This site is dedicated to the memory of Dr. Alan William Smolowe who gave birth to the creation of this database.
After many years of working with and listening to American adolescents, I don't believe they are ready for sex or its potential consequences--parenthood, abortion, sexually transmitted diseases--and I think we need to do everything in our power to discourage sexual activity and encourage abstinence. Young people can learn to value the intimacy of friendships with the opposite sex as well as their own, can enjoy being in groups as well as couples. Those kinds of relationships need adult support, including the time it takes to organize gatherings for kids, instead of turning them loose in malls, video arcades, or the streets. Homes, schools, churches, and communities should provide havens for kids who want an alternative. These same entities have to pitch in when it comes to educating kids about sex.
Listening | Need | People | Power | Time | Learn | Think | Value |
All our thoughts and concepts are called up by sense-experiences and have a meaning only in reference to these sense-experiences. On the other hand, however, they are products of the spontaneous activity of our minds. They are thus in no wise logical consequences of the content of these sense-experiences. We must therefore investigate how they are related to the experience.
Consequences | Meaning | Wise |
While men represent powerful activity as assertion and aggression, women in contrast portray acts of nurturance as acts of strength.
Buckminster Fuller, fully Richard Buckminster "Bucky" Fuller
It seems to demonstrate that periods of industrial activity in technical syntheses of principles, data, free energy and energy as matter, find highest employment by the fear-amassed credits of warfare. Therefore the assumption approaches fact that war promotes the major technical advances of civilization... What has not been clear is that the potential of this emergency-born technology has always accrued to human's prewar individual initiatives taken in a humble but irrepressible progression of assumptions, measurements, deductions, and codifications of pure science.
Energy | Individual | Technology | War |
R. H. Tawney, fully Richard Henry Tawney
[It is necessary to assign]... to economic activity itself its proper place as servant, not a master, of society. The burden of our civilisation is not merely, as many suppose, that the product of industry is sill-distributed, or its conduct tyrannical, or its operation interrupted by embittered disagreements. It is that industry itself has come to hold a position of exclusive predominance among human interests, which no single interest, and least of all the provision of the material means of existence, is fit to occupy. Like a hypochondriac who is so absorbed in the processes of his own digestion that he goes to his grave before he has begun to live, industrialised communities neglect the very objects for which it is worth while to acquire riches in their feverish preoccupation with the means by which riches can be acquired.
Conduct | Grave | Industry | Means | Neglect | Position | Riches | Worth | Riches |
R. H. Blyth, fully Reginald Horace Blyth
What is Zen? Zen means doing anything perfectly, making mistakes perfectly, being defeated perfectly, hesitating perfectly, doing anything perfectly or imperfectly, perfectly. What is the meaning of this perfectly? How does it differ from perfectly? Perfectly is in the will; perfectly is in the activity. Perfectly means that at each moment of the activity there is no egoism in it
William Rees and Mathis Wackernagel
Ecological footprint analysis has gained considerable momentum around the world as both heuristic device and practical method for assessing sustainability. This success derives in part from methodological strengths of EFA that are both scientifically well founded and reflect thinking people’s intuitive sense of reality. On the technical/scientific side, EFA has several qualities that reinforce its credibility as a sustainability indicator. The method: acknowledges that humans are biophysical entities that make constant metabolic demands on their supportive ecosystems and that all our manufactured capital and related cultural artefacts impose a parallel and much larger industrial metabolism on the ecosphere; recognizes the crucial role of natural capital and natural income (biophysical stocks and flows) in economic development and sustainability; accepts that the economy is a fully contained, growing, dependent, sub-system of the non-growing ecosphere; recognizes the second law of thermodynamics as the ultimate governor of material transformations and economic activity (Georgescu-Roegen 1971, Daly 1991) and that beyond a certain (optimal) scale, the growth and maintenance human enterprise must necessarily accelerate the entropic disordering and dissipation of the ecosphere; is closely related conceptually to Odum’s the embodied energy (emergy) analyses (see Hall 1995) and the ‘environmental space’ concept of the Sustainable Europe Campaign (Carley and Spapens 1998). accounts for both population size and resource consumption in estimating of appropriated ecosystem area. This aligns EFA closely with Catton’s (1980) concept of human ‘load’ (population times per capita consumption); corresponds closely to and incorporates all the factors in Ehrlich’s and Holdren’s (1971) well-known definition of human impact on the environment: I = PAT, where ‘I’ is impact, ‘P’ is population, ‘A’ is affluence (i.e., level of consumption) and ‘T’ is a technology scalar.
Energy | Growth | Law | Method | Qualities | Sense | Size | Success | Technology | Thinking | World |
Ramon Llul, aka Raymond Lully, Raymond Lull, Raimundus, Raymundus Lullus or Lullius
Imagination is a kind of mediator, opening the way to the activity of the intelligible and spiritual life of the human being
William Rees and Mathis Wackernagel
It is no small irony that in the age of ‘technological man’ people actually play a greater role in ecosystems than ever. For example, H. sapiens has long been the most successful terrestrial carnivore ever to have walked the earth and, during the 20th Century, humans became the most voracious predator in the world’s oceans. Remarkably, considering our unchallenged status as top carnivore, we are also the dominant herbivore in grasslands and forests all over the planet, particularly if we consider the demands of ‘industrial metabolism’ (Rees 2003a, Fowler and Hobbs 2003). And human impacts transcend biology, earth scientists assert that economic activity has become the most significant geological force altering the face of the planet and climatologists agree that we are now actually beginning to affect global climate.
