This site is dedicated to the memory of Dr. Alan William Smolowe who gave birth to the creation of this database.
Livy, formally Titus Livius, aka Titus Livy NULL
The study of history is the best medicine for a sick mind; for in history you have a record of the infinite variety of human experience plainly set out for all to see: and in that record you can find for yourself and your country both examples and warnings: fine things to take as models, base things, rotten through and through, to avoid.
Experience | History | Study |
Linus Pauling, fully Linus Carl Pauling
Science is the search for the truth--it is not a game in which one tries to beat his opponent, to do harm to others. We need to have the spirit of science in international affairs, to make the conduct of international affairs the effort to find the right solution, the just solution of international problems, and not an effort by each nation to get the better of other nations, to do harm to them when it is possible. I believe in morality, in justice, in humanitarianism.
Better | Conduct | Effort | Harm | Need | Right | Science | Search | Spirit |
M. Scott Peck, fully Morgan Scott Peck
When I say that evil has to do with killing, I do not mean to restrict myself to corporeal murder. Evil is that which kills spirit. There are various essential attributes of life -- particularly human life -- such as sentience, mobility, awareness, growth, autonomy, will. It is possible to kill or attempt to kill one of these attributes without actually destroying the body. Thus we may "break" a horse or even a child without harming a hair on its head. Erich Fromm was acutely sensitive to this fact when he broadened the definition of necrophilia to include the desire of certain people to control others-to make them controllable, to foster their dependency, to discourage their capacity to think for themselves, to diminish their unpredectibility and originalty, to keep them in line. Distinguishing it from a "biophilic" person, one who appreciates and fosters the variety of life forms and the uniqueness of the individual, he demonstrated a "necrophilic character type," whose aim it is to avoid the inconvenience of life by transforming others into obedient automatons, robbing them of their humanity. Evil then, for the moment, is the force, residing either inside or outside of human beings, that seeks to kill life or liveliness. And goodness is its opposite. Goodness is that which promotes life and liveliness.
Capacity | Character | Control | Desire | Evil | Kill | Life | Life | People | Child | Think |
Lyndon Johnson, fully Lyndon Baines Johnson, aka LBJ
The noblest search is the search for excellence.
Search |
What is a scientist?… We give the name scientist to the type of man who has felt experiment to be a means guiding him to search out the deep truth of life, to lift a veil from its fascinating secrets, and who, in this pursuit, has felt arising within him a love for the mysteries of nature, so passionate as to annihilate the thought of himself.
Experiment | Love | Man | Means | Search | Thought | Truth | Thought |
There is a part of a child's soul that has always been unknown but which must be known. With a spirit of sacrifice and enthusiasm we must go in search like those who travel to foreign lands and tear up mountains in their search for hidden gold. This is what the adults must do who seeks the unknown factor that lies hidden in the depths of a child's soul. This is a labor in which all must share, without distinction of nation, race, or social standing since it means the bringing forth of an indispensable element for the moral progress of mankind.
Distinction | Enthusiasm | Indispensable | Labor | Means | Progress | Sacrifice | Search | Soul | Spirit |
Madness is only a variety of mental nonconformity and we are all individualists here.
Max Planck, fully Max Karl Ernst Ludwig Planck
In this identification, however, we have to take into account also one essential difference. For a religious man the god is given immediately and primarily. In him, in his allmighty will, originates all life and all happenings in bodily as in spiritual life. Though he cannot be grasped by reason, he is, nevertheless, directly perceived through religious symbols and he puts his holy message in the souls of those who give up to him in faith [here Planck does not consider god to be a world order, since the latter, as far as I know, does not send any holy messages]. On the contrary, for a scientist, the only primarily given facts are the contents of his sensual perceptions and the measurements following from them. Scientists use the latter to approach, as close as possible, god and his world order, as the highest, eternally unattainable goal, with the help of inductive researches, [is this actually the sole goal of any scientist?]. If then, both religion and science, need for their activities the belief in god [does the science really need god – this is stated here for the first time, with no justification], the god stands for the former in the beginning, for the latter at the end of the whole thinking. For the former, god represents the basis, for the latter the crown of any reasoning concerning the world view. This difference corresponds to different roles played in human life by religion and science. Science needs man for gaining knowledge, religion, however, needs him for action [aha, and I had no idea at all till now, what is the religion good for!] ... Since we find ourselves amidst life and must ... frequently make instant decisions, ... in which we are not helped by long deliberation but only by a safe and clear guidance (Weisung), which we will gain from immediate contact with god [here again god cannot be identical with the world order, because the latter does not provide anyone with quick guidance] ... and if besides omnipotence and omniscience we ascribe god [we really can ascribe god anything at will?] also the attributes of good and love [I thought all the time that god has properties independent of us, but here I see that they are given him by people], then resorting to him (Zuflucht zu ihm) guarantees a man, who is in search for consolation, higher measure of reliable feeling of happiness. One cannot object anything against such an idea from the standpoint of science, since the questions of ethics, as we have already emphasized, do not belong at all to its competence.
