This site is dedicated to the memory of Dr. Alan William Smolowe who gave birth to the creation of this database.
"What is companionship where nothing that improves the intellect is communicated and where the larger heart contracts itself to the model and dimension of the smaller?" - Walter Savage Landor
"Visible creation in time, or nature... does not exist of itself. It is not the cause of itself, but is an ever-changing copy of something which lies behind appearances. The recipient, or mother, is three-dimensional space, which must be empty of all properties in order to receive the impress of the model. The copy is in time. The model (idea) is outside our space and time." - Maurice Nicoll
"No scientific concept can ever represent the richness of nature or the complexity of its full creative potential. Thus, [information] is only another facet of the diamond... The most that a new model, metaphor or concept in science can give us is the gift of new questions." - Beverly Rubik
"Let’s imagine a visual image of your “life” as an energetic field. This energetic field attracts to you people, opportunities, and events. Within that field is a central point of purpose around which incoming energy is organized. Affecting and modifying that central point of purpose are energetic sub-fields of beliefs, attitudes, past experiences, expectations, unresolved emotional states, and other unconscious material. At all times, we emit a certain energy pattern based on our physical, emotional and spiritual states. The model of a magnetic force field is intended to suggest that we not only radiate our energy from a centralized self-organizing, indwelling purpose, but that energetic field also attracts in, or magnetizes to itself, those people and things that will help fulfill that purpose." - Carol Adrienne
"Books of quotations are an elemental model of how culture is perpetuated, the wisdom of the tribe passed on to posterity, to be added to, edited, and modified by subsequent generations." - Robert Andrews
"The philosophical and religious West has been axial for almost 3,000 years. In the axial model, a sharp distinction was made between this world and a world beyond, and the idea arose that, although, we are in this world, we are not of this world. According to this model, human life is a journey that leads us from appearance to reality, bondage to liberation, confusion to insight, and darkness to light." - Stephen A. Erickson
"I believe that our choice between two models of psychiatry is really a choice between two competing sets of moral values that will ultimately determine the kind of society we live in. One is the Psychotherapeutic Model’s ideal of healing the soul with its values of self-awareness, autonomy, personal growth, an I-Thou spirit of love, respect, and compassion for others, and an acceptance of moral responsibility for our own egoistic impulses and emotions. The other is the Medical Model’s ideal of quick fix, with its swimming-pool values of stability and conformity, and an I-It orientation toward material success and other superficial addictive pleasures" - Elio Frattaroli
"Faith is not a miniature of thinking but its model, not its shadow but its root. It is a spiritual force in man, not dealing with the given, concrete, limited, but directed upon the transcendent. It is the spring of our creative actions." - Abraham Joshua Heschel
"In God’s Kingdom the corrupting principles of domination and subjugation will be overcome. People will no longer model social or religious relationships; or even relationships to God after the sort of power that reduces others to servility. Rather they will discover a new kind of power, a power exercised through service, which empowers the disinherited and brings all to a new relationship of mutual enhancement." - Rosemary Radford Ruether
"Scientists look for four qualities in theory generally… parsimony: the fewer the units and process used to account for the phenomenon, the better… second, generality: the greater the range of phenomena covered by the model, the more likely it is to be true… Consilence: units and process of a discipline that conform with solidly verified knowledge in other disciplines have proven consistently superior in theory and practice to units and processes that do not conform… Predictiveness: those theories endure that are precise in the predictions they make across phenomena and whose predictions are easiest to test by observation and experiment." -
"We live in a swirl of information, and we need some of this raw data to arrive at the answers we seek. Knowledge, however, is interpreted data. If the perspective or conceptual model through which we interpret our data is inappropriate, or flawed, then our knowledge is flawed and will lead us astray." - Copthorne Macdonald
"In play, the body can learn the model for actions in real life. Its lust can prepare a man to endure tribulation." - Dag Hammarskjöld
"The sense of inferiority inherent in the act of imitation breeds resentment. The impulse of the imitators is to overcome the model they imitate." - Eric Hoffer
"Man is an animal, formidable both from his passions and his reasons; his passions often urging him to great evils, and his reason furnishing means to achieve them. To train this animal, and make him amenable to order, to inure him to a sense of justice and virtue, to withhold him from ill courses by fear, and encourage him in his duty by hopes, in short to fashion and model him for society, hath been the aim of civil and religious institutions; and, in all times, the endeavor of good and wise men. The aptest method for attaining this end hath been always judged a proper education." - George Berkeley, also Bishop Berkeley, Bishop of Cloyne
