This site is dedicated to the memory of Dr. Alan William Smolowe who gave birth to the creation of this database.
Maya Angelou, born Marguerite Annie Johnson
Every person needs to take one day away. A day in which one consciously separates the past from the future. Jobs, family, employers, and friends can exist one day without any one of us, and if our egos permit us to confess, they could exist eternally in our absence. Each person deserves a day away in which no problems are confronted, no solutions searched for. Each of us needs to withdraw from the cares which will not withdraw from us.
Meister Eckhart, formally Meister von Hochheim
True intelligence operates silently. Stillness is where creativity and solutions are found.
I don't think people are any more concerned about noise now than they were in the past. I think the concerns are the same, but there are now more opportunities, more solutions available, to help with the problem. These solutions may or may not have been available in the past.
This privatization of the environmental crisis, like New Age cults that focus on personal problems rather than on social dislocations, has reduced many environmental movements to utter ineffectiveness and threatens to diminish their credibility with the public. If “simple living” and militant recycling are the main solutions to the environmental casts, the crisis will certainly continue and intensify.
So we find that the three possible solutions of the great problem of increasing human energy are answered by the three words: food, peace, work. Many a year I have thought and pondered, lost myself in speculations and theories, considering man as a mass moved by a force, viewing his inexplicable movement in the light of a mechanical one, and applying the simple principles of mechanics to the analysis of the same until I arrived at these solutions, only to realize that they were taught to me in my early childhood. These three words sound the key-notes of the Christian religion. Their scientific meaning and purpose now clear to me: food to increase the mass, peace to diminish the retarding force, and work to increase the force accelerating human movement. These are the only three solutions which are possible of that great problem, and all of them have one object, one end, namely, to increase human energy. When we recognize this, we cannot help wondering how profoundly wise and scientific and how immensely practical the Christian religion is, and in what a marked contrast it stands in this respect to other religions. It is unmistakably the result of practical experiment and scientific observation which have extended through the ages, while other religions seem to be the outcome of merely abstract reasoning. Work, untiring effort, useful and accumulative, with periods of rest and recuperation aiming at higher efficiency, is its chief and ever-recurring command. Thus we are inspired both by Christianity and Science to do our utmost toward increasing the performance of mankind. This most important of human problems I shall now specifically consider.
Abstract | Contrast | Energy | Experiment | Force | Important | Light | Man | Meaning | Observation | Peace | Principles | Problems | Purpose | Purpose | Religion | Respect | Rest | Science | Sound | Thought | Wise | Words | Work | Respect | Thought |
Fixing the intractable problems besetting the world will require a convergence of social intelligence and natural science, two qualities traditional politics lack... The world seems to be looking for the big solution, which is itself part of the problem, since the most effective solutions are both local and systemic... Although the movement may appear inchoate or naively ambitious, its underlying structure and communication techniques can, at times, create a collective social response that can challenge any institution in the world... What its members do share is a basic set of fundamental understandings about the earth, how it functions, and the necessity of fairness and equity for all people dependent on the planet’s life-giving systems.
Challenge | Equity | Fairness | Intelligence | Necessity | People | Politics | Problems | Qualities | Will | World |
Only children believe they're capable of everything… Opportunities multiply as they are seized… Other people think exactly the opposite: they surrender themselves without a second thought, hoping to find in passion the solutions to all their problems. They make the other person responsible for their happiness and blame them for their possible unhappiness. They are either euphoric because something marvelous has happened or depressed because something unexpected has just ruined everything… Nothing in the world is ever completely wrong. Even a stopped clock is right twice a day… Nothing in this world happens by chance… Nothing will behave in the logical way you have come to expect.
Blame | Children | Nothing | Passion | People | Right | Surrender | Will | World | Happiness | Think |
Pope John Paul II, born Karol Józef Wojtyła, aka Saint John Paul the Great NULL
The Church's social doctrine is not a third way between liberal capitalism and Marxist collectivism, nor even a possible alternative to other solutions less radically opposed to one another: rather, it constitutes a category of its own.
Capitalism | Doctrine |
Rainer Maria Rilke, full name René Karl Wilhelm Johann Josef Maria Rilke
People have (with the help of conventions) oriented all their solutions toward the easy and toward the easiest side of the easy; but it is clear that we must hold to what is difficult; everything alive holds to it, everything in Nature grows and defends itself in its own way and is characteristically and spontaneously itself, seeks at all costs to be so and against all opposition. We know little, but that we must hold to what is difficult is a certainty that will not forsake us; it is good to be solitary, for solitude is difficult; that something is difficult must be a reason the more for us to do it.To love is good, too: love being difficult. For one human being to love another: that is perhaps the most difficult of all our tasks, the ultimate, the last test and proof, the work for which all other work is but preparation.
This country has far more problems than it deserves and far more solutions than it applies.
Problems |
Reinhold Niebuhr, fully Karl Paul Reinhold Niebuhr
Democracy is finding proximate solutions to insoluble problems.
It's much more effective to allow solutions to problems to emerge from the people close to the problem rather than to impose them from higher up.
Yet however much King embodied civil rights, he never became the issue. The distinction is important. King only represented the issue, and most people, I think, could tell the difference. The context of his activity was clear. Few people thought King was the source of the civil rights perspective, even if they knew him as chief spokesman and strategist… President Johnson’s behavior illustrates the other side of the distinction. Johnson went way beyond representing the cause of the Vietnam War. By virtue of taking on the role of solitary decision-maker, he became the issue – his judgment, his dishonesty, and style.
Change | Organization |
For Gandhi to challenge these ways of life demanded knowing them deeply, by experience, by operating close to the frontline, where the stakeholders of India lived. Gandhi could speak to people, to their hopes, fears, weaknesses, and needs because he spent time knowing them. He could touch and inspire people because they touched and inspired him.
It should be obvious from reflecting on our daily lives that authority relationships are enormously productive. The human capacity for generating complex systems of authority is essential to our extraordinary adaptability and creativity as social creatures.
Challenge | Problems | Will | Leadership | Learn |
I like to summarize what I regard as the pedestal-smashing messages of Darwin's revolution in the following statement, which might be chanted several times a day, like a Hare Krishna mantra, to encourage penetration into the soul: Humans are not the end result of predictable evolutionary progress, but rather a fortuitous cosmic afterthought, a tiny little twig on the enormously arborescent bush of life, which, if replanted from seed, would almost surely not grow this twig again, or perhaps any twig with any property that we would care to call consciousness.
Extreme |
You can't express inspiration without skill.
Daring | Individual | Life | Life | People |