Age | Beginning | Earth | Force | Global | Irony | People | Play |
William Rees and Mathis Wackernagel
Despite the cascade of empirical evidence that even the present scale human economic activity threatens to undermine the integrity of the ecosphere, there is little evidence in the international policy arena that mainstream institutions are seriously willing to consider abandoning perpetual growth machine. Indeed, policy makers generally believe that the Malthusian dilemma and concerns about ‘limits to growth’ have long been put to rest.
William Rees and Mathis Wackernagel
Growth is a pressing moral imperative for those whose needs are not being met, and industrialized countries have not yet found ways to maintain their standard of living, without continued economic growth. One hopeful strategy to deal with this dilemma involves massive improvements in the efficiency of economic activity so that growth in consumption of goods and services is "decoupled" from growth in the use of energy and material. In theory, this should permit an increase in consumption to be accompanied by a decrease in resource use. In fact, this "dematerialization" of economic goods and services must proceed faster than economic growth to produce the necessary reduction in humanity's total load on the ecosphere. The political attractiveness of this approach is self-evident - it enables the rich to maintain their high material standards while freeing up the ecological space needed for the poor to increase theirs.
Efficiency | Energy | Growth | Space |
The corporate lobby in Washington is basically designed to stifle all legislative activity on behalf of consumers.
There must, moreover, not only be this reference to myself in distinguishing my acts from all those things that are not acts, but it must be a reference to myself as an active being. Another perfectly natural way of expressing this notion of my activity is to say that, in acting, I make something happen, I cause it, or bring it about. Now it does seem odd that philosophers should construe this natural way of expressing the matter as really meaning, not that I, but rather some event, process, or state not identical with myself should be the cause of that which is represented as my act. It is plain that, whatever I am, I am never identical with any such event, process, or state as is usually proposed as the "real cause" of my act, such as some intention or state of willing. Hence, if it is really and unmetaphorically true, as I believe it to be, that I sometimes cause something to happen, this would seem to entail that it is false that any event, process, or state not identical with myself should be the real cause of it. But it is not, in fact, hard to see why philosophers should want to insist that these natural ways of expressing the matter really mean something quite different from what they seem to mean; namely, that it has been the firm conviction of most philosophers for generations that in the case of any event that occurs, another event must be at least part of its cause. If, accordingly, it is true that I am the cause of my acts, as it evidently is, then in view of this principle we must suppose that the real cause is some event intimately associated with me — and then, of course, the chase is on to find it or, failing that, at least to give it a name and create a semblance of having found it. The alternative I urge is that I am sometimes the cause of my own actions, that such an assertion is neither incomplete nor metaphorical and hence has no "real" meaning different from, much less inconsistent with, itself as it stands. In that case, however, we must conclude that the word "cause" in such contexts has not the ordinary meaning of a certain relationship between events, but has rather the older meaning of the efficacy or power of an agent to produce certain results. This idea can be otherwise expressed by saying that an agent is something that originates things, produces them, or brings them about. It might be wished that some clear definition or analysis of this idea of agency could be given, in place of merely synonymous expressions, but we have already seen that this cannot be done, and we have also seen why. To give an analysis of agency or of the sense in which an agent is the cause of his actions would amount to giving an analysis of an act, an analysis which would of necessity presuppose the truth of a metaphysical presupposition that is not only dubious, but probably false.
Assertion | Cause | Giving | Intention | Meaning | Necessity | Power | Relationship | Sense | Truth |
It is also possible for wastes to accumulate to the point that the biological systems that underpin economic activity (such as forests, crops, and human bodies) are smothered and poisoned.
Richard Feynman, fully Richard Phillips Feynman
In this age of specialization men who thoroughly know one field are often incompetent to discuss another. The great problems of the relations between one and another aspect of human activity have for this reason been discussed less and less in public. When we look at the past great debates on these subjects we feel jealous of those times, for we should have liked the excitement of such argument. The old problems, such as the relation of science and religion, are still with us, and I believe present as difficult dilemmas as ever, but they are not often publicly discussed because of the limitations of specialization.
Age | Excitement | Men | Past | Present | Problems | Reason | Science | Old |
Richard Tarnas, fully Richard Theodore Tarnas
Enter now the theory of quantum mechanics to upend our ideas about the physical nature of the world. Physicists were discovering in their laboratories that the basic properties of atomic particles were being altered just by the simple act of measuring them. Soon after it was discovered that, in certain experimental arrangements, particles at the atomic level do not fully exist prior to being observed. The activity of conscious observation and measurement was actually bringing particles into full existence! This suggests that reality may not be pre-given and "objective," but rather that it is being...
Ideas | Nature | Observation | Reality |
Robert Updegraff, fully Robert Rawls Updegraff
The purpose of learning to employ every minute properly is to unclutter our hours, deliver us of feverish activity and earn us true leisure.
If we assume that leadership must not only meet the needs of followers but also must elevate them, we render a different judgment. Hitler wielded power, but he did not lead.
Experience | Leadership |
Rudolf Steiner, fully Rudolf Joseph Lorenz Steiner
Thus man could use a portion of the energy which previously he employed for the production of beings like himself, in order to perfect his own nature. The force by which mankind forms a thinking brain for itself is the same by which man impregnated himself in ancient times. The price of thought is single-sexedness. By no longer impregnating themselves, but rather by impregnating each other, human beings can turn a part of their productive energy within, and so become thinking creatures... In this way man has become a spiritual being of the kind which he is now. But one must not suppose that no beings which possessed cognition had been in contact with the earth before then. When one follows the Akasha Chronicle it does indeed appear that in the first Lemurian period, later physical man, because of his double sex, was a totally different being from that which one today designates as man. He could not connect any sensory perceptions with thoughts; he did not think. His life was one of impulses. His soul expressed itself only in instincts, in appetites, in animal desires and so on. His consciousness was dreamlike; he lived in dullness
Action | Determination | Freedom of thought | Freedom | Nature | People | Thought | Thought |