"People seldom improve when they have no model but themselves to copy after." - James Goldsmith
"Human nature is not a machine to be built after a model, and set to do exactly the work prescribed for it, but a tree, which requires to grow and develop itself on all sides, according to the tendency of the inward forces which make it a living thing." - John Stuart Mill
"If it were only that people have diversities of taste, that is reason enough for not attempting to shape them all after one model. But different persons also require different conditions for their spiritual development, and can no more exist healthily in the same moral, than all the varieties of plants can in the same physical atmosphere and climate." - John Stuart Mill
"Natural law: Intelligence, no matter how innate or genetically encoded, can unfold within us only when an actual model for that intelligence is given us. Bio-cultural effects, once initiated, tend to self-generate. Projected by us, we perceive the behaviors demonstrated by our great models as powers out there to which we are subject, rather than as potentials within ourselves to be lived." - Joseph Chilton Pearce, aka Joe
"People seldom improve when they have no other model but themselves to copy after." - Oliver Goldsmith
"Addictive spirituality creates dependence in the practitioner (frequently to authoritarian leaders and their communities), an avoidance of personal responsibility, and loss of individuality through social controls, such as fear, guilt, or greed for power or bliss. It also tends to suppress rational inquiry into the teachings. Healthy spirituality, on the other hand, supports the practitioner's freedom, autonomy, self-esteem, and social responsibility. It is based on experience, rather than belief or dogma; it does not create idols out of spiritual teachers; and it empowers students by emphasizing democratic forms of learning and teaching, rather than the authoritarian model that has dominated spiritual life for millennia." - Ronald S. Miller
"The [advertiser’s] formula is: to make people ashamed of last year’s model; to hook up self-esteem itself with the purchasing of this year’s; to create a panic for status, and hence a panic of self-evaluation, and to connect its relief with the consumption of specified commodities." - C. Wright Mills, fully Charles Wright Mills
"The purpose of science is not to analyze or describe but to make useful models of the world. A model is useful if it allows us to get use out of it. " - Edward de Bono
"Logic is a poor model of cause and effect. " - Gregory Bateson
"Family life may be marked by exclusiveness,suspicion, and jealousy as to those without, and yet be a model of amity and mutual aid within. Any education given by a group tends to socialize its members, but the quality and value of the socialization depends on the habits and aims of the group." - John Dewey
"We teachers - perhaps all human beings - are in the grip of an astonishing delusion. We think that we can take a picture, a structure, a working model of something, constructed in our minds out of long experience and familiarity, and by turning that model into a string of words, transplant it whole into the mind of someone else. Perhaps once in a thousand times, when the explanation is extraordinary good, and the listener extraordinary experienced and skillful at turning word strings into non-verbal reality, and when the explainer and listener share in common many of the experiences being talked about, the process may work, and some real meaning may be communicated. Most of the time, explaining does not increase understanding, and may even lessen it." - John Holt, fully John Caldwell Holt
"The sciences do not try to explain, they hardly even try to interpret, they mainly make models. By a model is meant a mathematical construct which, with the addition of certain verbal interpretations describes observed phenomena. The justification of such a mathematical construct is solely and precisely that it is expected to work." - John Von Newmann
"The terms theory and model, incidentally, are sometimes used interchangeably. But really they should not be. A theory is a relationship of the model to the things the model is supposed to represent... A theory is thus a metaphor between a model and data. And understanding in science is the feeling of similarity between complicated data and a familiar model." - Julian Jaynes
"Clinical experience has indicated that where a child has been exposed early in his live to episodes of physical violence, whether he himself is the victim or ... the witness, he will often later demonstrate similar outbursts of uncontrollable rage and violence of his own. Aggression becomes an easy outlet through which the child's frustrations and tensions flow, not just because of a simple matter of learning that can be just as simply unlearned, not just because he is imitating a bad behavior model and can be taught to imitate something more constructive, but because these traumatic experiences have overwhelmed him. His own emotional development is too immature to withstand the crippling inner effects of outer violence. Something happens to the child's character, to his sense of reality, to the development of his controls against impulses that may not later be changed easily but which may lead to reactions that in turn provoke more reactions - one or more of which may be criminal. Then society reacts against him for what he did, but more for what all of us have done - unpleasantly - to one another. Upon him is laid the iniquity of us all." - Karl Menninger, fully Karl Augustus Menninger
