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
Somewhere along the line of development, we discover what we really are, and then we make our real decision for which we are responsible. Make that decision primarily for yourself, because you can never really live anyone else’s life, not even your own child’s. The influence you exert is through your own life and what you become yourself.
E. F. Schumacher, fully Ernst Friedrich "Fritz" Schumacher
What I wish to emphasize is the duality of the human requirement when it comes to the question of size: there is no single answer. For his different purposes man needs different structures, both small ones and large ones, some exclusive and some comprehensive… For constructive work, the principal task is always the restoration of some kind of balance. Today, we suffer from an almost universal idolatry of giantism. It is therefore necessary to insist on the virtues of smallness – where this applies. (If there were a prevailing idolatry of smallness, irrespective of subject or purpose, one would have to try and exercise influence in the opposite direction.)
Balance | Duality | Influence | Man | Purpose | Purpose | Question | Size | Work |
E. F. Schumacher, fully Ernst Friedrich "Fritz" Schumacher
The best aid to give is intellectual aid, a gift of useful knowledge… Nothing becomes truly “one’s own” except on the basis of some genuine effort or sacrifice… The gift of material goods makes people dependent, but the gift of knowledge makes them free.
And what is the education of mankind if not the passage from faith in authority to personal conviction and to the sustained practice of the intellectual duty to consent to no idea except by virtue of its recognized truth, to accept no fact until its reality has been, in one way or another, established.
Authority | Duty | Education | Faith | Mankind | Practice | Reality | Truth | Virtue | Virtue |
S. Yizhar, pen name for Yizhar Simalansky
We are “influenced” by something which is close and similar tot he roots of our soul. Real influence is that which helps us be ourselves, that which elicits the hidden, the deepest secrets in ourselves.
God will have no man pressed with another’s inconveniences in matters spiritual and intellectual – no man’s salvati8on to depend on another; and every tooth that eats sour grapes shall be set on edge for itself, and for none else.
Achmad Sukarno, born Kusno Sosrodihardjo
Let us remember that no blessing of God is so sweet as life and liberty. Let us remember that the stature of all mankind is diminished so long as nations or parts of nations are still unfree. Let us remember that the highest purpose of man is the liberation of man from his bonds of fear, his bonds of human degradation, his bonds of poverty – the liberation of man from the physical, spiritual, and intellectual bonds which for too long stunted the development of mankind’s majority.
Fear | God | Liberty | Life | Life | Majority | Man | Mankind | Nations | Poverty | Purpose | Purpose | God |
A vision is to be esteemed the more noble the more intellectual it is, the more it is stripped of all image and approaches the state of pure contemplation.
Contemplation | Vision |
Faith is a cop-out. It is intellectual bankruptcy. If the only way you can accept an assertion is by faith, then you are conceding that it can't be taken on its own merits.
Franz Werfel, fully Franz Viktor Werfel
Skeptic always rhymes with septic; the spirit died of intellectual poisoning.
Spirit |
Lu Xun, or Lu Hsün, pen name of Zhou Shuren
Young people, what need have you to follow the trendy slogans of these intellectual leaders? You ought better to gather some comrades and pool together all you energies; go forward in one common impetus, following what appears to be the path of survival. All together you will never be short of strength. If you encounter a deep forest, you can always hack your way through; you can open up the wilderness; you can dig wells in the desert. Why should you stick to old ruts and beg for guidance of these wretched guides?
Better | Guidance | Need | People | Strength | Survival | Will | Following | Guidance | Old |
As we have seen over and over again, whenever church and state enter into partnership, human freedom is restricted, intellectual growth is stifled, and education is formalized and routinized to exclude and smother innovation and creativity.
Church | Creativity | Education | Freedom | Growth | Innovation |