This site is dedicated to the memory of Dr. Alan William Smolowe who gave birth to the creation of this database.
Peter F. Drucker, fully Peter Ferdinand Drucker
Please accept the fact that the human race is split three ways: some people can take in information by looking at figures, some by looking at graphs, and a third group only by touching it, feeling it, or writing it.
Human race | People | Race | Writing |
Whatever the reason, for most of the present century, the literature and publicity of the old established [animal welfare] groups made a significant contribution to the prevailing attitude that dogs and cats and wild animals need protection, but other animals do not. Thus people came to think of "animal welfare" as something for kindly ladies who are dotty about cats, and not as a cause founded on basic principles of justice and morality.
Cause | Justice | Literature | Need | People | Present | Principles | Old | Think |
People who think they can control their negative emotions and manifest them when they want to, simply deceive themselves. Negative emotions depend on identification; if identification is destroyed in some particular case, they disappear. The strangest and most fantastic fact about negative emotions is that people actually worship them. I think that, for an ordinary mechanical man, the most difficult thing to realize is that his own and other people's negative emotions, have no value whatever and do not contain anything noble, anything beautiful or anything strong. In reality negative emotions contain nothing but weakness and very often the beginning of hysteria, insanity or crime. The only good thing about them is that, being quite useless and artificially created by imagination and identification, they can be destroyed without any loss. And this is the only chance of escape that man has. Philosophy is based on speculation, on logic, on thought, on the synthesis of what we know and on the analysis of what we do not know. Philosophy must include within its confines the whole content of science, religion and art. But where can such a philosophy be found? All that we know in our times by the name of philosophy is not philosophy, but merely critical literature or the expression of personal opinions, mainly with the aim of overthrowing and destroying other personal opinions. Or, which is still worse, philosophy is nothing but self-satisfied dialectic surrounding itself with an impenetrable barrier of terminology unintelligible to the uninitiated and solving for itself all the problems of the universe without any possibility of proving these explanations or making them intelligible to ordinary mortals.
Beginning | Chance | Control | Emotions | Good | Imagination | Insanity | Literature | Man | Nothing | People | Philosophy | Problems | Reality | Religion | Universe | Weakness | Worship | Think | Value |
Peter Medawar, fully Sir Peter Brian Medawar
Deductivism in mathematical literature and inductivism in scientific papers are simply the postures we choose to be seen in when the curtain goes up and the public sees us. The theatrical illusion is shattered if we ask what goes on behind the scenes. In real life discovery and justification are almost always different processes.
Discovery | Illusion | Justification | Life | Life | Literature | Public | Discovery |
Philip Larkin, fully Philip Arthur Larkin
I think writing about unhappiness is probably the source of my popularity, if I have any-after all, most people are unhappy, don't you think?
People | Unhappiness | Writing | Think |
Pierre Abelard, aka Abailard or Abaelard or Habalaarz
Against the disease of writing one must take special precautions, since it is a dangerous and contagious disease.
Phyllis Bottome, aka Phyllis Forbes Dennis (married name)
To be a Jew is to belong to an old harmless race that has lived in every country in the world; and that has enriched every country it has lived in. It is to be strong with a strength that has outlived persecutions. It is to be wise against ignorance, honest against piracy, harmless against evil, industrious against idleness, kind against cruelty! It is to belong to a race that has given Europe its religion; its moral law; and much of its science-perhaps even more of its genius-in art, literature and music. This is to be a Jew; and you know now what is required of you! You have no country but the world; and you inherit nothing but wisdom and brotherhood.
Literature | Nothing | Race | Strength | Wisdom | Wise | Old |
For we soon reap the fruits of literature in life, and prolonged indulgence in any form of literature in life leaves its mark on the moral nature of man, affecting not only the mind but physical poise and intonation.
Indulgence | Life | Life | Literature | Mind | Nature |
Pliny the Elder, full name Casus Plinius Secundus NULL
True glory consists in doing what deserves to be written in writing what deserves to be read and in so living as to make the world happier for our living in it.
A Piece of writing has to seduce the reader, it has to suspend disbelief and earn the reader's trust.
Buckminster Fuller, fully Richard Buckminster "Bucky" Fuller
The word generalization in literature usually means covering too much territory too thinly to be persuasive, let alone convincing. In science, however, a generalization means a principle that has been found to hold true in every special case... The principle of leverage is a scientific generalization.
Literature | Means |
Buckminster Fuller, fully Richard Buckminster "Bucky" Fuller
We have a habit in writing articles published in scientific journals to make the work as finished as possible, to cover up all the tracks, to not worry about the blind alleys or describe how you had the wrong idea at first, and so on. So there isn't any place to publish, in a dignified manner, what you actually did in order to get to do the work.
Quintilian, fully Marcus Fabius Quintilianus, also Quintillian and Quinctilian NULL
From writing rapidly it does not result that one writes well, but from writing well it results that one writes rapidly.
Writing |
Rachel Carson, fully Rachel Louise Carson
The aim of science is to discover and illuminate truth. And that, I take it, is the aim of literature, whether biography or history or fiction. It seems to me, then, that there can be no separate literature of science.
History | Literature | Science |
Ralph Ellison, fully Ralph Waldo Ellison
The act of writing requires a constant plunging back into the shadow of the past where time hovers ghostlike.
Ralph Ellison, fully Ralph Waldo Ellison
I am a novelist, not an activist... But I think that no one who reads what I write or who listens to my lectures can doubt that I am enlisted in the freedom movement. As an individual, I am primarily responsible for the health of American literature and culture. When I write, I am trying to make sense out of chaos. To think that a writer must think about his Negroness is to fall into a trap.
Ralph Ellison, fully Ralph Waldo Ellison
By and large, the critics and readers gave me an affirmed sense of my identity as a writer. You might know this within yourself, but to have it affirmed by others is of utmost importance. Writing is, after all, a form of communication.
Randy Pausch, fully Randolph Frederick "Randy" Pausch
The most difficult part of writing a book is not devising a plot which will captivate the reader. It's not developing characters the reader will have strong feelings for or against. It is not finding a setting which will take the reader to a place he or she as never been. It is not the research, whether in fiction or non-fiction. The most difficult task facing a writer is to find the voice in which to tell the story.