This site is dedicated to the memory of Dr. Alan William Smolowe who gave birth to the creation of this database.
Werner Heisenberg, fully Werner Karl Heisenberg
This has also appeared in the alternate form: What we observe is not nature itself, but nature exposed to our method of questioning.
Consequences | Knowledge | Nothing | System | Theoretical |
Whittaker Chambers, born Jay Vivian Chambers, aka Jay David Whittaker Chambers
For the world, as seen in materialist view from the Right, scarcely differs from the same world seen in materialist view from the Left. The question become chiefly: who is to run that world in whose interests, or perhaps, at best, who can run it more efficiently? Something of this implication is fixed in the book’s dictatorial tone, which is much its most striking feature. Out of a lifetime of reading, I can recall no other book in which a tone of overriding arrogance was so implacably sustained. Its shrillness is without reprieve. Its dogmatism is without appeal.… From almost any page of Atlas Shrugged, a voice can be heard, from painful necessity, commanding, “To a gas chamber—go!”
Civilization | Mankind | Will | World |
It is a poor species of human being which this grim vision conjures up before our eyes: 'fragmentary and disintegrated' man, the end product of growing mechanization, specialization, and functionalization, which decompose the unity of human personality and dissolve it in the mass, an aborted form of Homo sapiens created by a largely technical civilization, a race of spiritual and moral pygmies lending itself willingly--indeed gladly, because that way lies redemption--to use as raw material for the modern collectivist and totalitarian mass state.
Consequences | Consideration | Sacrifice | Sense | Society | Will | Society |
Whittaker Chambers, born Jay Vivian Chambers, aka Jay David Whittaker Chambers
Toscanini was hailing a great artist, but that voice was more than a magnificent personal talent. It was the religious voice of a whole religious people — probably the most God-obsessed (and man-despised) people since the ancient Hebrews.
Ability | Corruption | Evil | Fate | Little | Man | Mankind | Men | Soul | Weakness | Will | Witness | Fate | Intellect |
Whittaker Chambers, born Jay Vivian Chambers, aka Jay David Whittaker Chambers
The mass of Americans, who vehemently made known their views in (and during) a recent general election, know perfectly well that they are not living in a reign of terror and that they seldom look behind a door for anything more frightening than an umbrella.
Balance | Mankind | Politics | Power | War | Will | World | Crisis |
Psychic health depends on orgastic potency, i.e., upon the degree to which one can surrender to and experience the climax of excitation in the natural sexual act. It is founded upon the healthy character attitude of the individual’s capacity for love. Psychic illnesses are the result of a disturbance of the natural capacity for love.
Civilization | Consequences | Man |
Whittaker Chambers, born Jay Vivian Chambers, aka Jay David Whittaker Chambers
My children, as long as you live, the shadow of the Hiss Case will brush you. In every pair of eyes that rests on you, you will see pass, like a cloud passing behind a woods in winter, the memory of your father - dissembled in friendly eyes, lurking in unfriendly eyes.
The caucus is a sort of representative meeting which sits voting and voting till they have cut out all the known men against whom much is to be said, and agreed on some unknown man against whom there is nothing known, and therefore nothing to be alleged.
Government | Mankind | Reason | World | Government | Understand |
The mystic reverence, the religious allegiance, which are essential to a true monarchy, are imaginative sentiments that no legislature can manufacture in any people.
Benevolence | Good | Mankind | Melancholy | Question |
Walt Whitman, fully Walter "Walt" Whitman
Touch me, touch the palm of your hand to my body as I pass, be not afraid of my body.
Better | Body | Fear | Imperfection | Justice | Love | Man | Nothing | Soul | Will | Woman | Understand |
In government offices which are sensitive to the vehemence and passion of mass sentiment public men have no sure tenure. They are in effect perpetual office seekers, always on trial for their political lives, always required to court their restless constituents. They are deprived of their independence. Democratic politicians rarely feel they can afford the luxury of telling the whole truth to the people. And since not telling it, though prudent, is uncomfortable, they find it easier if they themselves do not have to hear too often too much of the sour truth. The men under them who report and collect the news come to realize in their turn that it is safer to be wrong before it has become fashionable to be right.
Twenty years hence my eyes may grow if not quite dim, yet rather so, still yours from others they shall know twenty years hence. Twenty years hence though it may hap that I be called to take a nap in a cool cell where thunderclap was never heard. there breathe but o'er my arch of grass a not too sadly sighed alas, and I shall catch, ere you can pass, that winged word.
We must protect the right of our opponents to speak because we must hear what they have to say.
Consequences | Events | Government | Men | Public | Thought | Will | Government | Crisis | Thought |
Warren Buffett, fully Warren Edward Buffett, aka Oracle of Omaha
These costs are now being incurred in amounts that will cause shareholders to earn far less than they historically have.
Wayne Dyer, fully Wayne Walter Dyer
Each person on this planet is inherently, intrinsically capable of attaining dizzying heights of happiness and fulfillment.
Consequences | Opinion | Wants | Will |
Wei Wu Wei, pen name for Terence James Stannus Gray
Humility, metaphysically, implies the absence of any entity to be either 'proud' or 'humble'.