This site is dedicated to the memory of Dr. Alan William Smolowe who gave birth to the creation of this database.
We live in a spelling bee culture where the demand is factual accuracy and everybody overlooks the absence of art or meaning in what's said. Too many people sent letters to Nero telling him he was fingering his fiddle wrong. This passion for data is a way of avoiding coming to terms with things.
Absence | Accuracy | Art | Culture | Meaning | Passion | People | Wisdom | Wrong | Art |
‘Tis not contrary to reason to prefer the destruction of the whole world to the scratching of my finger. ‘Tis not contrary to reason for me to chose my total ruin, to prevent the least uneasiness of an Indian or person wholly unknown to me. ‘Tis as little contrary to reason to prefer even my own acknowledg’d lesser good to my greater, and have a more ardent affection for the former than the latter... In short, a passion must be accompany’d with some false judgment, in order to its being unreasonable; and even then ‘tis not the passion, properly speaking, which is unreasonable, but the judgment.
Good | Judgment | Little | Order | Passion | Reason | Wisdom | World |
A religious man is a person who holds God and man in one thought at one time, at all times, who suffers harm done to others, whose greatest passion is compassion, whose greatest strength is love and defiance of despair.
Compassion | Defiance | Despair | God | Harm | Love | Man | Passion | Strength | Thought | Wisdom | God | Thought |
Poetry begotten of passion is ever debasing; poetry born of real heartfulness, always ennobles and uplifts.
The most shocking fact about war is that its victims and its instruments are individual human beings, and that these individual beings are condemned by the monstrous convention of politics to murder or be murdered in quarrels not their own.
Convention | Individual | Murder | Politics | War | Wisdom | Murder |
If a child who wanted to be a teacher I would bid him Godspeed as if he were going to war. For indeed the war against prejudice, greed and ignorance is eternal, and those who dedicate themselves to it give their lives not less because they may live to see some faction of the battle won.
Battle | Eternal | Greed | Ignorance | Prejudice | War | Wisdom | Child | Teacher |
John F. Kennedy, fully John Fitzgerald "Jack" Kennedy
No man who witnessed the tragedies of the last war, no man who can imagine the unimaginable possibilities of the next war can advocate war out of irritability or frustration or impatience.
Impatience | Man | War | Wisdom |
Lyndon Johnson, fully Lyndon Baines Johnson, aka LBJ
In this age when there can be no losers in peace and no victors in war - we must recognize the obligation to match national strength with national restraint.
Age | Obligation | Peace | Restraint | Strength | War | Wisdom |
The union of the mathematician with the poet, fervor with measure, passion with correctness, this surely is the ideal.
Correctness | Passion | Wisdom |
There is no such thing as an inevitable war. If war comes it will be from failure of human wisdom.
R. D. Laing, fully Ronald David Laing
Violence attempts to constrain the other's freedom, to force him to act in the way we desire, but with ultimate lack of concern, with indifference to the other's own existence or destiny.
Desire | Destiny | Existence | Force | Freedom | Indifference | Wisdom |