This site is dedicated to the memory of Dr. Alan William Smolowe who gave birth to the creation of this database.
My vision of the gathered church that had come to me... had been replaced by a vision of the gathered community. What I saw now was the community imperfect and irresolute but held together by the frayed and always fraying, incomplete and yet ever-holding bonds of the various sorts of affection. There had maybe never been anybody who had not been loved by somebody, who had been loved by somebody else, and so on and on... It was a community always disappointed in itself, disappointing its members, always trying to contain its divisions and gentle its meanness, always failing and yet always preserving a sort of will toward goodwill. I knew that, in the midst of all the ignorance and error, this was a membership; it was the membership of Port William and of no other place on earth. My vision gathered the community as it never has been and never will be gathered in this world of time, for the community must always be marred by members who are indifferent to it or against it, who are nonetheless its members and maybe nonetheless essential to it. And yet I saw them all as somehow perfected, beyond time, by one another's love, compassion, and forgiveness, as it is said we may be perfected by grace.
Endurance | Knowledge | People | Right | Strength | Thought | Thought |
The forsaking of all others is a keeping of faith, not just with the chosen one, but with the ones forsaken. The marriage vow unites not just a woman and a man with each other; it unites each of them with the community in a vow of sexual responsibility toward all others. The whole community is married, realizes it’s essential unity, in each of its marriages... Marital fidelity, that is, involves the public or institutional as well as the private aspect of marriage. One is married to marriage as well as to one's spouse. But one is married also to something vital of one's own that does not exist before the marriage: one's given word. It now seems to me that the modern misunderstanding of marriage involves a gross misunderstanding and underestimation of the seriousness of giving one's word, and of the dangers of breaking it once it is given. Adultery and divorce now must be looked upon as instances of that disease of word-breaking, which our age justifies as realistic or practical or necessary, but which is tattering the invariably single fabric of speech and trust.
The care of the earth is our most ancient and most worthy and, after all, our most pleasing responsibility. To cherish what remains of it, and to foster its renewal, is our only legitimate hope.
Ability | Abundance | Defeat | Desire | Evidence | Hope | Ignorance | Knowledge | Problems | Revelation | World |
A corporation, essentially, is a pile of money to which a number of persons have sold their moral allegiance. Unlike a person, a corporation does not age. It does not arrive, as most persons finally do, at a realization of the shortness and smallness of human lives; it does not come to see the future as the lifetime of the children and grandchildren of anybody in particular.
If you can read and have more imagination than a doorknob, what need do you have for a 'movie version' of a novel?
The Earth is what we all have in common.
Experience | Habit | Knowledge | Little |
She would do a man’s work when she needed to, but she lived and died without ever putting on a pair of pants. She wore dresses. Being a widow, she wore them black. Being a woman of her time she wore them long. The girls of her day I think must have been like well wrapped gifts to be opened by their husbands on their wedding night, a complete surprise. 'Well! What's this!?
We Americans are not usually thought to be a submissive people, but of course we are. Why else would we allow our country to be destroyed? Why else would we be rewarding its destroyers? Why else would we all — by proxies we have given to greedy corporations and corrupt politicians — be participating in its destruction? Most of us are still too sane to piss in our own cistern, but we allow others to do so and we reward them for it. We reward them so well, in fact, that those who piss in our cistern are wealthier than the rest of us. How do we submit? By not being radical enough. Or by not being thorough enough, which is the same thing.
Compassion | Enough | Imagination | Kill | Knowledge | People | Power | Old |
Under the rule of the free market ideology, we have gone through two decades of an energy crisis without an effective energy policy. Because of an easy and thoughtless reliance on imported oil, we have no adequate policy for the conservation of gasoline and other petroleum products. We have no adequate policy for the development or use of other, less harmful forms of energy. We have no adequate system of public transportation.
Discipline | Knowledge | Morality | Time |
To think better, to think like the best humans, we are probably going to have to learn again to judge a person's intelligence, not by the ability to recite facts, but by the good order or harmoniousness of his or her surroundings. We must suspect that any statistical justification of ugliness and violence is a revelation of stupidity.
Beginning | Family | Global | Good | Knowledge | Patience | People | Politics | Principles |
W. C. Fields, stage name for William Claude Dukenfield
I am an expert of electricity. My father occupied the chair of applied electricity at the state prison.
Knowledge | Observation | Study | Time |
W. E. B. Du Bois, fully William Edward Burghardt Du Bois
Present-day students are often puzzled at the apparent contradictions of Southern slavery. One hears, on the one hand, of the staid and gentle patriarchy, the wide and sleepy plantations with lord and retainers, ease and happiness; on the other hand one hears of barbarous cruelty and unbridled power and wide oppression of men. Which is the true picture? The answer is simple: both are true. They are not opposite sides of the same shield; they are different shields.
Art | Beauty | Knowledge | Life | Life | Love | Price | Science | Art | Beauty |
W. Brugh Joy, fully William Brugh Joy
The Heart Center is a transpersonal dimension or level. The Initiation forces are conducted in the dimension of Sacred Space, not in time and space, so we enter another dimension to access those forces. Through the daily attunement to the Heart Center there is a long-term transformation of the ego which then begins not only to orient to the Transcendent, to be responsive to the Transcendent, but there is also a birth into the dedicated ego, which is a transcendent kind of development which is neither the vast Deity itself, nor is it the ego-self – it is someplace in between, and has access to all the richness of compassion and healing.
Adventure | Awareness | Defense | Demeanor | Experience | Extreme | Giving | Important | Indifference | Knowledge | Law | Means | Power | Qualities | Sacred | Time | Understanding | Wholeness | Will | Awareness |
W. E. H. Lecky, fully William Edward Hartpole Lecky
Making every allowance for the errors of the most extreme fallibility, the history of Catholicism would on this hypothesis represent an amount of imposture probably unequaled in the annals of the human race.
Attention | Contradiction | Dignity | Discovery | Habit | Innovation | Knowledge | Lord | Man | Mind | Reputation | Science | Society | Study | System | Terror | Theology | Thought | Time | Society | Discovery | Thought |
W. Edwards Deming, fully William Edwards Deming
Let us ask our suppliers to come and help us to solve our problems.
W. W. Sawyer, fully Walter Warwick Sawyer
The appeal of arithmetic to infants is usually self-evident and recognising unusual mathematical maturity is not difficult. The unjustified fears of some educationists about allowing children to forge ahead, needs discussion and recognition of the need for young mathematicians to work in depth and at speed.