This site is dedicated to the memory of Dr. Alan William Smolowe who gave birth to the creation of this database.
The great enemy of knowledge is not error, but inertness. All that we want is discussion; and then we are sure to do well, no matter what our blunders may be. One error conflicts with another, each destroys its opponent, and truth is evolved.
Discussion | Enemy | Error | Knowledge | Truth |
Henry David Thoreau, born David Henry Thoreau
Some circumstantial evidence is very strong, as when you find a trout in the milk.
Evidence |
Against the formidable array of cumulative evidence for Determinism, there is but one argument of real force: the immediate affirmation of consciousness in the moment of deliberate action.
Action | Argument | Consciousness | Evidence | Force |
Henry David Thoreau, born David Henry Thoreau
Men profess to be lovers of music, but for the most part they give no evidence in their opinions and lives that they have heard it. It would not leave them narrow-minded and bigoted.
The justification and the purpose of freedom of speech is not to indulge those who want to speak their minds. It is to prevent error and discover truth. There may be other ways of detecting error and discovering truth than that of free discussion, but so far we have not found them.
Discussion | Error | Freedom of speech | Freedom | Justification | Purpose | Purpose | Speech | Truth |
Isaac Asimov, born Isaak Yudovich Ozimov
I believe in evidence. I believe in observation, measurement, and reasoning, confirmed by independent observers. I'll believe anything, no matter how wild and ridiculous, if there is evidence for it. The wilder and more ridiculous something is, however, the firmer and more solid the evidence will have to be.
Evidence | Observation | Will |
When young, we trust ourselves too much and we trust others too little when old. Rashness is the error of youth, timid caution of age. Manhood is the isthmus between the two extremes; the ripe and fertile season of action, when alone we can hope to find the head to contrive, united with the hand to execute.
Action | Age | Caution | Error | Hope | Little | Rashness | Trust | Youth |
The enthusiast has been compared to a man walking in a fog; everything immediately around him, or in contact with him, appears sufficiently clear and luminous; but beyond the little circle of which he himself is the center, all is mist and error and confusion.
The blindness of bigotry, the madness of ambition, and the miscalculations of diplomacy seek their victims principally amongst the innocent and the unoffending. The cottage is sure to suffer for every error of the court, the cabinet, or the camp. When error sits in the seat of power and of authority, and is generated in high places, it may; be compared to that torrent which originates indeed in the mountain, but commits its devastation in the vale.
Ambition | Authority | Bigotry | Diplomacy | Error | Madness | Power |
John Cage, fully John Milton Cage, Jr.
An error is simply a failure to adjust immediately from a preconception to an actuality.
Failure is, in a sense, the highway to success, inasmuch as every discovery of what is false leads us to seek earnestly after what is true, and every fresh experience points out some form of error which we shall afterward carefully avoid.
Discovery | Error | Experience | Failure | Sense | Success | Discovery |
Albeit failure in any cause produces a correspondent misery in the soul, yet it is, in a sense, the highway to success, inasmuch as every discovery of what is false leads us to seek earnestly after what is true, and every fresh experience points out some form of error which we shall afterward carefully eschew.
Cause | Discovery | Error | Experience | Failure | Sense | Soul | Success | Discovery | Failure |
There can be no doubt but that everything in the world, by the beauty of its order, and the evidence of a determinate and beneficial purpose which pervades its, testifies that some supreme efficient Power must have pre-existed, by which the whole was ordained for a specific end.
Beauty | Doubt | Evidence | Order | Power | Purpose | Purpose | World | Beauty |
Joseph Chilton Pearce, aka Joe
By observing a supposed objective truth out there, we become passive victims relieved of responsibility. Instead, we can use our eyes in active vision, to see with, not through. Rather than compounding our neighbor’s error through intellectual condemnation of him, we can enter actively into that relationship through our heart. Freeing him from error in our mind’s eye, we open him to deliverance in his own. There is only one heart, and it can take on any form.
Error | Heart | Mind | Relationship | Responsibility | Truth | Vision |