This site is dedicated to the memory of Dr. Alan William Smolowe who gave birth to the creation of this database.
The highest destiny of the individual is to serve rather than to rule.
Destiny | Individual | Rule | Wisdom |
The fear of losing one's job has kept education in America fifty years behind its possible improvement.
Education | Fear | Improvement | Wisdom |
An education isn't how much you have committed to memory, or even how much you know. It's being able to differentiate between what you do know and what you don't. It's knowing where to go to find out what you need to know; and it's knowing how to use the information once you get it.
The most glorious moments in your life are not the so-called days of success, but rather those days when out of dejection and despair you feel rise in you a challenge to life, and the promise of future accomplishments.
Challenge | Dejection | Despair | Future | Life | Life | Promise | Success | Wisdom |
Getting education is like getting measles; you have to go where the measles is.
We have in America the largest public school system on earth, the most expensive college buildings, the most extensive curriculum, but nowhere else is education so blind to its objectives, so indifferent to any specific outcome as in America. One trouble has been at the repression of faults rather than creation of virtues.
Earth | Education | Objectives | Public | System | Wisdom | Trouble |
David Gardner, fully David Pierpont Gardner
We learn simply by the exposure of living. Much that passes for education is not education at all but ritual. The fact is that we are being educated when we know it least.
Virginia Gildersleeve, fully Virginia Crocheron Gildersleeve
The ability to think straight, some knowledge of the past, some vision of the future, some skill to do useful service some urge to fit that service into the well-being of the community - these are the most vital things education must try to produce.
Ability | Education | Future | Knowledge | Past | Service | Skill | Vision | Wisdom | Think |
I don’t see any reason why we should have less confidence in this kind of perception, I.e., in mathematical intuition, than in sense perception, which induces us to build up physical theories and to expect that future sense perceptions will agree with them and, moreover, to believe that a question not decidable now has meaning and may be decided in the future.
Confidence | Future | Intuition | Meaning | Perception | Question | Reason | Sense | Theories | Will | Wisdom |
One of the chief objects of education should be to widen the windows through which we view the world.
The destiny of the world is determined less by the battles that are lost and won than by the stories it loves and believes in.