This site is dedicated to the memory of Dr. Alan William Smolowe who gave birth to the creation of this database.
It is dangerous to take human freedom for granted, to regard it as a prerogative rather than as an obligation, as an ultimate fact rather than as an ultimate goal. It is the beginning of wisdom to be amazed at the facts of our being free.
Beginning | Freedom | Obligation | Regard | Wisdom |
All information funnels through a chief of staff and the commanding officer expects his staff to present him with a recommended course of action, not simply the facts and the alternatives.
When the law is against you, argue the facts. When the facts are against you, argue the law. When both are against you, call the other lawyers’s names.
Law |
Robert Byrd, fully Robert Carlyle Byrd
Truth has a way of asserting itself despite all attempts to obscure it. Distortion only serves to derail it for a time. No matter to what lengths we humans may go to obfuscate facts or delude our fellows, truth has a way of squeezing out through the cracks, eventually.
The man who questions opinions is wise. The man who quarrels with facts is a fool.
It is not so very important for a person to learn facts. For that he does not really need a college. He can learn them from books. The value of an education in a liberal arts college is not learning of many facts but the training of the mind to think something that cannot be learned from textbooks.
Books | Education | Important | Learning | Mind | Need | Training | Learn | Think | Value |
Even scholars of audacious spirit and fine instinct can be obstructed in the interpretation of facts by philosophical prejudices.
It has been said that the primary function of schools is to impart enough facts to make children stop asking questions. Some, with whom the schools do not succeed, become scientists... and I never stopped asking questions.
Lack of experience diminishes our power of taking a comprehensive view of the admitted facts. Hence those who dwell in intimate association with nature and its phenomena grow more and more able to formulate, as the foundation of their theories, principles such as to admit of a wide and coherent development: while those whom devotion to abstract discussions has rendered unobservant of the facts are too ready to dogmatize on the basis of a few observations.
Abstract | Association | Devotion | Experience | Nature | Phenomena | Power | Principles | Theories | Association |
With a true view all data harmonize, but with a false one the facts soon clash.
The search for truth is one way hard, and in another way easy. For it is evident that no one can master it fully, nor yet miss it wholly. But each adds a little to our knowledge of nature, and from all the facts assembled, there arises a certain grandeur.
To the man who studies to gain a thorough insight into science, books and study are merely the steps of the ladder by which he climbs to the summit; as soon as a step has been advanced he leaves it behind. The majority of mankind, however, who study to fill their memory with facts do not use the steps of the ladder to mount upward, but take them off and lay them on their shoulders in order that they may take them along, delighting in the weight of the burden they are carrying. They ever remain below because they carry what should carry them.
Books | Insight | Majority | Man | Mankind | Memory | Order | Science | Study |
Bertrand Russell, fully Bertrand Arthur William Russell, 3rd Earl Russell
The fact that the majority of a community dislikes an opinion gives it no right to interfere with those who hold it. And the fact that the majority of a community wishes not to know certain facts gives it no right to imprison those who wish to know them.
Dale Carnegie, originally spelled Dale Carnegey
Get all the facts. Let's not even attempt to solve our problems without first collecting all the facts in an impartial manner.
Problems |
Live in contact with dreams, and you will get something of their charm; live in contact with facts, and you will get something of their brutality. I wish I could find a country where the facts were not brutal, and the dreams not unreal.