This site is dedicated to the memory of Dr. Alan William Smolowe who gave birth to the creation of this database.
R. H. Tawney, fully Richard Henry Tawney
The theological mold which shaped political theory from the Middle Ages to the seventeenth century is broken
All theory is against freedom of the will; all experience for it.
Experience | Freedom |
The gospel comprises indeed, and unfolds, the whole mystery of man's redemption, as far forth as it is necessary to be known for our salvation: and the corpuscularian or mechanical philosophy strives to deduce all the phenomena of nature from adiaphorous matter, and local motion. But neither the fundamental doctrine of Christianity nor that of the powers and effects of matter and motion seems to be more than an epicycle ... of the great and universal system of God's contrivances, and makes but a part of the more general theory of things, knowable by the light of nature, improved by the information of the scriptures: so that both these doctrines... seem to be but members of the universal hypothesis, whose objects I conceive to be the natural counsels, and works of God, so far as they are discoverable by us in this life.
Doctrine | Light | Mystery | Nature | Phenomena | Philosophy | System |
Russell Baker. fully Russell Wayne Baker
The goal of all inanimate objects is to resist man and ultimately defeat him.
Nothing |
Religion directs man to God not as its object but as its end.
Young as he was, his instinct told him that the best liar is he who makes the smallest amount of lying go the longest way.
Practice |
Sam Walton, fully Samuel Moore "Sam" Walton
A computer can tell you down the dime what you’ve sold. But it can never tell you how much you could have sold.
Science | Service | Understand |
Progress however, of the best kind, is comparatively slow. Great results cannot be achieved at once; and we must be satisfied to advance in life as we walk, step by step.
Discipline | Nature | Wisdom | Instruction |
Sigmund Freud, born Sigismund Schlomo Freud
Demons do not exist any more than gods do, being only the products of the psychic activity of man.
No human being escapes the necessity of conceiving some good outside himself towards which his thought turns in a movement of desire, supplication, and hope. consequently, the only choice is between worshipping the true God or an idol. Every atheist is an idolater — unless he is worshipping the true God in his impersonal aspect. The majority of the pious are idolaters.
Culture | Experiment | Glory | Humanity | Progress | Purpose | Purpose | Research | Society | Study | Time | Theoretical | Society |
Sigmund Freud, born Sigismund Schlomo Freud
What do women want, my God, what do they want? What does a woman want.
Archibald Geikie, fully Sir Archibald Geikie
If all history is only an amplification of biography, the history of science may be most instructively read in the life and work of the men by whom the realms of Nature have been successively won.
Antiquity | Argument | Error | Eternity | Evidence | Evolution | Lord | Past | Time |
Arthur Conan Doyle, fully Sir Arthur Ignatius Conan Doyle
His incredible untidiness, his addiction to music at strange hours, his occasional revolver practice within doors, his weird and often malodorous scientific experiments, and the atmosphere of violence and danger which hung around him made him the very worst tenant in London.
Earth | Ignorance | Philosophy | Politics |
And, in this case, science could learn an important lesson from the literati — who love contingency for the same basic reason that scientists tend to regard the theme with suspicion. Because, in contingency lies the power of each person, to make a difference in an unconstrained world bristling with possibilities, and nudgeable by the smallest of unpredictable inputs into markedly different channels spelling either vast improvement or potential disaster.
Absurd | Defense | Disagreement | Excellence | Failure | Mediocrity | Model | Reality | Society | Struggle | Teach | Thought | Understanding | Excellence | Society | Failure | Think | Thought |
There are no shortcuts to moral insight. Nature is not intrinsically anything that can offer comfort or solace in human terms -- if only because our species is such an insignificant latecomer in a world not constructed for us. So much the better. The answers to moral dilemmas are not lying out there, waiting to be discovered. They reside, like the kingdom of God, within us -- the most difficult and inaccessible spot for any discovery or consensus.
Flies can eat toads! (Although astonishment may be lessened in noting that the tiny toads are much smaller than enormous fly larvae.) Unusually large insects and maximally small vertebrates have also been featured in the few other recorded cases of such reversals - frogs, small birds, even a mouse, consumed by praying mantids, for example.
Sense |