This site is dedicated to the memory of Dr. Alan William Smolowe who gave birth to the creation of this database.
America was discovered accidentally by a great seaman who was looking for something else; when discovered it was not wanted; and most of the exploration for the next fifty years was done in the hope of getting through or around it. America was named after a man who discovered no part of the New World. History is like that, very chancy.
Friedrich Nietzsche, fully Friedrich Wilhelm Nietzsche
Every great philosophy is... a species of involuntary and unconscious autobiography.
Philosophy | Wisdom |
H. L. Mencken, fully Henry Louis Mencken
There is no record in history of a nation that ever gained anything valuable by being unable to defend itself.
Pope Pius XI, born Ambrogio Damiano Achille Ratti NULL
Those who speak of the incompatibility of science and religion either make science say that which it never said or make religion say that which it never taught.
Science provides a vision of reality seen from the perspective of reason, a perspective that sees the vast order of the universe, living and nonliving matter, as a material system governed by rules that can be known by the human mind. It is a powerful vision, formal and austere but strangely silent about many of the questions that deeply concern us. Science shows us what exists but not what to do about it.
Mind | Order | Reality | Reason | Science | System | Universe | Vision | Wisdom |
Every science has for its basis a system of principles as fixed and unalterable as those by which the universe is regulated and governed. Man cannot make principles; he can only discover them.
Babe Paley, fully Barbara Cushing "Babe" Mortimer Paley
What is public history but a register of the successes and disappointments, the vices, the follies and the quarrels of those who engage in contention for power.
Contention | History | Power | Public | Wisdom |
The total achievement of science hitherto is but a recognition of a small fraction of the creative thoughts by which the world is made.
Achievement | Science | Wisdom | World |
Robert Oppenheimer, fully Julius Robert Oppenheimer
Both the man of science and the man of art live always at the edge of mystery, surrounded by it. Both, as the measure of their creation, have always had to do with the harmonization of what is new and what is familiar, with the balance between novelty and synthesis, with the struggle to make partial order into total chaos... This cannot be an easy life.
Art | Balance | Life | Life | Man | Mystery | Novelty | Order | Science | Struggle | Wisdom | Novelty | Art |
Make philosophy thy journey, theology thy journey’s end: philosophy is a pleasant way, but dangerous to him that either tires or retires; in this journey it is safe neither to loiter nor to rest, till thou hast attained thy journey’s end; he that sits down a philosopher rises up an atheist.
Astronomy was born of superstition; eloquence of ambition, hatred, falsehood, and flattery; geometry of avarice; physics of an idle curiosity; and even moral philosophy of human pride. Thus the arts and sciences owe their birth to our vices.
Ambition | Avarice | Birth | Curiosity | Falsehood | Flattery | Philosophy | Pride | Superstition | Wisdom |