This site is dedicated to the memory of Dr. Alan William Smolowe who gave birth to the creation of this database.
We have become a more juvenile culture. We have become a childish me, me, me culture with fifteen-second attention spans. The global village that television was supposed to bring is less a village than a playground.
Computer | Ideas | Organization | Philosophy | Qualities |
I consider it an error in scientific communication that, most of the time, merely the polished and flawless results of natural research are displayed, as in an art show. And exhibit of the finished product alone has many drawbacks and dangers for both its creator and its users. The creator of the product will be only too ready to demonstrate perfection and flawlessness while concealing gaps, uncertainties and discordant contradictions of his insight into nature. He thus belittles the meaning of the real process of natural research. The user of the product will not appreciate the rigorous demands made on the natural scientist when the latter has to reveal and describe the secrets of nature in a practical way. He will never learn to think for himself and to cope by himself. Very few drivers have an accurate idea of the sum of human efforts, of the complicated thought processes and operations needed for manufacturing an automobile. Our world would be better off is the beneficiaries of work knew more about the process of work and the existence of the workers, if they did not pluck so thoughtlessly the fruits of labor performed by others.
In recent times, more and more human thinking has come to assume that the idea of a universal natural law and the idea of 'God' are pointing to one and the same reality.
See yourself as you really are. Listen to what none of your leaders and representatives dares tell you: You are a "little, common man." Understand the double meaning of these words: "little" and "common."
If "freedom" means, first of all, the responsibility of every individual for the rational determination of his own personal, professional and social existence, then there is no greater fear than that of the establishment of general freedom. Without a thoroughgoing solution of this problem there never will be a peace lasting longer than one or two generations. To solve this problem on a social scale, it will take more thinking, more honesty and decency, more conscientiousness, more economic, social and educational changes in social mass living than all the efforts made in previous and future wars and post-war reconstruction programs taken together.
Ability | Anger | Deviation | Education | Fighting | Health | Joy | Love | Pain | People | Pleasure | Truth | World |
Man's right to know, to learn, to inquire, to make bona fide errors, to investigate human emotions must, by all means, be safe, if the word FREEDOM should ever be more than an empty political slogan.
Civilization | Culture | Distinguish | Dreams | Looks | Man | Peace | Present | Purpose | Purpose | Science |
Life springs from thousands of sources vibrant, hands up everyone who cling to, refuses to be expressed in phrases tedious, only accepts actions transparent, truthful words of love and pleasure
Choice | Cruelty | Doctrine | Energy | Error | Fate | Greatness | Insight | Labor | Life | Life | Light | Little | Love | Man | Marriage | Meanness | Men | Simplicity | Time | Truth | World | Cruelty | Fate | Child | Friends | Value |
Walt Whitman, fully Walter "Walt" Whitman
The real artist is in humanity. What are called bad manners are often the most picturesque and significant of them all.
The time has come to stop beating our heads against stone walls under the illusion that we have been appointed policeman to the human race.
Free press | Truth | Will |
Walt Whitman, fully Walter "Walt" Whitman
There is an indescribable freshness and unconsciousness about an illiterate person that humbles and mocks the power of the noblest expressive genius.
What we call a democratic society might be defined for certain purposes as one in which the majority is always prepared to put down a revolutionary minority.
Government | People | Public | Will | Government |
W. H. Auden, fully Wystan Hugh Auden
Every man carries with him through life a mirror, as unique and impossible to get rid of as his shadow.
W. H. Auden, fully Wystan Hugh Auden
Poor Poe! At first so forgotten that his grave went without a tomb-stone twenty-six years. . . today in danger of becoming the life study of a few professors.
W. D. Ross, fully Sir William David Ross
There are seven prima facie duties which need to be taken into consideration when deciding which duty should be acted upon: Duty of beneficence (to help other people to increase their pleasure, improve their character, etc.). Duty of non-maleficence (to avoid harming other people). Duty of justice (to ensure people get what they deserve). Duty of self-improvement (to improve ourselves). Duty of reparation (to recompense someone if you have acted wrongly towards them). Duty of gratitude (to benefit people who have benefited us). Duty of promise-keeping (to act according to explicit and implicit promises, including the implicit promise to tell the truth). [paraphrased]
W. Edwards Deming, fully William Edwards Deming
The principle that where there is fear, there will be wrong figures.
Individual | Judgment | Meaning | Principles | Relationship | Style | System | Understanding | Will | Work | Understand |
The self in the twentieth century is a voracious nought which expands like the feeding vacuole of an amoeba seeking to nourish and inform its own nothingness by ingesting new objects in the world but, like a vacuole, only succeeds in emptying them out.
Self |
W. Edwards Deming, fully William Edwards Deming
The average American worker has fifty interruptions a day, of which seventy percent have nothing to do with work.
Why it is that of all the billions and billions of strange objects in the Cosmos - novas, quasars, pulsars, black holes - you are beyond doubt the strangest?
W. W. Sawyer, fully Walter Warwick Sawyer
It is widely recognized that the weakest students can be very unhappy if their special needs are not met. It is often not recognized that the ablest too can suffer acutely, if they are captive in a lockstep class and have to work, at what seems to them a snail's pace, through material they could have disposed of quickly when they were several years younger. The root of the trouble lies in the concept that education is something done to a pupil by a teacher. This is entirely untrue, at any rate for mathematics. Young mathematicians are hungry for knowledge and nothing delights them more than to be given the opportunity to read ahead on their own. The strongest students will then reach topics far beyond anything that a school curriculum could possibly contain or a school teacher be expected to expound. Even those, who are slightly above the level the curriculum envisages, will benefit from the relief of boredom and the extra knowledge acquired.
Music | People | Revolution |
Where there is chance of gain, there is also chance of loss. Whenever one courts great happiness, one also risks malaise.
Age | Man | Singularity | Work | Old |