This site is dedicated to the memory of Dr. Alan William Smolowe who gave birth to the creation of this database.
Barnett Cocks, fully Sir Thomas George Barnett Cocks
A committee is a cul-de-sac down which ideas are lured and then quietly strangled.
Ideas |
The answer to [our social problems] lies in democratic free thought where ideas may be generated, challenged, and accepted or rejected on the basis of scientific examination and verification, and evaluated on the basis of the highest human values that emerge from the developing society.
J. P. Stern, fully Joseph Peter Maria Stern
Nietzsche’s approach developed eventually into a program for radically questioning all the foundations of Western thought. We are slaves to convention, he says - we base our whole lives on attitudes and ideas whose premises, if we ever get round to actually examining them, we reject. This makes ours an inauthentic way of living, a dead way of living. We must re-evaluate our values in the light of what we honestly do believe and feel.
Convention | Ideas | Light | Thought |
The smallest bookstore still contains more ideas of worth than have been presented in the entire history of television.
History | Ideas | Television | Worth |
There is nothing mysterious or natural about authority. It is formed, irradiated, disseminated; it is instrumental, it is persuasive; it has status, it establishes canons of taste and value; it is virtually indistinguishable from certain ideas it dignifies as true, and from traditions, perceptions and judgments it forms, transmits, reproduces. Above all, authority can, indeed must, be analyzed.
This sharpening of skills is the real value of competition. Many have lost sight of the purpose of healthy competition, which helps us to draw forth inner strength and encourages us to transcend our ideas of personal limitation. The real competition, however, is within the person, and not between people... In essence, competition is cooperation.
Competition | Cooperation | Ideas | People | Purpose | Purpose | Strength | Value |
The importance of an individual thinker owes something to chance. For it depends upon the fate of his ideas in the minds of his successors.
Chance | Fate | Ideas | Individual | Fate |
Books won’t stay banned. They won’t burn. Ideas won’t go to jail. In the long run of history, the censor and the inquisitor have always lost. The only sure weapon against bad ideals is better ideas. The source of better ideas is wisdom. The surest path of wisdom is a liberal education.
Better | Books | Censor | Education | History | Ideals | Ideas | Wisdom |
Almost all new ideas have a certain aspect of foolishness when they are first produced.
Ideas |
Could Hamlet have been written by a committee, or the Mona Lisa painted by a club? Could the New Testament have been composed as a conference report? Creative ideas do not spring from groups. They spring from individuals. The divine spark leaps from the finger of God to the finger of Adam, whether it takes ultimate shape in a law of physics or a law of the land, a poem or a policy, a sonata or a mechanical computer.
Computer | God | Ideas | Land | Law | Policy | God | New Testament | Poem |