Action | Belief | Deliberation | Faith | God | Good | Guidance | Life | Life | Love | Man | Need | Object | Omnipotence | Omniscience | Religion | Safe | Science | Search | Thought | Time | Will | World | Following | Deliberation | Guidance | God | Thought |
Meher Baba, born Merwan Sheriar Irani
Supremacy over others will never cause a man to find a change in himself; the greater his conquests the stronger is his confirmation of what his mind tells him—that there is no God other than his own power. And he remains separated from God, the Absolute Power. But when the same mind tells him that there is something which may be called God, and, further, when it prompts him to search for God that he may see Him face to face, he begins to forget himself and to forgive others for whatever he has suffered from them. And when he has forgiven everyone and has completely forgotten himself, he finds that God has forgiven him everything, and he remembers Who, in reality, he is.
Absolute | Cause | Change | God | Man | Mind | Search | Will | God | Forgive |
Meher Baba, born Merwan Sheriar Irani
God's nature as the ocean of love cannot be grasped by the mind. God has to be known through love and not through the intellectual search after miracles. That is the reason why, for those who are closest and dearest to me, I do not perform miracles. I would rather have no following than use miracles for convincing others of my Divinity.
God | Love | Miracles | Nature | Reason | Search | Following | God |
Menachem Mendel Schneerson, known as the Lubavitcher Rebbe
With all our human capacity for technological advancement, we must never forget our higher objective. We must strive to enhance our scientific search for truth by constantly expanding our spiritual search for the divine.
Menachem Mendel Schneerson, known as the Lubavitcher Rebbe
There is much to learn from the technological revolution, as long as we understand its role in our lives and see it as a final step in our dramatic search for unity throughout the universe. After all, developments in science and technology have taught us to be more sensitive to the intangible and the sublime: the forces behind computers, telephones, television, and so on are all invisible, and yet we fully recognize their power and reach. Similarly, we must come to accept that the driving force behind the entire universe is intangible and sublime, and we must come to experience the transcendent and G-dly in every single thing — beginning, of course with ourselves.
Experience | Force | Power | Science | Search | Technology | Unity | Universe | Learn | Understand |
Meher Baba, born Merwan Sheriar Irani
The experiences which drugs induce are as far removed from Reality as is a mirage, from water. No matter how much you pursue the mirage, you will never quench your thirst, and the search for Truth through drugs must end in disillusionment.
Meher Baba, born Merwan Sheriar Irani
Absolute honesty is essential in one's search for God (Truth). The subtleties of the Path are finer than a hair. The least hypocrisy becomes a wave that washes one off the Path. It is your false self that keeps you away from your true Self by every trick it knows. In the guise of honesty this self even deceives itself. For instance your self claims, I love Baba. The fact is, if you really loved Baba you would not be your false self making the self-asserting statement!
Michel de Montaigne, fully Lord Michel Eyquem de Montaigne
I know well what I am fleeing from but not what I am in search of.
Search |
I would not be surprised to learn that some branch of our government conspired either actively to promote or passively to allow the attack on 9/11. For those who watched the reactionary political uses made of this tragedy, it’s easy to conjure up a variety of possible conspiratorial motives that would have led the president, the vice president, or some branch of the armed forces or CIA or FBI or other “security” forces to have passively or actively participated in a plot to re-credit militarism and war.
Government | Motives | Government | Learn | Vice |
Milton Friedman, fully John Milton Friedman
The great advances of civilization, whether in architecture or painting, in science or literature, in industry or agriculture, have never come from centralized government. Columbus did not set out to seek a new route to China in response to a majority directive of a parliament, though he was partly financed by an absolute monarch. Newton and Liebnitz; Einstein and Bohr; Shakespeare, Milton, and Pasternak; Whitney, McCormick, Edison, and Ford; Jane Addams, Florence Nightingale, and Albert Scweitzer; no one of these opened new frontiers in human knowledge and understanding, in literature, in technical possibilities, or in the relief of human misery in response to governmental directives. Their achievements were the product of individual genius, of strongly held minority views, of a social climate permitting variety and diversity.
Absolute | Individual | Industry | Knowledge | Majority | Science |