This site is dedicated to the memory of Dr. Alan William Smolowe who gave birth to the creation of this database.
Niccolò Machiavelli, formally Niccolò di Bernardo dei Machiavelli
For estimating the intelligence of a ruler... look at the men around him.
Intelligence | Men | Wisdom |
Marshall McLuhan, fully Herbert Marshall McLuhan
Ads push the principle of noise all the way to the plateau of persuasion. They are quite in accord with the procedures of brainwashing.
Noise | Persuasion | Wisdom |
Silence is the ecstatic bliss of souls, that by intelligence converse.
Intelligence | Silence | Wisdom |
The best time to frame an answer to the letters of a friend is the moment you receive them; then the warmth of friendship and the intelligence received most forcibly co-operate.
Friend | Intelligence | Receive | Time | Wisdom | Friendship |
Doubt is the disease of this inquisitive, restless age. It is the price we pay for our advanced intelligence and civilization - the dim night of our resplendent day. But as the most beautiful light is born of darkness, so the faith that springs from conflict is often the strongest and the best.
Age | Civilization | Darkness | Day | Disease | Doubt | Faith | Intelligence | Light | Price | Wisdom |
Military intelligence - a contradiction in terms.
Contradiction | Intelligence | Wisdom |
If reality flows like a stream, then knowledge of such reality also becomes fluid, a process rather than a set of fixed truths. And because all knowledge is produced, displayed, communicated and applied in thought; then thought too must be seen as part of the same eternal tide... Thought is, in essence, a response of memory. It consists of a repetition of some image or sensation, or it involves a combination or reorganisation of such repetition in a new and useful way. So, in the end, intelligence turns out to be part of the flow. It is not grounded in cells or molecules, but drawn from the same moving stream as reality. In other words, mind and matter are ultimately inseparable.
Eternal | Intelligence | Knowledge | Memory | Mind | Reality | Thought | Wisdom | Words | Thought |
There seems to be direct link between truly creative intelligence and the ability to dilute consciousness, to cut mental corners and practice unusual, lateral thinking in what amounts almost to a state of trance. All the most profound insights seem to flow from breaches in the barrier between waking thought, which tends to be conservative, and dream logic, which is essential liberal.
Ability | Consciousness | Intelligence | Logic | Practice | Thinking | Thought | Wisdom |
Use all your intelligence and experience in managing your own life, employing the tenderness you would expect to find in a being of ideal kindness.
Experience | Intelligence | Kindness | Life | Life | Tenderness | Wisdom |
Real intelligence is a creative use of knowledge, not merely an accumulation of acts. The slow thinker who can finally come up with an idea of his own is more important to the world than a walking encyclopedia who hasn't learned how to use information productively.
Important | Intelligence | Knowledge | Wisdom | World |
Henri Bergson, aka Henri-Louis Bergson
It is the emotion which drives the intelligence forward in spite of obstacles.
The history of Christendom would have been far happier if we all had remembered one rule of intelligence - not to believe a thing more strongly at the end of a bitter argument than at the beginning, not to believe it with the energy of the opposition rather than one's own.
Argument | Beginning | Energy | History | Intelligence | Opposition | Rule | Wisdom |