This site is dedicated to the memory of Dr. Alan William Smolowe who gave birth to the creation of this database.
It is certainly strange to observe... how many people seem to feel vain of their own unqualified optimism when the place where optimism most flourishes is the lunatic asylum.
The school should always have as its aim that the young man leave it as a harmonious personality, not as a specialist. This in my opinion is true in a certain sense even in technical schools.... The development of general ability for independent thinking and judgment should always be placed foremost, not the acquisition of special knowledge.
Ability | Judgment | Knowledge | Man | Opinion | Personality | Sense | Thinking | Wisdom |
Fred Dretske, fully Frederick "Fred" Irwin Dretske
In the beginning there was information. The word came later. the transition was achieved by the development of organisms with the capacity for selectively exploiting this information in order to survive and perpetuate their kind.
There are three reasons why, quite apart from scientific considerations, mankind needs to travel in space. The first reason is garbage disposal; we need to transfer industrial processes into space so that the earth may remain a green and pleasant place for our grandchildren to live in. The second reason is to escape material impoverishment; the resources of this planet are finite, and we shall not forgo forever the abundance of solar energy and minerals and living space that are spread out all around us. The third reason is our spiritual need for an open frontier. The ultimate purpose of space travel is to bring to humanity, not only scientific discoveries and an occasional spectacular show on television, but a real expansion of our spirit.
Abundance | Earth | Energy | Humanity | Mankind | Need | Purpose | Purpose | Reason | Space | Spirit | Television | Wisdom |
True belonging is born of relationships not only to one another but to a place of shared responsibilities and benefits. We love not so much what we have acquired as what we have made and whom we have made it with.
Education... should concern itself primarily... with the liberation, organization, and direction of power and intelligence, with the development of taste, with culture.
Culture | Education | Intelligence | Organization | Power | Taste | Wisdom |
One intellectual excitement has, however, been denied me. Men wiser and more learned than I have discerned in history a plot, a rhythm, a predetermined pattern. These harmonies are concealed from me. I can see only one emergency following another as wave follows upon wave, only one great fact with respect to which, since it is unique, there can be no generalizations, only one safe rule for the historian: that he should recognize in the development of human destinies the play of the contingent and the unforeseen.
Excitement | History | Men | Play | Respect | Rule | Safe | Unique | Wisdom | Following | Respect |
Next to temperance, a quiet conscience, a cheerful mind, and active habits, I place early rising as a means of health and happiness.
A conclusion is the place where you got tired of thinking.
Sigmund Freud, born Sigismund Schlomo Freud
If there are quarrels between the parents or if their marriage is unhappy, the ground will be prepared in their children for the severest predisposition to a disturbance of sexual development or to neurotic illness.
Go to the place where the thing you wish to know is native; your best teacher is there. Where the thing you wish to know is so dominant that you must breathe its very atmosphere, there teaching is most thorough, and learning is most easy. You acquire a language most readily in the country where it is spoken; you study mineralogy best among miners; and so with everything else.
Sigmund Freud, born Sigismund Schlomo Freud
Religion is an attempt to get control over the sensory world, in which we are placed, by means of the wish-world, which we have developed inside us as a result of biological and psychological necessities. But it cannot achieve its end. Its doctrines carry with them the stamp of the times in which they originated, the ignorant childhood days of the human race. Its consolations deserve no trust. Experience teaches us that the world is not a nursery. The ethical commands, to which religion seeks to lend its weight, require some other foundations instead, for human society cannot do without them, and it is dangerous to link up obedience to them with religious belief. If one attempts to assign to religion its place in man’s evolution, it seems not so much to be a lasting acquisition, as a parallel to the neurosis which the civilized individual must pass through on his way from childhood to maturity.
Belief | Childhood | Control | Evolution | Experience | Human race | Individual | Man | Means | Obedience | Race | Religion | Society | Trust | Wisdom | World | Society |
Sigmund Freud, born Sigismund Schlomo Freud
This age of childhood, in which the sense of shame is unknown, seems a paradise when we look back upon it alter, and paradise itself is nothing but the mass-phantasy of the childhood of the individual. This is why in paradise men are naked and unashamed, until the moment arrives when shame and fear awaken; expulsion follows, and sexual life and cultural development begin.
Age | Childhood | Fear | Individual | Life | Life | Men | Nothing | Paradise | Sense | Shame | Wisdom |
Sigmund Freud, born Sigismund Schlomo Freud
It may be difficult, too, for many of us, to abandon the belief that there is an instinct towards perfection at work in human beings, which has brought them to their present high level of intellectual achievement and ethical sublimation and which may be expected to watch over their development as supermen. I have no faith, however, in the existence of any such internal instinct and I cannot see how this benevolent illusion is to be preserved. The present development of human beings requires, as it seems to me, no different explanation from that of animals. What appears in a minority of human individuals as an untiring impulsion towards further perfection can easily be understood as a result of the instinctual repression upon which is based all that is most precious in human civilization.
Achievement | Belief | Civilization | Existence | Faith | Illusion | Instinct | Perfection | Present | Wisdom | Work |
Harry Golden, born Herschel Goldhirsch
The school is a place or institution for teaching and learning. Underneath this definition in every standard dictionary is another definition: School is a large number of fish of the same kind swimming together in the same direction.