This site is dedicated to the memory of Dr. Alan William Smolowe who gave birth to the creation of this database.
Erma Bombeck, fully Erma Louise Bombeck, born Erma Fiste
I read one psychologist's theory that said, "Never strike a child in your anger." When could I strike him? When he is kissing me on my birthday? When he's recuperating from measles? Do I slap the Bible out of his hand on Sunday?
Aid | Desire | Future | People | Question | Talking | Value |
Erich Segal, fully Erich Wolf Segal
Her handwriting was curious, small sharp little letters with no capitals (who did she think she was, e. e. cummings?).
Erich Segal, fully Erich Wolf Segal
I think the Peace Corps is a fine thing, don't you? he said. Well, I replied, it's certainly better than War Corps.
I cannot believe that God would make to a sinner in his wants and his woes the tender of a relief which did not exist, or which he did not wish him to embrace; I cannot believe that God would command his creatures to embrace a provision which had never been made for them, or sanction by the peril of one’s everlasting interests a commandment which he never meant should be obeyed, and which itself precluded the possibility of obedience.
Eternal | Force | God | Inconsistency | Judgment | Life | Life | Lord | Men | Nothing | Purpose | Purpose | Question | Will | God | Understand |
Ernest Hemingway, fully Ernest Miller Hemingway
I am opposed to writing about the private lives of living authors and psychoanalyzing them while they are alive. Criticism is getting all mixed up with a combination of the Junior F.B.I.-men, discards from Freud and Jung and a sort of Columnist peep-hole and missing laundry list school.... Every young English professor sees gold in them dirty sheets now. Imagine what they can do with the soiled sheets of four legal beds by the same writer and you can see why their tongues are slavering.
All a child has to do is to learn to abandon ecstasy, to do without awe, to leave fear and trembling behind. Only then can he act with a certain oblivious self-confidence, when he has naturalized his world. We say naturalized but we mean unnaturalized, falsified, with the truth obscured, the despair of the human condition hidden
In seeking to avoid evil, [humanity] is responsible for bringing more evil into the world than organisms could ever do merely by exercising their digestive tracts. It is [our] ingenuity, rather than [our] animal nature, that has given [our] fellow creatures such a bitter earthly fate.
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Anthropological and historical research also began, in the nineÂteenth century, to put together a picture of the heroic since primiÂtive and ancient times. The hero was the man who could go into the spirit world, the world of the dead, and return alive. He had his descendants in the mystery cults of the Eastern Mediterranean, which were cults of death and resurrection. The divine hero of each of these cults was one who had come back from the dead. And as we know today from the research into ancient myths and rituals, Christianity itself was a competitor with the mystery cults and won out—among other reasons—because it, too, featured a healer with supernatural powers who had risen from the dead. These cults, as G. Stanley Hall so aptly put it, were an attempt to attain "an immunity bath" from the greatest evil: death and the dread of it. All historical reliÂgions addressed themselves to this same problem of how to bear the end of life. Religions like Hinduism and Buddhism performed the ingenious trick of pretending not to want to be reborn, which is a sort of negative magic: claiming not to want what you really want most.
Anxiety | Anxiety | Control | Death | Fighting | Good | Health | Illusion | Life | Life | Man | Means | Necessity | Need | Play | Question | Reality | Right | Science | Security | Self-deception | Time | Will | World |
And so, the question for the science of mental health must beÂcome an absolutely new and revolutionary one, yet one that reÂflects the essence of the human condition: On what level of illusion does one live? We will see the import of this at the close of this chapter, but right now we must remind ourselves that when we talk about the need for illusion we are not being cynical. True, there is a great deal of falseness and self-deception in the cultural causa-sui project, but there is also the necessity of this project. Man needs a "second" world, a world of humanly created meaning, a new reality that he can live, dramatize, nourish himself in. "Illusion" means creative play at its highest level. Cultural illusion is a necessary ideology of self-justification, a heroic dimension that is life itself to the symbolic animal. To lose the security of heroic cultural illusion is to die—that is what "deculturation" of primitives means and what it does. It kills them or reduces them to the animal level of chronic fighting and fornication. Life becomes possible only in a continual alcoholic stupor. Many of the older American Indians were relieved when the Big Chiefs in Ottawa and Washington took control and prevented them from warring and feuding. It was a relief from the constant anxiety of death for their loved ones, if not for themselves. But they also knew, with a heavy heart, that this eclipse of their traditional hero-systems at the same time left them as good as dead.
Absolute | Anxiety | Anxiety | Cause | Confidence | Order | Parents | Power | Question | Security | Self | Society | Terror | Understanding | Weakness | Worth | Society | Child | Think |
Ernest Hemingway, fully Ernest Miller Hemingway
'What if I'm not straight and simple and good? Do you think I can write that way?'
E. F. Schumacher, fully Ernst Friedrich "Fritz" Schumacher
To mention these things, no doubt, means laying oneself open to the charge of being against science, technology, and progress. Let me therefore, in conclusion, add a few words about future scientific research. Man cannot live without science and technology any more than he can live against nature.
Better | Experience | Nothing | Problems | Question | Technology | World |
Erwin Schrödinger, fully Erwin Rudolf Josef Alexander Schrödinger
Democritus introduces the intellect having an argument with the senses about what is 'real'.
Hypothesis | Indispensable | Individual | Little | Means | Nature | Nothing | Position | Question | Science | Will |
Erwin Schrödinger, fully Erwin Rudolf Josef Alexander Schrödinger
Why are atoms so small?... Many examples have been devised to bring this fact home to an audience, none of them more impressive than the one used by Lord Kelvin: Suppose that you could mark the molecules in a glass of water, then pour the contents of the glass into the ocean and stir the latter thoroughly so as to distribute the marked molecules uniformly throughout the seven seas; if you then took a glass of water anywhere out of the ocean, you would find in it about a hundred of your marked molecules.
God | Music | Question | Science | Time | Unity | God | Old |
E. F. Schumacher, fully Ernst Friedrich "Fritz" Schumacher
In this respect, the idea of private enterprise fits exactly into the idea of The Market, which, in an earlier chapter, I called "the institutionalization of individualism and non-responsibility."
Dignity | Land | Money | People | Question | Regard | Will |
E. F. Schumacher, fully Ernst Friedrich "Fritz" Schumacher
Man talks of a battle with Nature, forgetting that if he won the battle, he would find himself on the losing side.
Age | Civilization | Courage | Fear | Good | Nothing | Question | Strength |
E. F. Schumacher, fully Ernst Friedrich "Fritz" Schumacher
It is of little use trying to suppress terrorism if the production of deadly devices continues to be deemed a legitimate employment of man's creative powers. Nor can the fight against pollution be successful if the patterns of production and consumption continue to be of a scale, a complexity, and a degree of violence which, as is becoming more and more apparent, do not fit into the laws of the universe, to which man is just as much subject as the rest of creation.