This site is dedicated to the memory of Dr. Alan William Smolowe who gave birth to the creation of this database.
Henry Kissinger, fully Henry Alfred Kissinger
[Central Intelligence Agency] analysts were only too aware that no one has ever been penalized for not having foreseen an opportunity, but that many careers have been blighted for not predicting a risk. Therefore the intelligence community has always been tempted to forecast dire consequences for any conceivable course of action, an attitude that encourages paralysis rather than adventurism.
Action | Consequences | Intelligence | Opportunity | Risk |
Henry Kissinger, fully Henry Alfred Kissinger
Mankind will never know what it was spared because of the risks avoided or because of actions taken that averted awful consequences – if only because once thwarted the consequences can never be proved.
Consequences | Mankind | Will |
It is an undoubted fact that an overwhelming majority of religious persecutors have been men of the purest intentions, of the most admirable and unsullied morals… Such men as these are not bad, they are only ignorant; ignorant of the nature of truth, ignorant of the consequences of their own acts.
Consequences | Majority | Men | Nature | Truth |
What action would promote happiness of a rational being is completely insoluble, and consequently no imperative respect it is possible which should, in the strict sense, command to do what makes happy; because happiness is not an ideal of reason but of imagination, resting solely on empirical grounds, and it is vain to expect that these should define an action by which one could attain the totality of a series of consequences which is really endless.
Action | Consequences | Happy | Imagination | Reason | Respect | Sense | Respect | Happiness |
Remember always, in painting as in eloquence, the greater your strength, the quieter will be your manner, and the fewer your words; and in painting, as in all the arts and acts of life, the secret of high success will be found, not in a fretful and various excellence, but in a quiet singleness of justly chosen aim.
Excellence | Life | Life | Quiet | Strength | Success | Will | Words |
Joseph Chilton Pearce, aka Joe
No media project succeeds based on “good news only” because good news does not trigger our alert system. Anything good indicates a safe space, the quiet background against which events can play out. The enculturated mind is cued to respond to the negative as a point of focus, which largely screens out or ignores a quiet stable base, and, because it sharpens and maintains our alert awareness, we actually begin to look for the negative.
Awareness | Events | Focus | Good | Mind | News | Play | Quiet | Safe | Space | System |
Love joins our present with the past and the future... Love is a divine knowledge that enables men to see as much as the gods... Love is a blinding mist that keeps the soul from discerning the secret of existence, so that the heart sees only trembling phantoms of desire among the hills, and hears only echoes of cries from voiceless valleys... Love is the rest of the body in the quiet of the grave, the tranquillity of the soul in the depth of Eternity... And so, all who passed spoke of Love as the image of their hopes and frustrations, leaving it a mystery as before.
Body | Desire | Eternity | Existence | Future | Grave | Heart | Knowledge | Love | Men | Mystery | Past | Present | Quiet | Rest | Soul | Tranquility |
Meister Eckhart, formally Meister von Hochheim
To the quiet mind all things are possible. What is a quiet mind? A quiet mind is one which nothing weighs on, nothing worries, which, free from ties and from all self-seeking, is wholly merged into the will of God and dead as to its own. Such an one can do no deed however small but it is clothed with something of God’s power and authority.
Authority | God | Mind | Nothing | Power | Quiet | Self | Will | God |
Happiness is a kind of emotional resting place of quiet satisfaction with one's life.
Mortimer J. Adler, fully Mortimer Jerome Adler
More consequences for thought and action follow from the affirmation or denial of God than from answering any other question.
Action | Consequences | God | Question | Thought | God | Thought |
I know of no teachers so powerful and persuasive as the little army of specialists. They carry no banners, they beat no drums; but where they are men learn that bustle and push are not the equals of quiet genius and serene mastery.
What physic, what chirurgery, what wealth, favor, authority can relieve, bear out, assuage, or expel a troubled conscience? A quiet mind cureth all.
Authority | Conscience | Mind | Quiet | Wealth |
Our actions are our own; their consequences belong to Heaven.
Consequences | Heaven |
Walter Raleigh, fully Sir Walter Raleigh
What thou givest after thy death, remember that thou givest it to a stranger, and most times to an enemy; for he that shall marry thy wife will despise thee, thy memory and thine, and shall possess the quiet of thy labors, the fruit which thou hast planted, enjoy thy love, and spend with joy and ease what thou hast spared and gotten with care and travail.
Care | Death | Despise | Enemy | Joy | Love | Memory | Quiet | Wife | Will |
Simone de Beauvoir, fully Simone-Ernestine-Lucie-Marie Bertrand de Beauvoir
In the relation of master to slave the master does not make a point of the need that he has for the other; he has in his grasp the power of satisfying this need through his own action; whereas the slaver, in his dependent condition, his hope and fear, is quiet conscious of the need he has for his master. Even if the need is at bottom equally urgent for both, it always works in favor of the oppressor and against the oppressed.