This site is dedicated to the memory of Dr. Alan William Smolowe who gave birth to the creation of this database.
Lewis Namier, fully Sir Lewis Bernstein Namier, aka Ludwik Niemirowski, born Ludvik Bernstein
It is a woeful mistake to suppose that the educated are kinder or more tolerant: education creates vested interests, and renders the beneficiaries acutely jealous and very vocal.
Let’s make no mistake about this: The American Dream starts with our neighborhoods. If we wish to rebuild our cities, we must first rebuild our neighborhoods. And to do that, we must understand that the quality of life is more important than the standard of living. to sit on the front steps - whether it’s a veranda in a small town or a concrete stoop in a big city - and talk to our neighbors is infinitely more important than to huddle on the living-room lounger and watch make-believe world in not-quite living color.
Important | Life | Life | Mistake | Wisdom | World | Understand |
I’m not afraid of facts, I welcome facts but a congeries of facts is not equivalent to an idea. This is the essential fallacy of the so-called “scientific” mind. People who mistake facts for ideas are incomplete thinkers, they are gossips.
Fallacy | Ideas | Mind | Mistake | People | Thinkers | Wisdom | Afraid |
Do not mistake understanding for realization, and do not mistake realization for liberation.
Mistake | Understanding | Wisdom |
James Baldwin, fully James Arthur Baldwin
Any real change implies the breakup of the world as one has always known it, the loss of all that gave one an identity, the end of safety. And at such a moment, unable to see and not daring to imagine what the future will now bring forth, one clings to what one knew, or dreamed that one possessed. Yet, it is only when a man is able, without bitterness or self-pity, to surrender a dream he has long cherished or a privilege he has long possessed that he is set free — he has set himself free — for higher dreams, for greater privileges.
Bitterness | Change | Daring | Future | Man | Surrender | Will | World | Loss | Privilege |
To be human is to long for something more, something beyond us. Fulfillment, peace, and lasting happiness, for no apparent reason, seem to have evaded us. We believe that we are meant for happiness and made for joy. Pain and suffering are somehow a mistake that should not be part of life.
Fulfillment | Joy | Life | Life | Mistake | Pain | Peace | Reason | Suffering | Happiness |