This site is dedicated to the memory of Dr. Alan William Smolowe who gave birth to the creation of this database.
Familiarity may breed contempt in some areas of human behavior, but in the field of social ideas it is the touchstone of acceptability.
Behavior | Contempt | Familiarity | Ideas | Wisdom |
J. B. S. Haldane, fully John Burdon Sanderson Haldane
So many new ideas are at first strange and horrible though ultimately valuable that a very heavy responsibility rests upon those who would prevent their dissemination.
Ideas | Responsibility | Wisdom |
Nothing is more free than the imagination of man; and though it cannot exceed that original stock of ideas furnished by the internal and external senses, it has unlimited power of mixing, compounding, separating, and dividing these ideas, in all the varieties of fiction and vision. It can feign a train of events, with all the appearance of reality, ascribe to them a particular time and place, conceive them as existent, and paint them out of itself with every circumstance, that belongs to any historical fact, which it believes with the greatest certainty.
Appearance | Events | Ideas | Imagination | Man | Nothing | Power | Reality | Time | Vision | Wisdom |
Redundancy of language is never found with deep reflection. Verbiage may indicate observation, but not thinking. He who thinks much, says but little in proportion to his thoughts. He selects that language which will convey his ideas in the most explicit and direct manner. He tries to compress as much thought as possible into a few words. On the contrary, the man who talks everlastingly and promiscuously, who seems to have an exhaustless magazine of sound, crowds so many words into his thoughts that he always obscures, and very frequently conceals them.
Ideas | Language | Little | Man | Observation | Reflection | Sound | Thinking | Thought | Will | Wisdom | Words | Thought |
Ze'ev Jabotinsky, born Vladimir Jabotinsky
In propaganda the appeal of love is slow and lumbering in comparison with the appeal of hatred. hatred is the piquant sauce which accelerates both the swallowing and digestion of ideas and policies.
Ideas | Love | Wisdom | Propaganda |
Philip J. Hilts, fully Philip James Hilts
In all human activities, it is not ideas or machines that dominate; it is people. I have heard people speak of “the effect of personality on science.” But this is a backward thought. Rather, we should talk about he effect of science on personalities. Science is not the dispassionate analysis of impartial data. It is the human, and thus passionate, exercise of skill and sense on such date. Science is not an exercise in objectivity, but, more accurately, an exercise in which objectivity is prized.
Ideas | Machines | Objectivity | People | Personality | Science | Sense | Skill | Thought | Wisdom |
Every pupil you have carries in his mind or heart or conscience a bit of you. Your influence, your example, your ideas and values keep marching on - how far into the future and into what realms of our spacious universe you will never know.
Conscience | Example | Future | Heart | Ideas | Influence | Mind | Universe | Will | Wisdom |
We are a great deal more certain that our will is free than that everything that happens is bound to have a cause. This being the case, could we not for once in a way reverse the argument, and say: our ideas of cause and effect must be very inaccurate, for were they right, our will could not be free?
Gottfried Leibniz, fully Gottfried Wilhalm von Leibniz, Baron von Leibnitz
As there is an infinite number of possible universes in the ideas of God, and as only one can exist, there must be sufficient reason for God’s choice, to determine him to one rather than to another. And this reason can only be found in the fitness, or in the degrees of perfection, which these worlds contain.
True opinions can prevail only if the facts to which they refer are known; if they are not known, false ideas are just as effective as true ones, if not a little more effective.
Reverie is when ideas float in our mind without reflection or regard of the understanding.
Ideas | Mind | Reflection | Regard | Understanding | Wisdom |
You cannot confine an idea behind prison bars... Ideas cannot be shut in nor shut out.