This site is dedicated to the memory of Dr. Alan William Smolowe who gave birth to the creation of this database.
Vince Lombardi, fully Vincent Thomas "Vince" Lombardi
Unless a man believes in himself and makes a total commitment to his career and puts everything he has into it – his mind, his body, his heart – what’s life worth to him?
Heart | Influence | Man | Men | Personality |
Yet as members of societies that are prepared for war, how can we set ourselves apart as peace-loving and the others as violent? This is, however, what we attempt to do. We see on the television or hear on the radio news about massacres and wars taking place in different countries, and we feel how stupid it is to wage war and wonder why the politicians and the statesmen don’t have the wisdom to stop all this nonsense. This is the reaction perhaps of every sensitive citizen of the world. But who wages war? Where are the roots of war? Are they in the minds of a handful of individuals ruling over their respective countries? Or are the roots of war in the systems that we have created and have been living by for centuries—the economic, the political, the administrative, the industrial systems? If we are not romantic and sentimental, and do not feel gratified just by reacting emotionally, by expressing how bad the wars are, but rather go deep, won’t we find the roots of war in the systems and structures that we have accepted?
Discipline | Ideas | Influence | Mind | Understand |
Vincent van Gogh, fully Vincent Willem van Gogh
I come back dissatisfied - I put it away, and when I have rested a little, I go and look at it with a kind of fear. Then I am still dissatisfied, because I still have that splendid scene too clearly in my mind to be satisfied with what I have made of it. But I find in my work an echo of what struck me...
Force | Hope | Influence | Present | Public | Work | Think |
Virgil, also Vergil, fully Publius Vergilius Maro NULL
If one swain scorns you, you will soon find another.
Virgil, also Vergil, fully Publius Vergilius Maro NULL
Knowing sorrow well, I learn to succor the distressed.
Be like the bird that, passing on her flight awhile on boughs too slight, feels them give way beneath her, and yet sings, knowing that she hath wings.
Whether we be Italians or Frenchmen, misery concerns us all. Ever since history has been written, ever since philosophy has meditated, misery has been the garment of the human race; the moment has at length arrived for tearing off that rag, and for replacing, upon the naked limbs of the Man-People, the sinister fragment of the past with the grand purple robe of the dawn.
Viktor Frankl, fully Viktor Emil Frankl
As the struggle for survival has subsided, the question has emerged: survival for what? Ever more people have the means to live, but no meaning to live for.
Art | Beauty | Hope | Influence | Journey | Life | Life | Little | Men | Nature | Prison | Art | Beauty |
V. S. Pritchett, fully Sir Victor Sawdon Pritchett
Great artists are always far-seeing. They easily avoid the big stumbling blocks of fact. They rely on their own simplicity and vision. It is fact-fetichism that has given us those scores and scores of American books on America, the works of sociologists, anthropologists, topical problem hunters, working-parties and statisticians, which in the end leave us empty. Henry James succeeds because he rejects information. He was himself the only information he required.
Self-confidence is not pride. Just the contrary: only a person or a nation that is self-confident, in the best sense of the word, is capable of listening to others, accepting them as equals, forgiving its enemies and regretting its own guilt.
Global | Good | History | Influence | Integration | Life | Life | Nothing | Order | Public | Taste | Learn |
Thomas L. Friedman, fully Thomas Lauren Friedman
The fact that no two major countries have done to war since they both got McDonald’s is partly due to economic integration, but it is also due to the presence of American power and America’s willingness to use that power against those who would threaten the system of globalization–from Iraq to North Korea. The hidden hand of the market will never work without a hidden fist.[...] McDonald’s cannot flourish without McDonnell Douglas, the designer of the US Air Force F-15. And the hidden fist that keeps the world safe for Silicon Valley’s technologies to flourish is called the US Army, Air Force, Navy and Marine Corps. And these fighting forces and institutions are paid for by American taxpayer dollars.
Age | Important | Influence | Parents | Principles | Thinking | Time | Woman | Teacher |
Thornton Wilder, fully Thornton Niven Wilder
We all have time to expend on what is essential to our nature.