This site is dedicated to the memory of Dr. Alan William Smolowe who gave birth to the creation of this database.
First, [the leaders] identified the adaptive challenge – the gap between aspirations and reality – and focused attention on the specific issues created by that gap. Recognizing that they were working with a problem that existing technical expertise could not solve satisfactorily, they shifted from giving authoritative solutions to a plan for managing people’s adaptive problem-solving.
Need | Plan | Leadership |
But instead of this world unification ushering in an age of prosperity and peace, as most globalists believe it will, it will be a time of unimaginable human suffering as recorded in God's Word. The Anti-Christ will tightly regulate who may buy and sell.
Mankind |
In this crucial sense, the theory of punctuated equilibrium adopts a very conservative position. The theory asserts no novel claim about modes or mechanisms of speciation; punctuated equilibrium merely takes a standard microevolutionary model and elucidates its expected expression when properly scaled into geological time.
Evolution | Life | Life | Question | Religion | Science | Struggle | Wisdom | Understand |
Lavoisier was right in the deepest, almost holy, way. His passion harnessed feeling to the service of reason; another kind of passion was the price. Reason cannot save us and can even persecute us in the wrong hands; but we have no hope of salvation without reason. The world is too complex, too intransigent; we cannot bend it to our simple will.
Progress |
To allow oneself to be carried away by a multitude of conflicting concerns, to surrender to too many demands, to commit to too many projects, to want to help everyone in everything is itself to succumb to the violence of our times. Frenzy destroys our inner capacity for peace. It destroys the fruitfulness of our work, because it kills the root of inner wisdom which makes work fruitful.
Compassion | Enough | Giving | Mercy | Nations | Power | Unity | Witness | World | Understand |
Willard Quine, fully Willard Van Orman Quine
The three main medieval points of view regarding universals are designated by historians as realism, conceptualism, and nominalism. Essentially these same three doctrines reappear in twentieth-century surveys of the philosophy of mathematics under the new names logicism, intuitionism, and formalism.
Whittaker Chambers, born Jay Vivian Chambers, aka Jay David Whittaker Chambers
[The Devil said:] Hell is a conspiracy. Like all good conspiracies, its first requirement is that nobody shall believe in it. Well, we have succeeded so well that for centuries there has been no Hell, and there is scarcely a rational man in the world today who, despite the overwhelming evidence to the contrary, believes that the Devil exists.
For in the absence of debate unrestricted utterance leads to the degradation of opinion. By a kind of Gresham’s law the more rational is overcome by the less rational, and the opinions that will prevail will be those which are held most ardently by those with the most passionate will. For that reason the freedom to speak can never be maintained merely by objecting to interference with the liberty of the press, of printing, of broadcasting, of the screen. It can be maintained only by promoting debate.
Warren Buffett, fully Warren Edward Buffett, aka Oracle of Omaha
The supreme irony of business management is that it is far easier for an inadequate CEO to keep his job than it is for an inadequate subordinate.... At too many companies, the boss shoots the arrow of managerial performance and then hastily paints the bullseye around the spot where it lands.
Warren Buffett, fully Warren Edward Buffett, aka Oracle of Omaha
Derivatives are financial weapons of mass destruction.
Vladimir Lenin, fully Vladimir Ilyich Lenin
Human child birth is an act which transforms the woman into an almost lifeless, bloodstained heap of flesh, tortured, tormented and driven frantic by pain.
Ability | Correctness | Devotion | Discipline | Self-sacrifice | Leadership |
We have reached the point, however, where we no longer have the luxury to indulge in self-centered comfort and personal acquisition or to escape into religious pursuits at the cost of collective interests. For us there can be no escape, no withdrawal, no private arena in which we can turn our backs on the sorrows of humanity, saying, “I am not responsible. Others have created a mess; let them mend it.” The writing on the world’s wall is plain: “Learn to live together or in separateness you die!” The choice is ours.
Awareness | Love | Purity | Soul | Will | Wisdom | Awareness |
E. F. Schumacher, fully Ernst Friedrich "Fritz" Schumacher
Is it not evident that our current methods of production are already eating into the very substance of industrial man?
You are much more likely to find passionate prayer in a foxhole than in a church pew; and you will certainly find more otherworldly visions and supernatural voices in a mental hospital than you will in a church.
J. B. Priestly, fully John Boynton Priestly
As we read the school reports on our children, we realize a sense of relief, that can rise to delight, that, thank Heaven, nobody is reporting in this fashion on us.
Ambiguity | Better | Compassion | Enemy | Failure | Injustice | Injustice | Justice | Little | Means | People | Religion | Sense | Tradition | Understanding | Work | Failure |
J. R. R. Tolkien, fully John Ronald Reuel Tolkien
But if I had spoken sooner, it would not have lessened your desire, or made it easier to resist. On the contrary! No, the burned hand teaches best. After that advice about fire goes to the heart.