This site is dedicated to the memory of Dr. Alan William Smolowe who gave birth to the creation of this database.
Greatness, in the last analysis, is largely bravery - courage in escaping from old ideas and old standards and respectable ways of doing things. This is one of the chief elements in what we vaguely call capacity. If you do not dare differ from your associates and teachers you will never be great or your life sublime. You may be the happier as a result, or you may be miserable. Each of us is great insofar as we perceive and act on the infinite possibilities which lie undiscovered and unrecognized about us.
Associates | Bravery | Capacity | Courage | Greatness | Ideas | Life | Life | Will | Old |
The word “independence” is united to the accessory ideas of dignity and virtue. The word “dependence” is united to the ideas of inferiority and corruption.
Corruption | Dependence | Dignity | Ideas | Inferiority | Virtue | Virtue |
John Kenneth Galbraith, aka "Ken"
Ideas are inherently conservative. They yield not to the attack of other ideas but to the massive onslaught of circumstances with which they cannot contend.
Circumstances | Ideas |
On no subject are our ideas more warped and pitiable than on death. Let children walk with nature, let them see the beautiful blendings and communions of death and life, their joyous inseparable unity, as taught in woods and meadows, plains and mountains and streams of our blessed star, and they will learn that death is stingless indeed, and as beautiful as life, and that the grave has no victory, for it never fights. All is divine harmony.
Children | Death | Grave | Harmony | Ideas | Life | Life | Nature | Unity | Will | Blessed | Learn |
Ultimately, it is our mindlessness that imprisons us. We get better and better at being out of touch with the full range of our possibilities, and more and more stuck in our cultivated-over-a-lifetime habits of not-seeing, but only reacting and blaming... We can all be imprisoned by incessant wanting, by a mind clouded with ideas and opinions it clings to as if they were truths.
Protection against the tyranny of the magistrate is not enough; there needs protection against the tyranny of the prevailing opinion and feeling, against the tendency of society to impose, by other means than civil penalties, its own ideas and practices as rules of conduct on those who dissent from them.
Conduct | Dissent | Enough | Ideas | Means | Opinion | Society | Tyranny | Society |
[Economic] and social changes, though among the greatest, are not the only forces which shape the course of our species. Ideas are not always the mere signs and effects of social circumstances: they are themselves a power in history.
Circumstances | History | Ideas | Power |
The macrocosm (order of the universe), microcosm (order of the individual), and mesocosm (order of the attuned society) are equivalent, the social ideas and moral principles by which the individual is constrained to his group are conceived to be, finally, of his own nature. And for the same reason, the visionary realizations of the yogi in solitude would be of the psychological sources out of which the mesocosmic order of his mythologically grounded cultural monad originated.
Ideas | Individual | Nature | Order | Principles | Reason | Society | Solitude | Universe |
To the liberal ideas of the age must be opposed the moral ideas of all ages.
There is no wisdom save in truth. Truth is everlasting, but our ideas about truth are changeable. Only a little of the first fruits of wisdom, only a few fragments of the boundless heights, breadths and depths of truth, have I been able to gather.
Mihaly Csikszentmihalyi, native form is Csíkszentmihályi Mihály
Education takes place in the whole community. It is in the malls, the highways, the media, and their parents’ lifestyles that give young people their clearest ideas of what reality is about
Poetry interprets in two ways: it interprets by expressing, with magical felicity, the physiognomy and movements of the outward world; and it interprets by expressing, with inspired conviction, the ideas and laws of the inward world of man’s moral and spiritual nature. In other words, poetry is interpretive both by having natural magic in it, and by having moral profundity.
Max Weber, formally Maximilian Carl Emil Weber
Ideas come when we do not expect them, and not when we are brooding and searching at our desks. Yet ideas would certainly not come to mind had we not brooded at our desks and searched for answers with passionate devotion.
Norman Mailer, fully Norman Kingsley Mailer
Money bears the same relation to social solutions that water does to blood.
Money |