"What I've tried to do... is create a whole model that got away from test scores and avoided labels like LD (learning disabled) or ADD (attention-deficit disorder), and use a profile of strengths and weaknesses." - Mel Levine, formally Melvin D Levine
"A picture is a model of reality. " - Ludwig Wittgenstein, fully Ludwig Josef Johann Wittgenstein
"In many ways, constancy is an illusion. After all, our ancestors were immigrants, many of them moving on every few years; today we are migrants in time. Unless teachers can hold up a model of lifelong learning and adaptation, graduates are likely to find themselves trapped into obsolescence as the world changes around them. Of any stopping place in life, it is good to ask whether it will be a good place from which to go on as well as a good place to remain." - Mary Catherine Bateson
"When any relationship is characterized by difference, particularly a disparity in power, there remains a tendency to model it on the parent-child-relationship. Even protectiveness and benevolence toward the poor, toward minorities, and especially toward women have involved equating them with children. " - Mary Catherine Bateson
"The open-source collaborative development model, I believe, is built to succeed in the Internet age, and it makes more sense than the proprietary model of some of our competitors." - Michael Dell, fully Michael Saul Dell
"I never thought a role model should be negative." - Michael Jordan, fully Michael Jeffrey Jordon, aka MJ, Air Jordan and His Airness
"Humanism may not be universal but may be quite relative to a certain situation. What we call humanism has been used by Marxists, liberals, Nazis, Catholics. This does not mean that we have to get rid of what we call human rights or freedom, but that we can't say that freedom or human rights has to be limited at certain frontiers. For instance, if you asked eighty years ago if feminine virtue was part of universal humanism, everyone would have answered yes. What I am afraid of about humanism is that it presents a certain form of our ethics as a universal model for any kind of freedom. I think that there are more secrets, more possible freedoms, and more inventions in our future than we can imagine in humanism as it is dogmatically represented on every side of the political rainbow: the Left, the Center, the Right." - Michel Foucault
"So then what will be acceptable to take as a model (fa) for order (zhi)? How would it be for everyone to model themselves on their parents? Those in the world who are parents are many, but those who are ren (humane, good) are few; if everyone models themselves on their parents, this is modeling not-ren. Modeling not-ren — it's not acceptable to take that as a model." - Mozi or Mo-tze, Mocius or Mo-tzu, original name Mo Di, aka Master Mo NULL
"So then what will be acceptable to take as a model for order? Thus he said, Nothing is like modeling oneself on Heaven. Heaven's conduct is expansive and impartial; its gifts are generous and demand no repayment; its brightness endures without fading. Thus the sage kings model themselves on it." - Mozi or Mo-tze, Mocius or Mo-tzu, original name Mo Di, aka Master Mo NULL
"Television is our culture's principal mode of knowing about itself. Therefore -- and this is the critical point -- how television stages the world becomes the model for how the world is properly to be staged. It is not merely that on the television screen entertainment is the metaphor for all discourse. It is that off the screen the same metaphor prevails." - Neil Postman
"God is a model through which the excellence of man is to be estimated, whilst the abstract perfection of the human character is the type of the actual perfection of the divine." - Percy Bysshe Shelley
"Facilitators must continually bring forward people who have not spoken, and prompt them to add their views. They must regulate the flow of conversation, following a model of dialogue which invites people to suspend their assumptions and treat each other as colleagues. All the while, the facilitators must ask people to explain why they said what they just said --to urge them to describe what's behind their thinking." - Peter Senge, fully Peter Michael Senge
"In order to change an existing paradigm you do not struggle to try and change the problematic model. You create a new model and make the old one obsolete." - Buckminster Fuller, fully Richard Buckminster "Bucky" Fuller
"To change something, build a new model that makes the existing model obsolete." - Buckminster Fuller, fully Richard Buckminster "Bucky" Fuller
"You never change things by fighting the existing reality. To change something, build a new model that makes the existing model obsolete." - Buckminster Fuller, fully Richard Buckminster "Bucky" Fuller
"Meditate upon my counsels; love them; follow them; to the divine virtues will they know how to lead thee. I swear it by the One who in our hearts engraved the sacred Tetrad, symbol immense and pure, Source of Nature and model of the Gods." - Pythagoras, aka Pythagoras of Samos or Pythagoras the Samian NULL