This site is dedicated to the memory of Dr. Alan William Smolowe who gave birth to the creation of this database.
Salvador Dalí, fully Salvador Domingo Felipe Jacinto Dalí i Domènech
There is only one difference between a madman and me. The madman thinks he is sane. I know I am mad.
Against us we find arrayed a host guarded by special privilege, buttressed by legalized trusts, fed by streams of legalized monopolists, picketed by gangs of legalized Pinkertons, and having in reserve thousands of embryo employers who, under the name of Militia, are organized, uniformed, and armed for the sole purpose of holding the discontented in subservient bondage to iniquitous conditions.
Competition | Endurance | Law | Method | Object | Society | Strength | Society | Trial |
The brave man is an inspiration to the weak, and compels them, as it were, to follow him.
The proportions of good and evil in any society depend partly upon the proportion of consent to that of refusal and partly upon the distribution of power between those who consent and those who refuse. If any power of any kind is in the hands of a man who has not given total, sincere, and enlightened consent to this obligation such power is misplaced. If a man has willfully refused to consent, then it is in itself a criminal activity for him to exercise any function, major or minor, public or private, which gives him control over people's lives. All those who, with knowledge of his mind, have acquiesced in his exercise of the function are accessories to the crime. Any State whose whole official doctrine constitutes an incitement to this crime is itself wholly criminal. It can retain no trace of legitimacy. Any State whose official doctrine is not primarily directed against this crime in all its forms is lacking in full legitimacy. Any legal system which contains no provisions against this crime is without the essence of legality. Any legal system which provides against some forms of this crime but not others is without the full character of legality. Any government whose members commit this crime, or authorize it in their subordinates, has betrayed its function.
Method | Philosophy | Problems |
The needs of a human being are sacred. Their satisfaction cannot be subordinated either to reasons of state, or to any consideration of money, nationality, race, or colour, or to the moral or other value attributed to the human being in question, or to any consideration whatsoever. There is no legitimate limit to the satisfaction of the needs of a human being except as imposed by necessity and by the needs of other human beings. The limit is only legitimate if the needs of all human beings receive an equal degree of attention.
Method | Need | Punishment |
Sigmund Freud, born Sigismund Schlomo Freud
The poor ego has a still harder time of it; it has to serve three harsh masters, and it has to do its best to reconcile the claims and demands of all three.... The three tyrants are the external world, the superego, and the id.
Method |
Arthur Conan Doyle, fully Sir Arthur Ignatius Conan Doyle
By my soul! I would rather have a dry death, quoth Sir Oliver. Though, Mort Dieu! I have eaten so many fish that it were but justice that the fish should eat me.
Credit | Individual | Method | Will |
Arthur Conan Doyle, fully Sir Arthur Ignatius Conan Doyle
I'm not sure about whether I shall go. I am the most incurably lazy devil that ever stood in shoe leather -- that is, when the fit is on me, for I can be spry enough at times.
Credit | Individual | Method | Will |
In their recently aborted struggle to inject Genesis literalism into science classrooms, fundamentalist groups followed their usual opportunistic strategy of arguing two contradictory sides of a question when a supposed rhetorical advantage could be extracted from each. Their main pseudoargument held that Genesis literalism is not religion at all, but really an alternative form of science not acknowledged by professional biologists too hidebound and dogmatic to appreciate the cutting edge of their own discipline. When we successfully pointed out that ‘creation science’ — as an untestable set of dogmatic proposals — could not qualify as science by any standard definition, they turned around and shamelessly argued the other side. […] (They actually pulled off the neater trick of holding both positions simultaneously.) Now they argued that, yes indeed, creation science is religion, but evolution is equally religious. Thus, they claimed, creation science and evolution science are symmetrical — that is, equally religious. Creation science isn't science because it rests upon the untestable fashioning of life ex nihilo by God. Evolution science isn't science because it tries, as its major aim, to resolve the unresolvable and ultimate origin of life. But we do no such thing. We understand Hutton's wisdom — ‘he has nowhere treated of the first origin …of any substance… but only of the transformations which bodies have undergone…’
Method |
History doth not reckon twenty professed atheists in all ages in the compass of the whole world: and we have not the name of any one absolute atheist upon record in Scripture: yet it is questioned, whether any of them, noted in history with that infamous name, were downright deniers of the existence of God, but rather because they disparaged the deities commonly worshipped by the nations where they lived, as being of a clearer reason to discern that those qualities, vulgarly attributed to their gods, as lust and luxury, wantonness and quarrels, were unworthy of the nature of a god.
Change | Desire | Enough | Future | Knowledge | Means | Method | Power | Reason | Strength | Wants | Will | Wisdom |
The Steady State theory was what Karl Popper would call a good scientific theory: it made definite predictions, which could be tested by observation, and possibly falsified. Unfortunately for the theory, they were falsified.
Day | Destroy | Earth | Enough | Experience | Extreme | Global | History | Hope | Journey | Light | Looks | Means | Method | Mission | Nature | Need | Nothing | Object | Past | People | Power | Principles | Reality | Reason | Rest | Right | Space | System | Time | Understanding | Universe | Will | Wonder | World | Child | Think |
The thing that got me started on the science that I've been building now for about 20 years or so was the question of okay, if mathematical equations can't make progress in understanding complex phenomena in the natural world, how might we make progress?
Discipline | Experiment | Mathematics | Method | Nature | Principles | Progress | Science | Society | System | Title | Understanding | Theoretical | Society |
To my mind the failure resolutely to follow progressive policies is the negation of democracy as well of progress, and spells disaster. But for this very reason I feel concern when progressives act with heedless violence, or go so far and so fast as to invite reaction. The experience of John Brown illustrates the evil of the revolutionary short-cut to ultimate good ends. The liberty of the slave was desirable, but it was not to be brought about by a slave insurrection. The better distribution of property is desirable, but it is not to be brought about by the anarchic form of Socialism which would destroy all private capital and tend to destroy all private wealth. It represents not progress, but retrogression, to propose to destroy capital because the power of unrestrained capital is abused. John Brown rendered a great service to the cause of liberty in the earlier Kansas days; but his notion that the evils of slavery could be cured by a slave insurrection was a delusion analogous to the delusions of those who expect to cure the evils of plutocracy by arousing the baser passions of workingmen against the rich in an endeavor at violent industrial revolution. And, on the other hand, the brutal and shortsighted greed of those who pro?t by what is wrong in the present system, and the attitude of those who oppose all effort to do away with this wrong, serve in their turn as incitements to such revolution; just as the insolence of the ultra pro-slavery men ?nally precipitated the violent destruction of slavery.
Conscience | Good | Justification | Liberty | Life | Life | Man | Method | Office | Present | Purpose | Purpose | Salvation |
Your first love has no beginning or end. Your first love is not your first love, and it is not your last. It is just love. It is one with everything.
Is confidence or discretion, or is STRICT LIMIT, the principle of our Constitution?
Experience | Method | Time |
Thomas Mann, fully Paul Thomas Mann
As death, when we come to consider it closely, is the true goal of our existence, I have formed during the last few years such close relations with this best and truest friend of mankind, that his image is not only no longer terrifying to me, but is indeed very soothing and consoling And I thank my God for graciously granting me the opportunity...of learning that death is the key which unlocks the door to our true happiness.
Individual | Method | Science |
Pragmatism is offered as a revolutionary new way of thinking about ourselves and our thoughts, but it is apparently disabled by its own character from offering arguments that might show its suyperiority to the common sense it seeks to displace.
Enough | Ideas | Method | Mind | Objectivity | Philosophy | Reality | Rest | Understanding | Think |