sense.
Consciousness | Experience | Harmony | Knowledge | Means |
Walter J. Ong, fully Walter Jackson Ong
Most persons are distressed, and many depressed, to learn that essentially the same objections commonly urged today against computers were urged by Plato in the Phaedrus and in the Seventh Letter against writing. Writing, Plato has Socrates say in the Phaedrus, is inhumane pretending to establish outside the mind what in reality can be only in the mind. It is a thing, a manufactured product.
Consciousness | Individual | Knowledge | Meaning | Sense | System | Unique | Words | Writing |
Walter J. Ong, fully Walter Jackson Ong
In the printed book, these vague psychic "places" became quite physically and visibly localized. A new noetic world was shaping up, spatially organized. In this new world, the book was less like an utterance, and more like a thing.
Knowledge | Method | Observation | Thought | World | Thought |
Wang Yang-Ming or Yangming, aka Wang Shouren or Wang Shou-jen, courtesy name Bo'an
People today distinguish between knowledge and action and pursue them separately, believing that one must know before he can act... They say [they will wait] till they truly know before putting their knowledge into practice. Consequently to the end of their lives, they will never act and also will never know.
Wang Yang-Ming or Yangming, aka Wang Shouren or Wang Shou-jen, courtesy name Bo'an
The word ge in gewu is the same as the ge in Mengzi’s expression, ‘A great man recti?ed (ge) the ruler’s mind.’ Gewu means to eliminate whatever is incorrect in the mind and preserve the correctness of its original substance. Wherever there is a thought, eliminate whatever is incorrect and preserve the mind’s original substance. Then in all places, at all times, the Heavenly li will de?nitely be preserved.
Warren Bennis, fully Warren Gamaliel Bennis
What makes a good follower? The single most important characteristic may well be a willingness to tell the truth. In a world of growing complexity leaders are increasingly dependent on their subordinates for good information, whether the leaders want to hear it or not. Followers who tell the truth and leaders who listen to it are an unbeatable combination.
Ability | Knowledge | Means | Society | Understanding | Society |
Warren Buffett, fully Warren Edward Buffett, aka Oracle of Omaha
The attitude of our managers vividly contrasts with that of the young man who married a tycoon's only child, a decidedly homely and dull lass. Relieved, the father called in his new son- in-law after the wedding and began to discuss the future: Son, you're the boy I always wanted and never had. Here's a stock certificate for 50% of the company. You're my equal partner from now on.' Thanks, dad.' Now, what would you like to run? How about sales?' I'm afraid I couldn't sell water to a man crawling in the Sahara.' Well then, how about heading human relations?' I really don't care for people.' No problem, we have lots of other spots in the business. What would you like to do?' Actually, nothing appeals to me. Why don't you just buy me out?
Wang Yang-Ming or Yangming, aka Wang Shouren or Wang Shou-jen, courtesy name Bo'an
Perhaps immortality is a gift of heaven rather than the result of some human effort.
Action | Distinguish | Knowledge | Will |
Wei Wu Wei, pen name for Terence James Stannus Gray
This may account for the extraordinary popularity of such works as the Tao Te Ching, and in a lesser degree for that of the Diamond and Heart Sutras and Padma Sambhava's Knowing the Mind. For despite the accretion of superfluous verbiage in which the essential doctrine of some of the latter has become embedded, their direct pointing at the truth, instead of explaining it, goes straight to the heart of the matter and allows the mind itself to develop its own vision. An elaborately developed thesis must always defeat its own end where this subject matter is concerned, for only indication could produce this understanding, which requires an intuitional faculty, and it could never be acquired wholesale from without.
Defeat | Dependence | Doctrine | Heart | Knowing | Knowledge | Language | Literature | Means | Method | Mind | People | Popularity | Time | Understanding |